Campaign lifecycle
A campaign moves through a small, fixed set of states, and the desk's cron job is the only thing that ever moves it forward automatically. You control the pause.
The four states
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Built but not started. Nothing sends. |
| Running | Actively working its list, at whatever pace you set. |
| Paused | Held by you — the desk won't touch it again until you resume it. |
| Done | Every lead in it has been sent to, skipped, or otherwise resolved. Nothing left to do. |
There's a fifth, special-purpose state — external — for campaigns you're measuring rather than sending, covered in Measuring campaigns you send elsewhere. An external campaign never becomes a sending campaign; that's a deliberate wall, not a missing feature.
What moves a campaign between states
- Draft → Running: you start it.
- Running → Done: automatic, the moment there's nothing left pending or in-flight.
- Running ⇄ Paused: always you, either direction. The desk never pauses a campaign on its own — a stalled mailbox or CRM issue shows up as leads not progressing, not as the campaign itself flipping to paused.
Per-lead progress, separately from the campaign's own state
Each lead in a campaign has its own status — pending, sending, sent, replied, bounced, opted out, and so on — tracked independently of whether the campaign overall is running or paused. A paused campaign doesn't lose or reset that progress; resuming picks every lead up exactly where it was.
What decides what happens to each lead: the journey
Once a lead is contacted, what happens next — wait, follow up, check for a reply, hand off, stop — is decided by the campaign's journey: a small decision graph rather than a fixed "email, wait 3 days, email again" script. It's built with a hard ceiling on how many times any one person can be emailed and a limit on how many decision steps it can take, specifically so a badly built journey can never loop forever or spam someone. If a journey doesn't validate for any reason, the desk simply falls back to the older, fixed follow-up cadence — a broken journey never stalls a campaign.
Reading a campaign's status honestly: "running" tells you the desk is willing to work it, not that every lead in it is actively mid-send right now — most leads in a running campaign are waiting on their next scheduled step.