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Send, schedule, and send-time optimization

Once your campaign has a subject, a template, and an audience, the Send mode section decides when it goes out.

The three send modes

  • Send all at once: the default. Every recipient gets the email immediately when you confirm the send.
  • Schedule for later: pick a future date and time; the campaign queues as scheduled and ships when the moment arrives.
  • Predictive send time: send-time optimization per recipient. Each subscriber gets the email at their predicted optimal hour over the next 24 hours, based on their own past open history. Recipients with no history of their own fall back to your audience's average best hour.

If your goal is that everyone receives the email at the same moment (a launch, a time-sensitive offer), Send all at once is the mode to use. For regular newsletters, Predictive send time typically lifts opens by meeting each subscriber when they actually read email.

Schedule a campaign

  1. Select Schedule for later.
  2. In the Send at field, pick a date and time. This is your local time, and it must be at least a few minutes in the future.
  3. Click Schedule campaign and confirm.

The campaign moves to the Scheduled status and the report page shows a banner with the exact send time. Until it starts sending you can still open the composer, change anything, pause it to hold the schedule, or cancel it.

Test send first

Before any real send, put an address in the Send a preview to field and click Test send to check the email in a real inbox.

If your brand's sending domain is not set up yet, the test still goes out, but from [email protected] instead of your own domain. Set up your domain on the Sending domains page to send from your own address.

What the send button requires

The button reads Send campaign (or Schedule campaign in scheduled mode). It stays disabled until the campaign is complete, and a hint next to it tells you exactly what is missing:

  • A subject line
  • A selected template
  • An audience: all subscribers, or at least one list
  • For scheduled sends, a time in the future
  • With A/B testing on, a second variant with its own subject or template
  • An approved brand (see below)

Clicking the button opens a confirmation dialog that summarizes what is about to happen; nothing sends until you confirm.

warning

New brands go through a one-time review before their first live send. While your brand is awaiting approval you can build, preview, and test-send, but the live send button stays locked. Click Request approval in the banner and you will get an email once the review is done.

Domain warm-up and drip sending

If your sending domain is still warming up, a banner on the composer tells you the campaign will go out as a drip: up to that day's warm-up cap is sent immediately, and the rest continues automatically over the following days until everyone has been reached. Nobody is dropped. Warm-up protects a new domain's reputation; you can tune or turn it off per domain on the Sending domains page.

After you click send

  • Send all at once and Predictive send time start shipping right away and the campaign switches to its live report.
  • Scheduled campaigns wait in the queue and start on their own at the chosen time.

From there, head to Track, pause, and cancel a campaign to follow the results.