Creating and sending a campaign

Email Marketing isn't turned on for every store — if you don't see a Marketing tab in your admin nav, contact help@vmxllc.com to have it enabled. See Email Marketing for setup.

The campaign checklist

Click New campaign on the Campaigns list (or open an existing draft) and you get a checklist with four rows — To, Subject, Content, and Send — with a progress line at the top ("2 of 4 ready."). The Send row stays locked ("Unlocks once the steps above are done.") until the first three are complete.

To — pick a list under Send to. People who unsubscribed, bounced, or have no consent on file are excluded automatically — the count shown is who will actually receive it. See Lists.
Subject — the Subject line, the Preview text (the grey line inboxes show next to the subject), and a From name and Reply-to for this specific campaign.
Content — the email itself. Open editor takes you to a full-screen editor; Send myself a test is the required test send (below).
Send — Send now, or pick a date and time and Schedule….

The campaign name at the top ("Untitled campaign" until you type one) is just for you; recipients never see it.

Your work saves automatically as you type — there's no separate "Save" button, and nothing is lost if you navigate away and come back. If a save can't reach the server, VMX keeps your work and keeps retrying, with a warning that reads "Not saved yet. We'll keep trying — please don't close this page." until it lands.

Writing the email in the full-screen editor

Click Open editor in the Content row and the editor takes over the whole screen. Your email is in the middle at real inbox width; the panel on the left (Add to your email) holds the blocks you can add, and becomes the settings panel for whichever block you click. Desktop and Mobile at the top switch the width you're editing at, Preview shows the finished email exactly as it will send, and Done (or ← Back to campaign) returns you to the checklist.

Changes in the editor save as you type, the same as the checklist. The header and footer aren't editable here — they come from the Branding page. For how the blocks, formatting, and {{first_name}} personalisation work, see Templates — the block editor; campaigns and templates use the same editor.

Tip

The Preview (and the "What was sent" panel on a campaign report) is rendered by the exact same code that sends the real email — so what you see really is what recipients get, not an approximation.

Starting from a template

A template is a reusable layout. In the Content row, pick one under Start from a template and its content copies into your campaign — you'll be asked to confirm first, because it replaces anything already written here. From that point on, your edits stay in the campaign only: changing a template later never changes any campaign already built from it, and sending a campaign never changes the template it started from.

You can also go the other way: Save as template (at the top of the campaign) saves the campaign's layout as a new template, and you manage saved templates under the Templates tab. See Templates.

Cost and timing

Once you pick a list, the To row shows who this goes to and what it costs. If the same list was emailed within the last week, you'll also see a warning — sending to the same people again too soon is the fastest way to get marked as spam, so it's worth spacing things out.

Sending yourself a test

Before Send now or Schedule… will unlock, you need to send yourself a test copy and actually see it land in a real inbox. Until then, the Content row shows "Send yourself a test first — the Send button unlocks once you have seen it in a real inbox." If you change the email afterward — even a word — the row switches to "You have changed the email since your last test. Send another test to unlock sending." and you'll need another test. (A campaign that is an unchanged copy of a template you've already tested counts as tested.)

Click Send myself a test and the test goes to your own email address on file (shown in the Test goes to field — it's only editable if your employee record has no email address). The test says [TEST] in the subject, uses a sample name in place of a real customer's, and its unsubscribe link does nothing — so it's safe to click around in.

On usage-billed accounts, a test is billed as one email, at the same rate as a campaign — it doesn't count toward your recipient list. If you're out of credits, the test won't go out and you'll be told to add credits first. There's also a limit of 10 test sends per person per hour.

Reviewing and sending

Clicking Send now or Schedule… opens a final review — "Ready to send?" — showing:

The subject line and the list it's Going to
People — the exact recipient count, re-checked at that moment
Cost — the estimated charge
For a scheduled send, When — the date and time, in your store's time zone
Not included: — a breakdown of anyone excluded and why

The confirm button itself repeats the number and the cost — "Send to 4,012 people — about $12.00" — so the count is the last thing you read before anything goes out. There's no separate typed confirmation, just this final review and a click.

Tip

Scheduled emails go out on the hour. If you pick a time with minutes in it, it moves to the next hour — 2:15pm becomes 3:00pm — so the time you see on the campaign is always the time it actually goes.

A scheduled campaign can be taken back off the calendar with Unschedule — it returns to an editable draft and nothing sends. Editing the content of a scheduled campaign does the same thing automatically: the content you scheduled is no longer the content you tested, so you'll see "Editing this un-scheduled it — schedule it again when you're done."

Tip

If you schedule a campaign for later and your list grows a lot in the meantime — more than a handful of people beyond what you confirmed — VMX holds the send and asks you to confirm the new, bigger number before it goes out. This protects you from being charged for more recipients than you agreed to when you scheduled it. Just reopen the campaign, review the new count, and send again.

Watching it go out

After you send, you land back on the campaigns list, where the campaign shows Sending now with a running count and a progress bar in the Sent column — 326 / 4,012, then 1,140 / 4,012, and so on.

It updates on its own; there's no need to refresh. A big list goes out in batches, so expect the number to move in steps rather than climb smoothly. When it finishes, the page refreshes itself and the campaign shows Sent with its final count, cost, and a Results link.

You can safely close the page and come back later — the sending doesn't depend on your browser staying open. A campaign that's mid-send can be stopped with Stop on the campaigns list; emails already sent can't be recalled, but nothing further goes out, and stopping is permanent.

If a campaign needs attention

Once sending starts, you might see a campaign marked Held, Paused, or Stopped instead of "Sent." A few different things can cause this:

Held — "Not enough credits to finish." The campaign picks back up automatically the moment more credits are added.
Held — "The marketing terms were updated." Sending resumes automatically once someone re-accepts them.
Paused — "Something went wrong partway through." VMX retries on its own, and the campaign picks up where it left off.
Stopped — "This needs a look before it can go out." Something about the send needs attention before it can continue — contact help@vmxllc.com if it isn't obvious what.
Cancelled — someone stopped it on purpose. Anything not already sent was never sent.

In every case, nothing already sent is ever re-sent, and nothing is charged twice — a batch is only ever attempted once. In the rare case a send is interrupted partway through in a way that leaves the outcome unclear, VMX errs on the side of not re-sending rather than risking someone getting the same email twice.

Duplicating a campaign

Once a campaign has started sending, it can no longer be edited — that's the permanent record of what actually went out. You'll see: "This campaign has already started sending, so it can't be changed." To send something similar again, use Duplicate from the campaigns list (or Duplicate this campaign on its results page) to start a fresh draft with the same content.

A draft that never sent can be removed entirely with Discard on the campaigns list — it hasn't gone to anyone, so nothing is kept.