Campaigns

A campaign is a one-time send to a chosen audience. You pick a channel when you create it — SMS or RCS — write the message once in the message composer, and decide when it goes out: send it now or schedule it for later. This page explains what a campaign is, which channels you can use, and the stages it goes through as you create, prepare and send it.

What a campaign is

Each campaign goes out over one channel, chosen when you create it:

Channel	What it's for
SMS	Text messages to mobile phones. The baseline — available in every project.
RCS	Branded messaging from your verified sender — text plus up to four Quick actions, with an optional SMS fallback for contacts who can't receive RCS. Rich cards and carousels are coming soon.
WhatsApp Soon	Shown when you create the campaign, marked coming soon. Not available yet.

You don't create an "SMS campaign" and an "RCS campaign" as different products — it's the same campaign, sent over the channel you choose.

An RCS campaign isn't cut off from contacts who can't receive RCS. While creating the campaign, in the message step, you can turn on the SMS fallback — with the If RCS is undeliverable connector — and write an SMS version for those contacts. The audience panel then shows your available audience for RCS + SMS and which channel will reach each contact. See SMS fallback.

Campaigns and automations share the same message composer: you write the text, add personalization, and (for RCS) attach up to four Quick actions. The step-by-step lives in Creating a campaign.

The campaign lifecycle

Every campaign moves through a small set of stages, shown as a coloured status badge on the campaign list and detail screen. Most campaigns follow the same happy path — Draft → Preparing → Scheduled → Sending → Sent — and a few stages handle cancellation or a blocked send.

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Draft
    Draft --> Preparing: confirm
    Preparing --> Scheduled: deferred send
    Preparing --> Sending: immediate send
    Scheduled --> Sending: send time reached
    Sending --> Sent: all messages sent
    Scheduled --> Canceled: cancel before it starts
    Sending --> Unpaid: balance runs out
    Unpaid --> Sending: top up balance
    Sent --> [*]
    Canceled --> [*]
    class Sent success
    class Canceled destructive
    class Unpaid destructive

Stages

Stage	What it means	Editable?
Draft	Being built or revised. Audience, message and cost estimate are still open.	Yes
Preparing	Confirmed — Instasent is building each message and its tracking links. Takes a few minutes; a progress bar shows how many contacts are ready.	No
Scheduled	Prepared and waiting for its send time.	No — cancel to make changes
Sending	Messages are going out. A progress bar shows how far along it is.	No
Sent	The send finished. Analytics keep updating as delivery and click data arrive.	No
Canceled	Stopped by you before it could finish. Terminal.	No
Unpaid	Paused mid-send because the project ran out of balance. Top up and it resumes.	No

Preparing the send

When you confirm a campaign the messages aren't sent immediately — it enters Preparing. Instasent builds each contact's message individually and generates all the tracking links, which can take a few minutes for a large audience; a progress bar shows how many contacts are ready. When preparation finishes, the campaign moves to Sending for an immediate send, or Scheduled for one set for later.

By default a campaign confirms automatically the moment it's prepared and carries on. While it's preparing you can cancel that automatic confirmation — a Cancel link on the preparation block — so it waits as prepared instead. You then review it and press Confirm campaign when you're ready. This is useful when you want a last look once the final recipient count and cost are settled.

Once a campaign is prepared or scheduled, changing its message or audience un-prepares it: it returns to Draft, the prepared messages and tracking links are cleared, and it must be prepared again before it can send. This is because each message is built with its final content — its length and number of parts, each contact's personalization, the estimated cost and the tracked links — so any change to the message or the audience means recalculating all of it. The composer warns you before this happens.

What you can do at each stage

Each stage allows a different set of actions:

• Draft — the only fully editable stage. You change audience, message and delivery settings freely.
• Scheduled — can be cancelled before its send time. To change its content, cancel it, edit the draft, then schedule it again.
• Sending — can be cancelled to stop the messages that haven't gone out yet.
• Sent — no longer editable; you only read its analytics.

Managing campaigns across these stages — cloning, cancelling and finding them — is covered in Managing campaigns.

Cost and confirmation

Before a campaign sends, Instasent gives an upfront estimate of its cost: roughly the number of recipients multiplied by the per-country price and the number of message parts. You see this estimate and confirm it before the send is scheduled — no message is sent until you confirm the campaign. Delivery timing, send speed and local-time sending are covered in Delivery settings.

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