A campaign is a one-time bulk email send to a group of contacts from your audience. You build the content, pick who receives it, send (or schedule it for later), and track engagement after the send. Campaigns are different from transactional emails in two important ways:Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.lettr.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
| Campaign | Transactional email | |
|---|---|---|
| Triggered by | You, sending from the dashboard | A user action or system event, sent through the API |
| Recipient list | A pre-built audience (lists or segments) | Specified per request, usually one or a few recipients |
| Use case | Newsletters, product announcements, promotions | Password resets, order confirmations, account alerts |
What a Campaign Is (and Isn’t)
A campaign in Lettr is one email going out to one batch of recipients at one point in time. Campaigns are not drip sequences, automations, or RSS-triggered sends. If you want to follow up to opens or non-opens, schedule a second campaign manually — there is no built-in series feature today. Beyond that, the model is intentionally simple:- One content (HTML body, subject, sender details)
- One audience selection (lists, segments, or all contacts)
- One schedule (send now, or pick a future date/time)
- One report (engagement metrics after the send)
Prerequisites
Before you send your first campaign, make sure you have:- A verified sending domain for the address you’ll send from
- At least a handful of
subscribedcontacts in your audience — or a list or segment you want to target - Either a template you want to base the campaign on, or content you’ll build directly in the campaign editor
Campaigns are part of Lettr’s marketing plan. The free tier includes 500 contacts; larger audiences require a paid marketing tier. See Billing for tiers and pricing. If your audience exceeds your plan’s contact limit, you cannot send new campaigns until you upgrade or remove contacts.
How a Campaign Moves Through Its Lifecycle
Every campaign goes through the same states from the moment you create it to the moment it’s sent and reporting.| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | You’re still editing. No emails have been queued or sent. |
| Scheduled | You set a future send time. The campaign is waiting; you can unschedule it back to Draft any time before it starts. |
| Preparing | Recipients are being built and the campaign is being validated. Brief but real — typically a few seconds to a few minutes for large audiences. |
| Sending | Emails are being delivered in batches. Live metrics are updating as they come in. |
| Sent | Every recipient has been processed. The campaign is now read-only; analytics keep updating as recipients open and click. |
| In review | An automated content check flagged the campaign, and a Lettr admin is reviewing it before sending continues. Rare in practice. |
| Failed | The campaign couldn’t be sent (typically because no recipients matched the audience or an unexpected error occurred). |
- Once a campaign enters Preparing, it cannot be cancelled. Only a
Scheduledcampaign can be moved back toDraft. - Once a campaign reaches Sent, its content is frozen. You cannot edit a sent campaign — duplicate it instead.
The Campaign Workflow
1. Create
Start from scratch, from a template, or duplicate an existing campaign
2. Build content
Design with the visual editor, write raw HTML, or use AI assistance
3. Choose your audience
Pick all contacts, specific lists, segments, or a combination
4. Send or schedule
Send now or pick a future date and time
5. Review results
Track opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes
Quick Start
Open the Campaigns page
Click Campaigns in the sidebar. You’ll see a list of past and in-progress campaigns.
Create a new campaign
Click New campaign. You can describe what the campaign is about, and Lettr’s AI will pre-fill the subject and pull sender defaults from a similar previous campaign if one exists.
Walk through the builder
The campaign builder is a four-step wizard:
- Compose — subject, from address, content
- Audience — who receives it
- Schedule — send now or later
- Review — a final check before sending
Test before sending
From the builder you can send a test email to yourself or your team to check rendering and merge tags before committing to the full send.
Send or schedule
From the Review step, Send now dispatches immediately or Schedule picks a future time.
Where Campaigns Live
All campaign work happens in the Lettr dashboard. There is currently no campaigns API — campaigns are created, sent, and reported on through the web app only. If you need programmatic email sending, use the transactional email API instead. The two systems serve different purposes and are intentionally separate.Next Steps
Build your audience
Add contacts, lists, and segments before sending
Create your first campaign
Walk through the 4-step campaign builder