Sending your first campaign
From a blank campaign to a verified send, in the order the screens ask for it.
Quick answers
6 questions · click to openWhat has to be done before I can send anything at all?
Your sending domain has to be verified. Until it is, the campaign shows Sender not verified and nothing goes out, no matter how finished the email looks.
Can I see it in my own inbox first?
Yes. Send Test Email sends it to you and only you. It isn’t recorded against the campaign or its analytics, so it won’t skew your open rates.
How long does a send take?
Campaigns go out in batches of 100 with a 30 second gap between batches. A list of 5,000 takes roughly half an hour to work through, and the Recipients count climbs as it goes.
Can I cancel a scheduled campaign?
Yes, any time before its send time — cancelling puts the campaign back to draft. A send that has already started can’t be recalled.
Who actually receives it?
The people in your audience, minus anyone unsubscribed or hard-bounced, minus anyone who has opted out of that email type. The confirmation screen tells you the number before you commit.
Why can I only reach some of our members?
Your role is scoped to a political division. A local role only reaches people in that local group’s electorates. See targeting a list or division.
Everything here happens under Outreach. The order matters — get the sender sorted before you write, because an unverified domain blocks the send no matter how good the email is.
Verify your sending domain first. It depends on a DNS change, which runs on someone else’s clock. Writing a campaign you can’t send is a frustrating way to spend an afternoon.
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Create the campaign
From Outreach, start a new campaign. Cobber creates it as a draft straight away and opens the editor, so the campaign exists before you’ve written anything — that’s normal. The editor is in sections: Campaign details, Email type, Recipients, and Template & attachments.
The campaign list, where a new campaign starts. -
Set the details and the email type
Campaign details is the internal name, the Subject and the From address. The Email type matters more than it looks: people can opt out of types individually, so a newsletter and an urgent alert reach different sets of people even from the same list.
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Choose who it goes to
Under Recipients, build your audience. You can send to everyone, to a saved list, or to a filtered segment. Whatever you choose, the count you see is already scoped to what your role can reach.
Choosing the audience for a campaign. -
Write it, and give merge fields a fallback
Personalisation is Liquid, the same as the page templates. Always give a merge field something to fall back on:
Hi {{ person.first_name | default: "there" }},The full list of available fields is in the Liquid reference.
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Send yourself a test
Send Test Email goes to you alone. Read it on a phone as well as a laptop — most of your members will open it on a phone.
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Review and send
The confirmation screen is headed Ready to send? and shows who it’s Sending to and which email types they’re opted into. If you would rather schedule it, set Send at — times are in the organisation’s own timezone, and recipients are locked in at the moment you schedule.
The Ready to send confirmation, with the recipient count.
After it goes out
The campaign page tracks Opened, Clicked and Replied, with Engagement by recipient underneath so you can see individual people rather than just percentages. Replies come back into Cobber rather than disappearing into someone’s personal inbox.
If the numbers look wrong, why an email didn’t send covers the four usual causes.
| Symptom | Cause and fix |
|---|---|
| “Sender not verified” on the campaign | The domain your from address uses isn’t verified with Postmark. Verify it under Email Configuration — nothing sends until you do. |
| “No one matches the current audience and email types” | Your filters and the email type have no overlap. Most often the type is one that most people have opted out of; widen the audience or change the type. |
| The recipient count is lower than the list | Normal. Unsubscribes and hard bounces are skipped at send time. |
| You scheduled it for the wrong time | Cancel the scheduled send — the campaign goes back to draft — then reschedule. Times are in the organisation’s timezone, not yours. |