Campaigns

Campaign lifecycle

Every campaign moves through a state machine. What you can do depends on the current state.

State	What it means	Editable?
Draft	Initial state — composing content and picking audience	Yes
PendingReview	Submitted for reviewer approval (approval workflow only)	Yes — but editing reverts the campaign to Draft
Scheduled	Approved and waiting for its scheduled send time	Yes — editing reverts to Draft and clears approval
Sending	Recipients materialised, worker draining the queue	No
Sent	All recipients processed successfully	No
Failed	Send aborted due to configuration errors or unrecoverable failures	No
Cancelled	Manually cancelled before the send started	No

Editing resets approval

When a campaign is in PendingReview or Scheduled, any edit to content, subject, or audience reverts the state to Draft and clears the approval trail. This prevents a reviewer from approving one version and a different one being sent.

Creating a campaign

1. Open CampaignCanvas → Campaigns and click New Campaign.
2. Pick a starting point:
   • Blank — start from scratch
   • From template— seed from a saved campaign blueprint (subject, blocks, theme preserved; audience and schedule cleared)
   • Duplicate— copy from an existing campaign
3. Fill in content, sender, audience, and (optionally) tracking and UTM.
4. Save as draft. You can now preview, submit for review, schedule, or send.

Send an Umbraco page as a newsletter

As an alternative to building a campaign in the editor, you can compose a newsletter directly on an Umbraco content page and send it to your lists — handy when the email mirrors something you’re already publishing (a release note, an article, a landing page).

Newsletter licence required

Available on sites with the Newsletters licence feature enabled.

Setup

Add a NewsletterEmail (Block Grid) property to the document type. Editors then compose the email on the page itself using the same email-safe blocks as a campaign, and a CampaignCanvas Newsletter workspace view appears on those documents.

Sending

From that workspace view, set the Subject, optionally pick a Theme, choose the audience (mailing lists and/or segments), then Test, Schedule or Send now.

Behaviour

• Each action creates a real campaign from the page content, so the send runs through the identical render and send pipeline — suppression checks, tracking, analytics and the audit trail are all unchanged.
• A test delivers a one-off to an address you specify, without creating permanent recipient rows.
• Scheduling requires a future time; the send worker promotes it exactly like any other scheduled campaign.

Content & composition

Campaign content is composed in a drag-and-drop editor built on Umbraco’s Block Grid editor, constrained to email-safe blocks.

Block catalogue

Block	Purpose
Text	Rich-text paragraph with bold, italic, link support
Heading	Section heading with configurable size
Image	Inline image with alt text and optional link
Button	Call-to-action button with colour, text, and URL
Columns	Two-column layout — collapses to a single column on narrow viewports
Divider	Horizontal rule between sections
Spacer	Configurable vertical whitespace
Footer	Prebuilt footer block with address and contact info
Unsubscribe Link	Per-recipient unsubscribe link — auto-inserted if you omit it (see Compliance)

Preview

The editor provides four preview modes:

• Desktop— default 600 px-wide inbox view
• Mobile— narrow 375 px viewport to check column collapse and button tap targets
• Plain text— the auto-generated fallback sent alongside the HTML part
• Dark mode— renders against a dark body-background to spot clashing hard-coded colours

Preview is safe

Previews never inject tracking pixels or rewrite links, so opening a preview does not count as an open event. Share preview links freely within your team.

Test sends

Before committing to a full send, use Test Send to dispatch the campaign to a handful of addresses (comma or newline separated). Merge fields resolve against a synthetic subscriber so tokens like {{subscriber.firstName}} render with stub values (e.g. Firstname). Test sends do not create permanent recipient rows or touch analytics.

Merge fields

Merge fields are placeholders replaced with per-recipient values at send time. Use the syntax {{token}} (double braces).

Built-in tokens

Token	Resolves to
{{subscriber.email}}	The recipient’s email address
{{subscriber.firstName}}	First name
{{subscriber.lastName}}	Last name
{{subscriber.language}}	ISO 639-1 language code
{{subscriber.{alias}}}	Any subscriber custom field, by alias
{{campaign.name}}	The campaign’s internal name
{{campaign.subject}}	The configured subject line
{{list.name}}	Name of the targeted list (if a single list)
{{campaign.unsubscribeUrl}}	Unique unsubscribe link for this recipient. Always available in campaign sends.

Merge tag catalogue

The editor exposes a dropdown of all available tokens including any custom subscriber fields you’ve defined, so you don’t need to memorise aliases.

Missing values

Tokens that resolve to empty values render as empty strings — never as the raw {{token}} text. This prevents the common mistake of emails going out with visible “Hi {{firstName}}” greetings.

Each token supports a default value— when using a token in a greeting, configure Friendor similar as the default so no-name subscribers get a natural-reading “Hi Friend” instead of a blank.

