> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.clinikehr.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Send marketing campaigns

> Build a campaign, choose who receives it, and see the results — email marketing built for the consent rules a health practice actually has to follow.

export const StillStuck = ({topic}) => <div className="ck-callout ck-callout--note" role="note">
    <p className="ck-callout__body">
      <strong>Still stuck{topic ? ` with ${topic}` : ''}?</strong>{' '}
      Check <a href="/platform/help/troubleshooting">Troubleshooting</a> first —
      it covers the failures we see most often. If that does not resolve it,{' '}
      <a href="/platform/help/contact-support">contact support</a> and include
      your workspace name and the time the problem happened, so we can find the
      matching entry in your audit log.
    </p>
  </div>;

export const TaskHeader = ({before, time, after}) => <div className="ck-task">
    {before ? <div className="ck-task__cell">
        <div className="ck-task__title">Before you start</div>
        <p className="ck-task__body">{before}</p>
      </div> : null}

    {time ? <div className="ck-task__cell">
        <div className="ck-task__title">Takes about</div>
        <p className="ck-task__body">{time}</p>
      </div> : null}

    {after ? <div className="ck-task__cell">
        <div className="ck-task__title">When you're done</div>
        <p className="ck-task__body">{after}</p>
      </div> : null}
  </div>;

export const Path = ({steps = []}) => <span className="ck-path">
    {steps.map((s, i) => <span key={i} className="ck-path__step">
        {i > 0 ? <span className="ck-path__sep" aria-hidden="true">
            ›
          </span> : null}
        {s}
      </span>)}
  </span>;

export const Availability = ({editions = ['all'], plans, roles, note}) => {
  const list = editions.includes('all') ? ['clinic', 'pharmacy', 'lims'] : editions;
  return <div className="ck-avail" role="note" aria-label="Feature availability">
      <span className="ck-avail__label">Available in</span>

      {list.map(e => <span key={e} className={`ck-pill ck-pill--${e}`}>
          {EDITION_LABELS[e] || e}
        </span>)}

      {plans ? <span className="ck-avail__label">Plan</span> : null}
      {plans ? <span className="ck-pill ck-pill--plan">{plans}</span> : null}

      {roles ? <span className="ck-avail__label">Who</span> : null}
      {roles ? <span className="ck-pill ck-pill--role">{roles}</span> : null}

      {note ? <span className="ck-avail__note">{note}</span> : null}
    </div>;
};

<Availability editions={['clinic']} plans="All plans" roles="Staff granted marketing access" note="Sends per month, saved templates and active automations differ by plan; contacts never do." />

**Marketing** is where you build and send campaign emails — a newsletter, a recall reminder, a re-engagement email to lapsed clients — to a chosen group of people, with unsubscribe, consent and safe-sending handled for you.

<Path steps={['Sidebar', 'Marketing']} />

<TaskHeader before="At least one saved segment, or a willingness to build one on the fly" time="10–15 minutes for a first campaign" after="A sent (or scheduled) campaign, with results you can check afterward" />

## What you're looking at

Five tabs:

| Tab           | What it holds                                                        |
| ------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Campaigns** | Every campaign you have created, with its status and a quick funnel  |
| **Templates** | Ready-made starter designs, and any you have saved yourself          |
| **Segments**  | Saved groups of contacts, with a live count of who currently matches |
| **Journeys**  | Automated email sequences that run on their own once turned on       |
| **Analytics** | Results across your campaigns                                        |

**New campaign** sits at the top of the **Campaigns** tab. Every campaign carries a status: **Draft**, **Scheduled**, **Sending**, **Sent**, **Paused**, **Cancelled** or **Failed** — a paused campaign always names why (for example, a bounce or complaint rate that tripped a safety pause), so **Paused** is never a mystery.

**This page keeps itself up to date.** While a campaign is scheduled, sending or paused, its status and its figures move on their own — including a campaign somebody else started, and a safety pause nobody chose. You do not need to reload to see a send progress, and you will not miss a pause because you were looking at the screen when it happened.

