Campaigns & Reporting

Campaigns are how you send marketing emails to your audience. Whether it's a weekly newsletter, a product launch announcement, or a seasonal promotion, the campaign workflow takes you from content selection through delivery and into performance analysis.

Campaign statuses

Every campaign moves through a lifecycle:

Creating a campaign

Open Campaigns, click New Campaign, and work through the three-step wizard. Each step saves as you go, so you can leave and resume a draft at any time.

Step 1: Setup

The first step captures who the email is from and who receives it.

Sender details:

• Campaign name — an internal reference (recipients never see this)
• From name — the sender name recipients see in their inbox
• From email — the address the campaign is sent from
• Reply-to (optional) — where replies go; leave empty to use the From email

Owlat checks the From email's domain as you type. If the domain isn't registered or verified, you can keep editing the draft, but sending stays disabled until you add and verify it under Settings > Domains. See Deliverability for the DNS records involved.

Audience — pick exactly one source, either a topic or a saved segment:

• Specific Topic — choose one Topic. Recipients are the contacts subscribed to it.
• Saved Segment — choose one Segment. Recipients are the contacts matching its rules.

The step shows an estimated recipient count of eligible contacts. A contact is eligible only if they have an email address, aren't suppressed (unsubscribed or blocklisted), and — for a topic that requires double opt-in — have completed confirmation. For topics, the wizard also tells you how many of the topic's contacts were excluded and why.

Add an A/B test (optional) — the Setup step has a quiet Add an A/B test expander. Leave it closed to send a single version; open it to compare two versions before committing your whole audience:

• Test subject lines — same template, alternative subject for Variant B, or
• Test content — a different template for Variant B.
• Split percentage (10–50%) — each variant goes to that share of the audience; the rest receive the winner.
• Winner criteria — Best Open Rate, Best Click Rate, or Manual selection.
• Test duration — for the automatic criteria, how long to wait before sending the winner.

See A/B Testing for the full guide.

Step 2: Content

Choose the email itself:

• Use an existing marketing template — pick from your saved marketing templates, or
• Create a new marketing email — name it and a draft template is created and linked when you continue.

You also set the email subject here (this is the campaign's subject line — there is no separate subject field elsewhere in the wizard). Selecting a template pre-fills the subject from the template, and you can override it.

If you haven't built a template yet, see Email Templates and the Email Editor.

Step 3: Review & Send

The final step summarizes the campaign — name, From details, audience plus the estimated recipient count, subject and template, and any A/B test setup — with an edit shortcut on each section.

Choose when to send:

• Send Now — delivery begins immediately.
• Schedule for Later — pick a date and time. Optionally enable Send at recipient's local time to deliver at the chosen clock time in each contact's timezone; contacts without a timezone get your selected time.

Sending is blocked here if the From domain isn't registered or verified. You can also use Send Test Email to send a copy to yourself and check rendering before going live.

Duplicating a campaign

To reuse a campaign as a starting point, duplicate it from the Campaigns list or from a campaign's report page. The copy is created as a fresh draft named Copy of <name>, carrying over the template, From details, subject, and audience. You can then adjust and send it like any other draft.

Campaign reporting

After a campaign is sent, the reporting tools help you understand performance.

Key metrics

Reporting views

• Campaigns > Reports — aggregate performance across all campaigns. Useful for spotting trends in your email program.
• Campaign detail page — click into a specific campaign for detailed metrics, timeline, and per-link click data.

Understanding your results

• Open rate below 15% usually signals deliverability issues or unengaged audiences. Review your Deliverability settings and audience hygiene.
• Click rate below 2% suggests your content or CTAs could be stronger. Consider A/B testing different approaches.
• High complaint rate (above 0.1%) is a red flag. You may be sending to people who didn't opt in, or your content doesn't match what subscribers expected.
• Rising hard bounce rate means your list needs cleaning. Remove invalid addresses and check your import sources. Hard bounces automatically blocklist the address.
• Soft bounces are usually temporary. Owlat tracks them separately so you can distinguish between permanent list hygiene issues and transient delivery problems.

Campaign archive

Enable campaign archiving to generate a public "View in browser" link for each sent campaign. This is useful for recipients whose email clients don't render HTML well, or for sharing campaign content on the web.

How it works

1. On the campaign's edit page, in the Public Archive card, toggle Public archive on.
2. When the campaign is sent, Owlat captures an HTML snapshot of the email content.
3. A public archive URL is generated and included as a "View in browser" link at the top of the email.
4. The archive page displays the email exactly as it appeared at send time — it doesn't change if you later edit the template.

The archive URL uses a unique token per campaign. See the Public Endpoints docs for the GET /archive/:token endpoint details.

Operational tips

• Warm up new domains — start with smaller batches and gradually increase volume. Sending 50,000 emails from a brand-new domain will trigger spam filters.
• Maintain list hygiene — regularly remove inactive contacts and process bounces. A clean list improves deliverability for everyone.
• Use segments for relevance — the more relevant your content is to each recipient, the better your engagement and the lower your complaint rate.
• Review before every send — check recipient count, subject line, and template preview. A few seconds of review can prevent costly mistakes.

Next steps

• A/B Testing — optimize your campaigns with controlled experiments
• Automations — set up triggered email workflows
• Segments — target the right audience
• Deliverability — keep your emails reaching inboxes