Campaigns

How campaigns work

A campaign has three parts:

1. Recipients — one or more broadcast lists, inline email addresses, or both
2. Content — a saved email template from your library, or an inline subject and body
3. Timing — send immediately or schedule for a specific date and time

When you trigger a send, DataRunner enqueues a delivery job for every recipient. The campaign status moves to sending while jobs are processed and to sentonce all sends complete. Follow progress in real time on the campaign's Sends tab.

Campaign types

DataRunner supports four campaign types:

• Marketing — promotional content, newsletters, and announcements to opted-in lists
• Transactional — account notices, receipts, and system-triggered messages
• Announcement — product updates, release notes, and internal broadcasts
• Phishing simulation — A security-awareness exercise against your own staff. It uses the same send engine but adds a verified sender domain, a click funnel, and a training landing page — and it cannot be sent until the workspace records an explicit authorisation. See Phishing simulation.

The first three are labels for your own categorisation and share one delivery engine. Phishing simulation is behaviourally different: it is gated, audited, and reports on a different funnel.

Creating a campaign

Go to Campaigns → New campaign. Configure:

• Name — internal label for the campaign
• Type — marketing, transactional, announcement, or phishing simulation
• Email subject — subject line for the outgoing email
• Email body — inline HTML body, or leave blank when using a template
• Email template — optional saved template from your library; takes precedence over the inline body if both are set
• Recipients — broadcast lists and / or individual email addresses
• Scheduled at — leave blank to keep the campaign as a draft until you trigger it manually, or set a datetime to schedule

Broadcast list targeting

Broadcast lists are reusable recipient groups managed in Contacts → Broadcast lists. Assign one or more lists to a campaign; DataRunner resolves all contacts at send time and deduplicates addresses across overlapping lists so no recipient gets the same email twice.

You can also add individual addresses alongside broadcast lists in the Recipients field. Both are merged at delivery time.

Scheduling

Set a Scheduled at datetime to queue the campaign for future delivery. DataRunner starts sending at that time automatically — no manual trigger required.

To send immediately instead, leave Scheduled at blank and use the Send now button on the campaign detail page. The campaign moves directly from draft to sending.

To cancel a scheduled campaign before it sends, open the campaign and click Cancel. The status moves to cancelled and no emails are sent. Campaigns that are already sending cannot be cancelled.

Delivery tracking

The Sends tab on each campaign shows the full delivery log. Each row represents one recipient:

• Address — the email address the message was sent to
• Platform — the delivery channel used (e.g. email)
• Status — pending, sent, failed, or bounced
• Sent at — timestamp of the delivery attempt
• Error — error message if status is failed

The campaign header shows aggregate counts: Recipient count, Delivered, and Failed — updated in real time as sends complete.

Opens and clicks. Each send carries a random tracking token. A 1×1 GIF embedded in the message records an open, and outbound links are rewritten to a tracked redirect that records a click before forwarding. Recipient IP addresses are hashed before storage, not kept raw. Treat opens as a soft signal — image blocking and corporate mail scanners both inflate and suppress them — and clicks as the reliable one.

A/B testing. A campaign can carry a set of subject and body variants with weights. At send time each recipient is assigned a variant by weighted random draw, so the split is probabilistic rather than exact — expect the realised split to sit near your weights, not on them.