Campaign lifecycle

User guide › Campaign lifecycle

The five stages

The one thing worth internalising: the audience is resolved at launch, not saved as a list. Everything downstream is per-recipient state created at that moment.

Stage 1 — build the audience

Marketing → Audiences → New audience. Pick the channel first, because it decides what gets extracted: Email pulls an email address, WhatsApp and SMS pull a phone number.

1. Add each entity you want to pull from Add entity, choose it, and check the two mapping dropdowns it pre-fills — the identifier field (labelled Email field or Phone field) and the optional Name field. The guess is based on your field names and types; on a table with several email fields it can pick the wrong one.
2. Filter each source Add filter gives you field / operator / value rows, joined with AND — records matching ALL of these. Each source has its own filters.
3. Read the live preview The right-hand panel shows the deduped, validated count and a sample of the actual addresses. This runs the exact resolution a launch runs — treat the number as literal.
4. Save Create audience.

Records with a blank or invalid identifier are dropped silently, and the same address appearing in two sources becomes one recipient. Full detail in Audiences.

Stage 2 — create the campaign

Marketing → Campaign Builder at /omni. Two buttons, two very different things.

Take the automation path for this walkthrough — it's the one with per-contact behaviour to trace.

1. Name it Required. The placeholder suggests e.g. Welcome series.
2. Choose the way in Audience enrols everyone when you launch. CRM event enrols a contact when a record is created or a field changes. Engagement enrols on an open, click or conversion. Manual waits for you.
3. Draw the steps Drag the channel actions and the Omni control nodes onto the canvas and wire them. Branch nodes have two outgoing handles, yes and no; a send node has one, plus an optional error edge.
4. Put tracking in the message If any branch downstream asks "did they open / click / convert", the message before it must carry {omni_open_pixel} and {omni_link:https://…}. Without them no outcome can ever be recorded for that step.
5. Save The journey is stored as Draft. Nothing has been sent and nobody has been enrolled.

Stage 3 — launch

Launch on an audience journey asks to confirm — Launch this journey — resolve the audience and enrol every recipient now? Three things are checked before anything happens: the journey has a name, it has an audience, and the canvas has at least one step. Then, in one go:

• the audience is resolved against your records, right now;
• one enrollment is created per recipient, carrying their identifier, their name, and a back-link to the record they came from;
• every enrollment starts active, at the start of the canvas, due immediately;
• the journey flips to Active.

You get a count back: Enrolled N recipient(s) (N resolved, N already enrolled). Resolved is what the audience produced; enrolled is how many were new.

An event-driven journey is activated instead — Journey activated — contacts will enrol as the trigger fires. Nobody is enrolled up front; a contact joins the moment their record changes in the way you specified, or the moment they engage.

Stage 4 — what happens when a step fires

A tick runs every minute and queues every enrollment that is due. A worker then advances that one recipient as far as it can go — through as many steps as run instantly — until it hits something that has to wait, finishes, or fails.

A recipient walks one path. There's no parallel fan-out: a branch picks a side, and that's the side they're on.

What the recipient's opens and clicks do

When the contact opens the message the tracking pixel is fetched; when they click a tracked link they hit a signed redirect that forwards them on. Both write an outcome against that recipient and that step, which is what a downstream branch is polling for. A conversion beacon does the same. Those outcomes also feed the contact's lead score and their timeline.

If it's a campaign flow instead

The shape is the same but the unit is the campaign. A launch creates one run. Each action step creates and launches a real campaign in that channel against its audience — the step's own, or the flow's default — and records which campaign it started. A wait parks the run. Before any result branch is evaluated, every still-running launched step is re-polled so the rate is current; the branch then compares that metric against your threshold and takes yes or no. If nothing has been launched yet, the branch takes no.

Stage 5 — where the results appear

"This contact didn't receive it"

Work down this list in order. Each step eliminates a stage, and the first one that fails is your answer.

1. Is the contact in the audience at all? Open the audience and read the live preview count and sample. If they're not there, the campaign never knew about them. Check, on their record: does it satisfy every filter (AND, and is is an exact text match)? Is the identifier in the field you mapped? Does the value pass validation — a real name@domain.tld, or at least six digits for a phone?
2. Did they get enrolled? Open the journey's Results and look for their identifier in the Recipients list. Not there means they weren't in the audience at the moment you launched — an audience is resolved at launch, so a record edited afterwards doesn't retroactively join. Relaunch to pick them up.
3. Were they deduped into someone else? If the same address appears on two source records, only one recipient exists — and the name and source record attached to it come from whichever source is listed first. A "missing" contact is sometimes present under a colleague's record.
4. Where is their cursor? Their row shows a Current step. Sitting on a Wait means the delay hasn't elapsed. Sitting on a branch means it's still polling for an outcome and its deadline hasn't passed. Both are normal.
5. Did they take the branch you expected? A branch takes no on timeout. If the preceding message had no tracking tokens, or the contact's mail client blocked the pixel, the outcome was never reported and the timeout is inevitable. Their timeline tells you which outcomes actually arrived.
6. Are they suppressed on that channel? Opt-out lists are applied by each channel after the audience resolves, so a suppressed contact is in the audience and in the journey and still receives nothing. Check the channel's suppression list — an SMS contact who replied STOP, a suppressed WhatsApp number, an unsubscribed email address.
7. Is the channel itself able to send? A step with no sender configured, no connected mailbox, or no approved template produces nothing. Confirm by sending a test from the channel app directly; if that fails too, the problem is the channel's setup, not the campaign.
8. Did the step fail for them specifically? A recipient whose send threw is marked failed and stops there, with the error stored against them. The funnel's Failed count is where to notice this happening at scale.

"The audience count looks wrong"

"The campaign is stuck"

What ends up recorded against a contact

Nothing about a campaign writes back to the source record. The trail lives on the marketing side:

• an enrollment per journey they entered, with their current step, their status, and a link back to the record they were resolved from;
• an outcome row per event — sent, failed, opened, clicked, converted, goal — tagged with the channel and the step;
• a lead score, computed live as each outcome's count times its weight, with the weights editable in the Contacts scoring panel;
• a timeline assembled from those outcomes, newest first.

Contacts are keyed by identifier — an email address or a phone number — so the same person appearing in three journeys is one contact with one score.

Where to go next