Owlat Docs

Send & Monitor a Campaign

How to send your campaign and track its performance with real-time metrics.

Send & Monitor a Campaign

You've built your campaign, chosen your audience, and previewed the result. Now it's time to send it and track how it performs.

Pre-Send Checklist

Run through this checklist before every send. Skipping these steps can hurt your deliverability and sender reputation.

  • Domain verified -- your sending domain is authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
  • Audience hygiene done -- bounced addresses removed, stale contacts cleaned out
  • Test email sent and reviewed -- you've checked links, images, and formatting in a real inbox
  • Subject line reviewed -- clear, concise, and free of spammy language
  • Unsubscribe link present -- every marketing email must include a working unsubscribe link

Sending Your Campaign

The final step of the campaign wizard is Review & Send -- this is your last-chance summary screen. It shows a Campaign Summary card with:

  • Campaign name
  • From name and address, plus the Reply-to address if you set one
  • Your audience (the Topic or Segment you chose) and the estimated recipient count
  • The subject line and the template the campaign uses
  • Your A/B test configuration, if you enabled one

Below the summary is a When to Send card. Pick Send Now and click Send Campaign -- delivery begins immediately, with no extra confirmation dialog. Owlat processes your recipient list and starts sending in batches.

Send a test first

The Review & Send screen also has a Send Test Email option. Use it to fire a copy of the campaign to yourself and check links, images, and formatting in a real inbox before you commit to the full send.

Sending is blocked until your From domain is registered and verified. If it isn't, the When to Send card shows a warning and the Send button stays disabled -- finish DNS verification under Settings > Domains first.

Scheduling a Campaign

If you'd rather send later, choose Schedule for Later on the When to Send card:

  1. Pick a date and time for delivery
  2. Optionally tick Send at recipient's local time -- Owlat then sends at your chosen clock time in each contact's own timezone. Contacts without a timezone get the email at your selected time.
  3. Click Schedule Campaign

You can change or cancel a scheduled campaign any time before it sends. Open the campaign's edit page and use Reschedule Campaign to change the send time, Unschedule to Edit to convert it back to a draft so you can edit content, or Cancel Campaign to stop it entirely.

Real-Time Dashboard

Once your campaign starts sending, the report page updates in real time with these top-line metrics:

MetricWhat It Measures
SentRecipients dispatched to the mail provider
DeliveredEmails accepted by the recipient's mailbox
OpenedRecipients who opened your email (with open rate)
ClickedRecipients who clicked a link (with click rate)
BouncedEmails that couldn't be delivered, split into Hard and Soft

You can track these numbers as they come in -- no need to refresh the page.

Below the top-line cards, the report adds an Opens Over Time chart, a Link Click Heatmap that maps engagement onto your email's links, and Opened / Clicked tabs listing the individual contacts behind each metric. A/B test campaigns also show a side-by-side variant comparison.

Interpreting Your Results

Here's a rough guide to what healthy metrics look like:

  • Open rate above 20% is solid for most industries. Below 15% may signal subject line or deliverability issues.
  • Click rate above 2-3% means your content is resonating. Higher is better.
  • Bounce rate below 2% is healthy. Above 5% suggests list quality problems -- watch the Hard vs. Soft split, since hard bounces point to invalid or non-existent addresses.

Spam complaints aren't surfaced as a card on the report, but they still matter: keeping your complaint rate well under 0.1% keeps you in good standing with mailbox providers, and anything above 0.3% is a red flag.

Open rates are an approximation. Some email clients block tracking pixels, so your real open rate is likely higher than reported.

What to Do If Something Goes Wrong

High bounce rate: Stop and clean your list. Remove invalid addresses, check for typos in bulk imports, and verify that your list source is reliable. A high bounce rate damages your sender reputation.

Spike in complaints: Review your email content and sending frequency. Make sure recipients actually opted in to receive your emails. If complaints exceed 0.3%, pause sending and investigate before your domain gets flagged.

Low open rate: Test different subject lines, send at different times, or re-engage inactive subscribers with a targeted win-back campaign. Consider whether your "From" name is recognizable to recipients.

Links not working: If you catch broken links after sending, you can't undo a sent email. This is why test emails matter. For future campaigns, double-check every link in your test email.

Next Steps

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