Campaigns
Common questions about creating, running, scheduling, and managing campaigns.
What Is the Difference Between SMS and Email Campaigns?
SMS campaigns send text messages via Twilio. Email campaigns send rich HTML emails via SendGrid. Each campaign uses a single channel; you cannot mix SMS and email recipients in the same campaign. See Campaigns Overview for more detail.
What Is a Campaign Run?
A campaign defines who you're messaging and what you're sending; a run is a single execution of it. Messages belong to a run, so a campaign can be sent many times — each as a separate run with its own messages and status. See Campaign Runs.
Can I Run Two Campaigns at the Same Time?
Yes. Any number of runs can send in parallel, with no per-campaign or per-channel limit — your run is never blocked waiting for another one to finish. This includes two runs of the same campaign. Where runs share a sender they share that sender's throughput between them. See Concurrency and Throughput.
Can I Send the Same Campaign Repeatedly?
Yes. Create a new run each time, or set a Repeat schedule so runs are created and started automatically. You can also duplicate a past run to reuse its exact template and values.
How Do I Schedule a Campaign?
Choose a Repeat schedule when creating or editing the campaign to run it automatically (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly), or start an individual run later by picking a future date and time. See Scheduling and Starting a Run.
What Sender Do My SMS Messages Send From?
That depends on the organisation's sender strategy: under Sender Pool, Twilio picks a sender automatically; under Sender Selection, the campaigner chooses a specific approved sender for the campaign. Only an Org Admin can change the strategy or the list of approved senders.
Why Did My Run Show "Setup Failed"?
A run shows Setup Failed when it could not be set up or could not begin sending. Either its messages failed to create, or — under Sender Selection — its sender was no longer available when sending was due to begin. In the second case an email is also sent to the campaign owner. See Unavailable senders.
Can I Change the Delivery Channel After Creating a Campaign?
No. The delivery channel (SMS or Email) is fixed at campaign creation and cannot be changed. If you need a different channel, create a new campaign.
How Do I Stop a Run That Is In Progress?
Open the run and click Stop in the action menu, then confirm. Stopping a run cancels any queued (unsent) messages. Messages that have already been sent or are currently sending are not affected. A run that is Scheduled or Warming Up can be cancelled instead, which reverts it to Ready to Run without deleting it or sending anything.
Can I Edit a Campaign While It Is Sending?
Yes. Editing is not blocked by an active run. Every run sends from its own snapshot of the campaign, taken when the run was created, so your changes cannot reach a run that is already underway — they apply to runs created after the edit. See Editing a Campaign.
Deleting a campaign is the exception — that is blocked while a run is in progress. See the next question.
Can I Delete a Campaign?
Yes, but not while it has a Run In Progress. A campaign with an active run cannot be deleted; the run must finish or be stopped first, after which the campaign returns to Ready to Run and the Delete action becomes available.
Deleting a campaign then removes it along with its runs and their message history.
Deleting takes the campaign's entire run history with it. Export anything you need from a run's messages before you delete the campaign — see Exporting Data.
An edit cannot affect a run that is already sending, because the run works from its own snapshot of the campaign. Deletion has no such protection — it removes the campaign the sending run belongs to, along with the run itself. See What You Can Do with Campaigns.
What Is the Maximum Number of Contacts I Can Include?
Each campaign supports up to 300,000 contacts per contact file (CSV, JSON, or XML), with a maximum file size of 50 MB — whichever limit you hit first applies.
As a rough guide for what 50 MB looks like in practice:
- ~100,000 rows with around 10 columns of typical data (name, phone/email, a handful of personalisation variables)
- ~300,000 rows with very lean data (just a destination column and 1–2 short variables)
The exact number depends on the length of your column values and how many columns you include — longer variable strings push the file size up faster than extra rows do.