Themes

A theme is a reusable brand kit. Defining one theme and applying it to every campaign gives your sends a consistent visual identity without copying header/footer markup into each one.

→ See the dedicated Themes page for the full brand-kit reference (colours, typography, buttons, layout and footer).

What a theme contains

• Colour palette— primary, background, and text colours
• Typography— email-safe font stacks and a base font size
• Logo URL— hosted image used in the theme’s header region
• HTML shell— the outer wrapper markup with a {content}placeholder where the campaign’s rendered blocks are injected

Applying a theme

Each campaign can reference a theme via the Theme picker. At render time the campaign’s rendered blocks are wrapped inside the theme shell before sending. Campaigns without a theme get a minimal default shell that still includes a compliant unsubscribe footer.

Manage themes under CampaignCanvas → Themes in the backoffice.

Campaign templates

A campaign template is a reusable blueprint — subject, preheader, blocks, theme, and UTM — used to seed new drafts. Think of it as a starting point, not a send-in-place definition.

Saving a template

From any campaign, click … → Save as template. The reusable fields are snapshotted; audience and schedule are dropped (those are campaign-specific, not template-worthy).

Creating from a template

In the campaigns list, click New from template and pick your template. A fresh Draftis created with the template’s content pre-populated, ready for you to set the audience and schedule.

Audience

A campaign’s audience is any combination of mailing lists and segments. Pick one or many of each from the Audience tab.

Deduplication

Recipients are deduped across the union of all targets. A subscriber who’s on two selected lists, or who matches a segment and is on a selected list, receives one email, not multiple.

Recipient count preview

The audience tab shows a live count of how many unique subscribers the current selection resolves to. Use this as a sanity check before scheduling a major send.

Suppression exclusion

Addresses on the global suppression list are automatically excluded from the recipient count and the send. See Suppression.

Sending

Pre-send checks

Before a campaign can transition to Sending, CampaignCanvas runs pre-send validation:

• Subject line must not be empty
• Recipient count must be greater than zero
• An unsubscribe link must be present (the renderer enforces this)
• From Email must be set
• Spam-score check— the content is scanned for common spam indicators (all-caps subjects, trigger phrases, missing preheader, excessive link density). A high score blocks the send; a moderate score logs warnings.

Send now

Click Send Now to promote directly from Draft (or Scheduled) to Sending. The recipient queue is materialised and the send worker starts draining it within seconds.

Scheduling

Click Schedule to set a specific send time and timezone. The campaign moves to Scheduled state and is picked up by the worker when the scheduled moment arrives.

Scheduling parameters:

• Scheduled time— exact UTC instant
• Timezone — IANA timezone (e.g. Europe/Amsterdam) used for display and for authoring the schedule

Throttling & retries

The send pipeline respects a workspace-level rate limit (default: 100 messages per minute). Failed sends are retried with exponential backoff; transient failures usually clear on retry, while permanent failures move the recipient row to Failed state.

Cancelling

Use Cancel on a Scheduled campaign to pull it back to Cancelled. Once sending is in progress cancellation is refused — cancelling mid-send would leave the recipient list in an inconsistent state.

Cancel window

A configurable cancel window (default 5 minutes) prevents cancellations right before the scheduled time. This gives the worker a safe zone to start materialising recipients without racing against a last-second cancel.

Roles & approvals

When approval is required (enabled in newsletter settings), campaigns follow a three-role workflow. Umbraco admins bypass the workflow — the roles apply to non-admin users.

Role	Umbraco user group	Can do
Drafter	cc-drafter	Create, edit, duplicate, submit for review, save as template
Reviewer	cc-reviewer	Approve, reject, comment on campaigns in review
Sender	cc-sender	Schedule, send now, cancel

The user groups are seeded on first boot. Assign each user one or more groups to grant the matching permissions.

Approval flow

1. Drafter composes the campaign and clicks Submit for Review. State becomes PendingReview.
2. Reviewer opens the campaign, inspects content, previews, and either Approves or Rejects with a comment.
3. On approval, the campaign is ready to be scheduled or sent by a Sender. On rejection, it returns to Draft.
4. Sender schedules or sends. Only users with the Sender role can trigger the actual send.

Comments

Each campaign has a comment thread for collaboration — reviewers leave feedback, drafters respond, and the full discussion is preserved with the campaign for posterity.

Tracking & UTM

Each campaign has opt-in / opt-out toggles for open and click tracking, plus an optional UTM tagging block for web analytics. See the Tracking page for the full details.

Folders

Campaigns can be grouped into folders under Campaigns → Folders. Use folders to separate launches, regions, or teams. Like form folders, they’re purely organisational — no effect on sending or analytics.

Duplicating

Duplicate clones a campaign to a fresh Draft. Content, sender, theme, tracking, and UTM settings are copied; audience and schedule are cleared. Perfect for creating the next issue of a newsletter from the last one.