A campaign is a one-time email blast. You write the message once, pick who should receive it, and send it now or on a schedule. Each campaign targets either your full contact list or a saved segment, and every send passes through the same compliance checks (suppression list, unsubscribe footer, and mailing address) that keep your marketing email compliant.
Campaigns live in the marketing hub under the Campaigns section. Contacts, segments, and sender settings that campaigns depend on live in the same hub under Audience and Settings.
Campaign statuses
Each campaign shows a colored status dot on its row.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Not yet sent. Only drafts can be edited or sent. |
| Scheduled | Queued to send at a future date and time. |
| Sending | The audience has been resolved and emails have been handed off for delivery. |
| Sent | The send has completed. |
| Failed | The send could not be completed. |
Once a campaign leaves the draft state it cannot be edited or sent again. Delete it and create a new one if you need to change the message after sending.
Creating a campaign
- Open the Campaigns section and click New campaign.
- Fill in the builder dialog fields below.
- Click Save draft to keep working on it later, or Send now to resolve the audience and send.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | An internal label to find the campaign later. It is not shown to recipients. |
| Send to | The audience: All contacts or one of your saved segments. |
| Subject line | The email subject shown in the recipient's inbox. |
| Message | The email body. Plain text or HTML are both accepted. |
A subject line and a message are both required before a campaign can be sent. If either is missing, the Send now button warns you instead of sending.
Choosing the audience
The Send to dropdown controls who receives the campaign:
- All contacts sends to every subscribed contact that has an email address on file.
- A saved segment sends only to the contacts that match that segment's rules.
As you pick an audience, the builder shows a live estimate ("Approximately N subscribed contacts") so you know roughly how many people the campaign will reach before you send.
Who is excluded
Even when you choose All contacts, a campaign never reaches everyone in your database. The send skips:
- Contacts with no email address.
- Contacts who have unsubscribed from marketing email.
- Contacts on the suppression list from a hard bounce or spam complaint. The suppression check runs again per recipient at send time, so it is the final word on who gets the email.
Building segments
Segments are saved audiences that you build once and reuse across campaigns. Create and edit them in the Segments area, then select them from the Send to dropdown. Segment rules can combine any of the following contact attributes with AND / OR logic:
| Attribute | Example uses |
|---|---|
| Last booking date | Booked within the last 90 days, or not booked in over a year |
| Total spent | Lifetime value above or below a dollar amount |
| Booking count | First-time versus repeat customers |
| Location | Contacts who have booked at one or more of your locations |
| Tags | Contacts carrying (or missing) a specific tag |
| Signup date | Recently created contacts, or long-standing ones |
| Active membership | Members versus non-members |
| Email consent | Subscribed versus unsubscribed to email |
| SMS consent | Subscribed versus unsubscribed to text |
| First / last name | Match or contains a name |
| Status | Contact record status |
Writing the message
The Message field accepts either plain text or HTML:
- Plain text is automatically formatted for email. Line breaks are preserved.
- HTML is used exactly as written, so you can paste a designed template.
An unsubscribe link and your mailing address are appended to every campaign email automatically. You do not add these yourself, and they cannot be removed, because they are required for compliant marketing email.
Scheduling and sending
The builder gives you two actions:
- Save draft stores the campaign without sending. You can reopen a draft, keep editing, and send it whenever you are ready.
- Send now resolves the audience and hands the emails off for delivery immediately.
A campaign can also carry a scheduled send time. When a future time is set, the campaign moves to Scheduled and the emails are queued to go out at that time rather than right away. Without a scheduled time, the send begins immediately and the campaign shows Sending.
You can also send a draft straight from its row using the send action, without reopening the builder.
What happens when you send
When you send a campaign, RentalTide:
- Resolves the target audience (all contacts or the chosen segment) into the list of subscribed contacts with an email address.
- Fans the campaign out into one individual marketing email per recipient.
- Applies the compliance gate to every message: it re-checks the suppression list, adds the required unsubscribe footer and mailing address, and includes one-click unsubscribe headers.
A single campaign is capped at 50,000 recipients. If a segment resolves to more contacts than that, only the first contacts are queued and the overage is logged rather than sent silently, so plan very large sends across multiple segments.
Tracking results
Each campaign row summarizes its outcome inline, showing the subject, the audience it targeted, and the recipient count once it has been sent.
Aggregate email engagement is tracked across all of your marketing email in the marketing hub's overview, drawn from real delivery events. Over a selectable window (30 days by default) you can see:
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Delivered | Emails accepted by the recipient's mail server |
| Opens | Recipients who opened an email |
| Clicks | Recipients who clicked a link |
| Open rate | Opens divided by delivered |
| Click rate | Clicks divided by delivered |
| Bounces | Hard bounces and drops |
| Spam reports | Recipients who marked an email as spam |
| Unsubscribes | Recipients who opted out |
| Suppressed | Email addresses currently suppressed from marketing sends |
Hard bounces and spam complaints automatically add the address to your suppression list, so future campaigns skip it without any action from you.
Sender setup
Before your first campaign, set up the sender details that compliant marketing email requires. In the marketing hub's compliance and sender settings you confirm:
- Business name shown in the email footer.
- Mailing address appended to every marketing email.
- Verified sender domain so email is sent from your own domain.
These can be set once for your whole account (the shared default) or overridden per location. If any of the three is missing, resolve it there before sending so your campaigns land correctly.
Save a campaign as a draft first and check the live audience estimate before you send. The estimate counts only subscribed contacts with an email, so it is the closest preview of your real reach.
Send now is disabled or warns me -- A campaign needs both a subject line and a message before it can be sent. Fill in both fields.
"Only draft campaigns can be edited" -- Once a campaign has been sent or scheduled it is locked. Delete it and create a new draft to change the message.
Fewer people received it than expected -- Contacts without an email, unsubscribed contacts, and suppressed addresses are always skipped. Check the audience estimate in the builder against your total contact count.
Emails are not going out -- Confirm your sender domain is verified and your business name and mailing address are set in the compliance and sender settings. Marketing email will not send compliantly without them.