How to send your first email campaign, start to finish

This is the click-by-click version. For how audiences are defined and how approval routing works, see "Campaigns and audiences: build, approve, and send safely." For the AI-drafted overview of sequences and campaigns together, see "AI sequences and campaigns." This article just walks you through the composer screen by screen.

1. 1
   Open Campaigns

   Go to Sales → Campaigns. If you have permission to create campaigns, you'll see a "New campaign" button.
2. 2
   Click New campaign

   A dialog opens. If your workspace has saved templates you're asked how to start — from scratch, or from a template. Starting from a template fills the audience, layout, and copy in for you; either way you name the campaign and keep going.
3. 3
   Name it and pick the type

   Give the campaign an internal name (this is just for your team — recipients never see it) and pick a message type: a service notice or a marketing message. The type you pick controls what compliance checks apply later.
4. 4
   Start building

   Click "Start building." Current creates a draft and opens the three-step composer: Who gets this email, Write the email, and Review.

Step one is "Who gets this email." Build your audience with filters the same way you would for a sequence — the recipient count updates live as you narrow or widen the filters, and a sample of matching contacts shows below it so you can sanity-check who's actually in there before you write a word of copy.

If this campaign is a price-increase notice, a "Vendor price increase" card appears on this step. Pick the affected service and enter the new price (flat dollar amount or a percentage bump) — Current personalizes the number for each recipient and can spin up a follow-up task per affected account automatically.

Step two is "Write the email." Fill in the subject line and a preview/preheader line, then build the body from stacked blocks: paragraph, heading, bullet list, and button (call-to-action). It's a plain-text body, not free-form rich text — this keeps every campaign readable and consistent, and it means a plain URL typed into a paragraph won't automatically become a clickable link. Use a Button block if you want a real link.

Don't want to start from a blank page? Click "Draft with AI," describe what the email should say, and click "Write draft" — it fills in the subject, preview text, and body blocks for you to edit.

Click any chip in the Personalize panel to drop a merge tag at your cursor. The always-available tags are:

• ＋{{first_name}}
• ＋{{last_name}}
• ＋{{company}}
• ＋{{account_manager}}
• ＋{{booking_link}}

You can add a fallback for when a field is blank, using a pipe: {{first_name|there}} shows "there" if the contact has no first name on file. If you picked the vendor price-increase option, five more tags become available for the price details ({{service}}, {{quantity}}, {{old_price}}, {{new_price}}, {{price_delta}}).

{{first_name|there}}

1. 1
   Send a test to yourself

   On the Review step, click "Send a test to me." Read it the way a partner would — check the subject line, the merge tags actually filled in correctly, and that the layout looks right. If you change the subject, body, message type, or sender afterward, Current flags the test as stale and asks you to send a fresh one before it'll let you send for real.
2. 2
   Run the pre-send checklist

   A completion ring on the Review step tracks whether you've: chosen a message type, written a subject, resolved an audience with at least one recipient, sent a test this session, and (for marketing sends) included the unsubscribe tag. Every box has to check before Send or Submit unlocks.
3. 3
   Submit for approval

   If you're not a sales leader, click "Submit for approval." Sales leadership reviews it before anything goes out — though a send to 25 recipients or fewer can go immediately once approved, without a separate wait.
4. 4
   What the approver sees

   Leadership sees your campaign in an Approvals tab with a count badge. From there they can Review it, send it back to you with changes requested, or Approve it. Inside the composer itself, a leader instead sees a single "Approve & send" button.

When a leader clicks "Approve & send," Current confirms the recipient count once more ("Send to N recipients? This can't be undone.") before it goes. If you approve during weekend quiet hours (Friday 5pm to Monday 8am Eastern), it offers to schedule for Monday morning instead — or you can override and send immediately.

Once it's sent, the campaign report shows delivered rate, open rate, click rate, and click-to-open rate at the top, an engagement funnel from sent through delivered, opened, and clicked, a 72-hour chart of when opens and clicks happened, and a per-link click breakdown. Bounces and spam complaints are called out separately, and a deliverability warning appears automatically if your bounce rate climbs over 2% or you get a complaint. Current doesn't track reply counts on campaigns — that's a sequence-only metric, because campaigns are one-way broadcasts by design.

You can also filter the recipient list itself by what happened to each person — opened but didn't click, clicked, delivered but not opened, bounced, complained, and so on — which is the fastest way to find who to follow up with by hand.