## Understand who you can email

Before anything else, Marketing asks who this campaign is for, because a health practice's marketing rules are not the same as an ordinary business's. There are three audiences, and the product treats them differently on purpose:

| Audience                              | Who it is                                                                                              | The rule                                                                                  |
| ------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Leads and contacts**                | People in your CRM who are not clients — enquiries, prospects, your waitlist                           | Ordinary marketing consent: they opted in, and they can opt out                           |
| **Patients — health-care operations** | Your own clients, about the care you provide them — a flu-shot drive, a recall reminder, a new service | Allowed without a signed marketing form; opt-out is always honored                        |
| **Patients — authorized marketing**   | True marketing to clients — a third-party product, anything you are paid to promote                    | Requires a signed marketing authorization on file for every recipient before you can send |

Pick the audience when you start a campaign, and it cannot be changed once the campaign has sent — it is part of the record of what you sent and why. Choosing **Patients — authorized marketing** without confirming the authorization blocks sending until you check the box confirming a signed form is on file for everyone in the audience.

Open tracking (whether the product records that someone opened your email) defaults **off** for both patient audiences and **on** for leads — because whether a patient opened an email is itself the kind of thing a health practice should not collect without thinking about it first. Click tracking always stays on for every audience, since a click is something someone chose to do.

No campaign is ever sent to someone who has unsubscribed or asked not to be contacted, regardless of which audience or segment you choose.

## Build a segment

<Steps>
  <Step title="Open Segments">
    Select the **Segments** tab, then start a new one.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Add conditions">
    Filter by field, stage, tag, source or owner. As you add and adjust conditions, a live recipient count updates beneath them — it recalculates as you type, and shows a loading shimmer rather than an old number while it does.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Save it">
    Name the segment and save it. It is now reusable across any campaign.
  </Step>
</Steps>

If a condition cannot be evaluated by the sending system, you are told so directly rather than being shown a narrower count than what would actually be emailed — a segment that cannot be fully applied will not silently send to more people than the count on screen.

## Set up the address campaigns send from

Campaigns send from an address you choose, called a **sending identity**. Set it up in **Settings → Marketing** before your first campaign — a campaign will not send without one.

<Steps>
  <Step title="Reuse an address you already have">
    Any ClinikMail address on a domain your practice owns is offered under **Use a ClinikMail address you already have**. One click turns it into a sending identity, keeping the name your patients already recognise.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Or create a new one">
    Pick a domain, a name in front of the `@` (like `news`), and the display name recipients see. Only domains your practice owns and has finished verifying are offered.
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Note>
  **Free ClinikMail addresses cannot send campaigns.** A free address is shared with other practices, so one practice's bulk mail could affect whether every other practice's appointment reminders reach the inbox. Campaigns therefore need a domain your own practice owns — connect one under **Settings → Mail**, and your free address keeps working for everyday one-to-one mail exactly as before.
</Note>

If a domain later stops being verified, any sending identity on it stops being available until it is verified again. You do not need to re-save anything — it returns on its own.

## Create and send a campaign

The composer is a checklist. Each section shows a green check once it is complete, or exactly what is missing — and the **Send** action only lights up once every row is green.

<Steps>
  <Step title="To — choose the audience">
    Pick a saved segment. The recipient count appears here too, and a campaign is blocked from sending if nobody in the segment can currently be emailed.
  </Step>

  <Step title="From — pick your sending address">
    Choose a sending identity for this practice. If the list is empty, set one up first — see [Set up the address campaigns send from](#set-up-the-address-campaigns-send-from).
  </Step>

  <Step title="Subject">
    Write a subject line, or turn on A/B testing (Essential plan and above) to try two or more subject lines against a portion of the audience before the rest goes out.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Content">
    Add blocks — heading, text, image, button, divider, spacer — or start from a template. A preview shows exactly what will send, on both desktop and mobile.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Schedule">
    Send now, or pick a date and time in the future.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Review and send">
    A review screen states plainly what is about to happen — who receives it, from which address, and roughly when it will finish — before you confirm.
  </Step>
</Steps>

Before **Send** unlocks, the checklist also runs a set of pre-send checks: an **Unsubscribe link** present in the email, a **Spam score**, that every **Link** in the email resolves and uses a secure address, that every **Merge tag** (like a first name) will actually fill in for the audience, a required **Test send** to your own address, a check of **Volume vs sending history** (a brand-new practice cannot blast its whole list on day one), and confirmation that **Automatic safety pause** is armed. Every row explains itself and tells you how to fix it if it is not green yet.

## Templates

**Starter templates** are ready to use and never count against your plan — duplicate one and edit it. Your own saved designs sit alongside them, with a running count like **3 of 5 saved**. At your plan's limit, saving offers to replace an existing template rather than leaving you stuck.

