Campaigns

A campaign is a sequence of one or more emails sent to enrolled leads over time. Everything about it — copy, leads, schedule, sender inboxes, compliance footer, and launch readiness — is built and launched from one screen: Campaign Builder.

Creating a campaign

There's no creation wizard. The left sidebar on Campaigns has a single always-visible form: a name, 2–120 characters.

Submitting opens the campaign in DRAFT status with zero steps and zero leads — everything else is configured afterward, inside the tabs. Once you have more than one campaign, the same sidebar lists them as buttons showing {steps} steps · {leads} leads · {status}.

A campaign only ever shows three statuses in the UI: DRAFT (being built), ACTIVE (launched and sending), and PAUSED (stopped for review or by an operator). The header's action button tracks status directly — Start on Draft, Pause on Active, Resume on Paused.

The builder tabs

Once a campaign exists, Campaign Builder's header shows its name, status, a preflight verdict strip, the tab bar, and the Start/Pause/Resume action — in that order, top to bottom. The five tabs, in real left-to-right order, are Sequence, Leads, Jobs, Schedule, and Compliance.

• Sequence — build the email steps (see Sequences and steps)
• Leads — enroll contacts from a list, with an eligibility preflight before anyone's added
• Jobs — a live, filterable table of every send job this campaign has created or will create
• Schedule — sending days/window/timezone, daily cap, send pacing, and sender pool (see Scheduling)
• Compliance — the unsubscribe footer and an optional hold-for-review setting

Tags don't get their own tab — Manage tags sits inline in the header, next to the campaign name.

Campaign tags

Clicking Manage tags opens a picker: search existing workspace tags, create a new one on the spot, or click an attached tag to remove it.

Campaign tags are the same shared workspace tag pool used for contact tags — creating a tag here makes it immediately available to tag a contact too, and vice versa. They're for grouping and reporting only; they don't change sending logic.

Compliance footer

The Compliance tab has two independent settings: a hold-for-review toggle, and the unsubscribe footer override.

Leaving it on Use workspace default falls back to whatever's set on the workspace's own footer. The {{unsubscribe_url}} placeholder is required in any custom text — ForgeSend cannot remove the unsubscribe link.

Pre-send preflight

A persistent guardrails strip sits above the tabs, showing a live verdict as you configure the campaign — READY, WARNING, or BLOCKED.

The real check list covers your domain (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC records), your inboxes (connection status, daily capacity, OAuth token health), and the campaign itself (at least one step, active leads present, no invalid leads, risky-lead counts, list verification, the automatic unsubscribe footer, suppression-list conflicts, duplicate emails in the active send pool, merge-variable coverage, connected-inbox count, workspace-wide capacity, and sending-domain presence) — plus a trial-account send-limit check. READY fully enables Start; WARNING still allows launch after confirmation; BLOCKED disables Start outright until every blocker clears.

Launch review

Clicking Start doesn't launch immediately — it opens Review before launch, the same gate every campaign goes through.

The confirm button reads Start campaign on a clean READY verdict, or Start campaign anyway if you're launching past warnings — there's no way to reach this screen at all while the verdict is BLOCKED. Confirming moves the campaign to ACTIVE and begins creating real send jobs inside your configured schedule.

Where to go next

Next: Sequences and steps

• Scheduling
• Your first campaign
• Lists & Contacts overview