Sending Campaigns

When you are happy with your campaign — content is polished, merge tags are in place, and the right audience is selected — it's time to send. SendBeam hands your messages to its managed delivery, which signs them for your domain and routes them through its mail infrastructure to maximise inbox placement.

Before You Send

Take a few minutes to run through this checklist before confirming a send. Mistakes in email campaigns can't be undone once delivery begins.

• Preview the email — Use the desktop and mobile preview on the Email step to confirm layout, images, and text all look correct at both screen sizes.
• Send a test email — Click Send test on the Email step, on the Review step, or on the campaign's own page. It goes to your own address by default, or to a list of addresses — a colleague, a client — up to 5 on Free and 20 on paid plans, with an hourly allowance per workspace. Choose Render as to fill the merge tags with a real contact's name, email and custom fields; the copy still goes to the addresses you entered, and its unsubscribe link cannot unsubscribe anyone. Test copies carry a working view-in-browser link, are not counted against your plan and do not appear in the stats. Check the copy on a desktop email client and on a phone: merge tags, images, links.
• Check the subject line — Re-read it for typos and think about how any merge tag reads when the contact has no value for it.
• Verify the from address — Make sure the domain is verified under Email & Domains and the display name looks professional. SendBeam re-checks the workspace's sender address on every send and only sends as its own shared address or a domain it has verified.
• Check the audience — Confirm the right list or segment is selected, and look at the recipients right now figure under Audience on the campaign page. It is computed by the same rules as the send itself, so it is the number that will be queued (the list's contact count and a segment's preview count also include unconfirmed and unsubscribed contacts, so they can be higher). If the campaign cannot be sent — no one to send to, or the audience would take you past your monthly allowance — the reason is shown in the same place. The API equivalent is GET /api/v1/campaigns/{id}/audience.
• Check the unsubscribe link — Put the {'{{unsubscribe_url}}'} merge tag where you want it. If it is missing, SendBeam adds a plain unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
• Check your allowance — The send is refused if the audience would take the account past its monthly email limit. Usage is shown under Account settings → Billing & Plans. Each plan also has an hourly ceiling, shown under Billing; a campaign that reaches it simply continues in the next hour.

The Send Now Flow

To send a campaign immediately:

1. On the Review & Send step of the builder, check the summary of campaign name, subject, from address and audience.
2. Click Send Now.
3. The campaign is saved, its status changes to Sending as recipients are queued, and you are taken to the campaign page. Within seconds to a few minutes (depending on audience size), it transitions to Sent.

You can also send a saved draft from its own page: open it from the Campaigns list, click Send, and confirm the dialog.

How Sending Works

Once you confirm a send, SendBeam processes your campaign in the background. Here's what happens under the hood:

• Audience resolution — SendBeam fetches the contacts matching your chosen audience (all contacts, list members, or segment). Only contacts whose status is Subscribed are included; on a double opt-in list, only confirmed members. On the Free plan only contacts who have confirmed a subscription are included, whatever the audience.
• Allowance check — The whole audience must fit within what is left of the account's monthly email allowance, or the send is refused with a "Monthly email limit reached" message. For a scheduled campaign the check happens at send time; if it fails, the campaign is cancelled with the reason recorded on its page and workspace admins are emailed.
• Queuing — One send record is created per recipient and the campaign moves to Sending. A background job drains the queue in batches, sharing each pass fairly between every campaign that is sending so a large campaign does not hold up a small one. Within the plan's hourly ceiling, what does not fit waits for the next hour. A recipient whose email cannot be sent is recorded as failed, with the reason.
• Merge tag substitution — For each recipient, merge tags in the subject line and email body are replaced with that contact's data.
• Tracking — Each email gets a unique tracking pixel for open detection and every link is rewritten through SendBeam's click redirect so that opens and clicks are recorded in your campaign statistics. A click-tracking link only redirects for an email SendBeam actually sent. Unsubscribe links are signed per recipient, and one-click unsubscribe headers are added.
• Delivery — Messages are signed for your domain and handed to the receiving mail servers. Bounces and complaints flow back automatically and update the contact. If the workspace's bounce or complaint rate climbs, admins are emailed a warning, and past the safety line sending is paused — see Delivery.

Sent Status is Final

Once a campaign reaches Sent status, it cannot be modified, resent, or recalled. The emails are already in transit and many will have been received by recipients within seconds of the send starting.

If you discover a mistake in a sent campaign — a broken link, a typo, an incorrect merge tag — your options are limited to:

• Sending a follow-up campaign — Create a new campaign acknowledging the error and providing the correct information.
• Duplicating and resending — Use the Duplicate feature to clone the campaign, fix the issue, and send a corrected version to the same audience.

This is why the pre-send checklist and test emails are so important. A small investment of time before sending prevents the need for damage-control afterwards.