## Automations (Journeys)

A journey is a sequence that runs on its own once activated — an email, then a wait, then another email, optionally branching on what a contact does. From the **Journeys** tab you can see each one's live enrollment count, and **Activate** or pause it; a confirmation names exactly what activating it does before it starts. Someone who unsubscribes exits every journey they are in immediately, and a contact in several journeys at once still never receives more than the same overall sending limit applied to campaigns.

## Read your results

**Analytics**, and each campaign's own report, lead with **Opened (filtered)** and **Clicked (filtered)** — filtered out are opens caused by email apps automatically pre-loading images, and clicks from automated security scanners, neither of which reflect a real person. A **Show raw numbers** toggle reveals the unfiltered totals beside them, labeled honestly rather than presented as if they were the same thing. Reports also show unsubscribes, and — because the point of a campaign is what it leads to, not just who opened it — how many recipients went on to book an appointment.

## What each plan includes

|                         | Free  | Essential | Team      |      |
| ----------------------- | ----- | --------- | --------- | ---- |
| Sends per month         | 500   | 12,000    | 60,000    |      |
| Active automations      | 1     | 10        | Unlimited |      |
| Saved custom templates  | 2     | 15        | Unlimited |      |
| A/B subject testing     | —     | —         | ✓         | ✓    |
| Appointment attribution | Basic | Basic     | Full      | Full |

Contacts are never limited or charged for on any plan — your list is your client panel, and it should be free to grow. Unused sends roll into next month, up to your plan's own monthly amount, so a quiet month does not cost you the next one.

## Who can do this

| Action                                           | Who can do it by default                       | Governed by |
| ------------------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------- | ----------- |
| View campaigns and reports                       | Staff granted access                           | Permission  |
| Write and edit campaigns, templates and segments | Staff granted access                           | Permission  |
| Send a campaign                                  | Owner, manager, or staff explicitly granted it | Permission  |
| Turn an automation on or off                     | Owner, manager, or staff explicitly granted it | Permission  |

Writing a campaign and sending it are deliberately separate permissions — drafting is cheap and reversible, and firing a campaign at your whole client list is not, so the product does not conflate the two.

See [Staff permissions](/platform/team/permissions).

## Check it worked

* A sent campaign moves from **Scheduled**/**Sending** to **Sent** in the **Campaigns** list, on its own, without reloading the page.
* Its report starts filling in with delivered, opened and clicked figures shortly after.
* A test send you asked for arrives at your own address, rendered exactly as the real campaign will look.

## Common issues

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Send stays greyed out">
    Open the checklist — every red row names what is missing and how to fix it. **Send** never unlocks until all of them are green.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="My segment shows fewer people than I expected">
    The count only includes people who can currently be emailed under this audience's consent rules — someone who has unsubscribed or opted out is excluded from every count, everywhere.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="A campaign is Paused and I didn't pause it">
    An automatic safety pause tripped — usually a bounce or complaint rate above the safe threshold. The reason is shown on the campaign; review it before resuming.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="I can't send to patients about a paid product">
    That needs the **Patients — authorized marketing** audience, which requires confirming a signed authorization is on file for every recipient before it will send.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="New campaigns are refused for the month">
    You are at your plan's monthly send limit. Unused sends roll forward once, so check next month, or see [Change your plan](/platform/plans/change-plan).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## FAQ

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Will a campaign ever reach someone who unsubscribed?">
    No. The unsubscribe and do-not-contact rules are checked again at the moment of sending, not just when you build the segment — so someone who unsubscribes after you schedule a campaign still will not receive it. [What happens when you press Send](/practice/work/marketing-sending) walks through every check.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What's the difference between a campaign and Contacts' old Campaigns tab?">
    Marketing is the current, built-out campaign system — audience classes, the checklist, templates, journeys and full reporting. It is where new campaigns belong.

    Both now send the same way. **Send** on the Contacts Campaigns tab queues the campaign through Marketing's pipeline, so it gets the same consent checks, the same pacing and the same reporting. The **Test** button that used to sit beside it has been removed: it previewed a wider audience than the campaign would actually reach, which made it worse than no preview. Use the checklist's test send and preflight on the Marketing screen instead.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I edit the individual steps inside a journey?">
    Yes. Open the **Journeys** tab and choose **Edit** on a journey, or **New journey** to start one. You can add email, wait and exit steps, reorder them, and write each email in place. Pause a running journey before you change it — people are part-way through it, and moving the steps under them would move them too. See [Automated journeys](/practice/work/marketing-journeys).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Does raising my plan change what happens to contacts I already have?">
    No. Contacts are never limited by plan, on any tier. Plan only changes how many sends, templates and active automations you have available.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

<StillStuck />