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Campaigns are how Switchbord sends an approved WhatsApp template to many contacts at once — a seasonal offer, a winback message, a weekly digest. Every campaign pairs one approved template with an audience and a send schedule, then hands delivery off to the fan-out engine. This page is the overview. For the full audience-building, scheduling, and safety-mechanism deep-dive, see Broadcast Engine.

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Building a campaign

Pick an audience

Select recipients by tag, by a recent CSV import, or by combining filters (e.g. tag = vip AND region = IT).

Choose a template

Only approved templates are selectable. Map each template variable to a contact field so the message personalizes per recipient.

Preview the audience

Before sending, review a sample of actual recipients to confirm variable mapping is pulling the right data.

Schedule the send

Send immediately or schedule for a future date/time, in UTC or the recipient’s local time zone (requires contact time-zone data).

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Delivery and safety

Once launched, a campaign’s messages are queued and delivered through the same fan-out engine used by journeys and the transactional API. It respects your WhatsApp Business Account’s current messaging-tier rate limits automatically, so a large campaign won’t get your number throttled or flagged. Two safety mechanisms apply automatically to every campaign:
  • Deduplication — the same broadcast will not be sent to a contact twice within a 12-hour window, even if you accidentally launch it more than once.
  • Opt-out enforcement — contacts who’ve replied STOP (or a localized equivalent) to a previous marketing message are excluded from the audience automatically.

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Category and cost

Because campaigns almost always use MARKETING-category templates, they’re billed at Meta’s highest per-conversation rate. Getting the category right — and understanding when Meta might silently re-categorize a template — directly affects what a campaign costs. See Marketing templates for the rate ordering across categories.

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Monitoring a live campaign

Once a campaign is sending, the dashboard tracks delivery rate, read rate, click-through on buttons/links, and conversion against a goal you define. Settings → Usage rolls delivered-template spend and free service-window traffic up into per-campaign cost attribution across 7-day, 30-day, and month-to-date windows — see Meta Usage & Cost Monitor for how those estimates are built.

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Campaigns vs. Journeys

Campaigns are a one-shot, audience-wide send with a single template. If you need multi-step logic — wait, branch, react to a button click — that’s a Journey instead. Both draw from the same contact and template data, so segmenting an audience once with tags works for either.

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See also