Managing Campaigns

Managing Campaigns

Campaigns are the emails you send to your active subscriber list. Create them under Dispatch → Campaigns.

Creating a campaign

1. Go to Dispatch → Campaigns → New Campaign
2. Enter a campaign title (internal label — subscribers don’t see this)
3. Enter the email subject line
4. Choose your editor mode (see below)
5. Write or paste your email content
6. Click Save Draft, then preview and send a test email to yourself before sending

Editor modes

• Template Mode — write your content in a structured form; Dispatch wraps it in your saved HTML template. Good for consistent branding with minimal effort.
• Raw HTML — paste or write complete HTML. Full control over every pixel. You are responsible for inline styles and email-client compatibility.

Merge tags

Use these placeholders anywhere in your email content — Dispatch replaces them with each subscriber’s data before sending:

• {{first_name}} — subscriber’s first name (falls back to a blank string if not set)
• {{email}} — subscriber’s email address
• {{unsubscribe_url}} — unique one-click unsubscribe link for this subscriber
• {{site_name}} — your WordPress site name
• {{site_url}} — your WordPress site URL

Sending a campaign

1. Open the campaign and click Send Test — confirm the email looks correct in your inbox
2. Click Send Campaign and confirm the dialog
3. Dispatch queues all active subscribers and begins processing at your configured rate limits
4. A real-time progress indicator shows sent / total / remaining

Pause and resume

You can pause a sending campaign at any time from the campaign detail screen. The queue stops processing after the current batch completes. Click Resume to continue from where it left off — no emails are sent twice.

Use pause/resume when you need to throttle a send across multiple days, or if you spot an error mid-send and want to stop before it reaches your entire list.

Campaign history

The Campaigns list shows all past and in-progress campaigns with their status (Draft, Sending, Paused, Sent), total recipients, and sent count. Completed campaigns are read-only and cannot be resent — create a duplicate if you want to resend similar content.

Next: Subscriber Management

Dispatch Core

Free self-hosted email marketing for WordPress. List management, SMTP, double opt-in, throttled sending, and CAN-SPAM compliance.

Quick Links

• Overview
• Requirements
• Installation
• Configuration
• Managing Campaigns
• Subscriber Management
• Shortcode Reference
• Troubleshooting

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