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Send a bulk campaign with Quick Send

Use Quick Send to send one message to many recipients at once, each in their own private one-to-one conversation.

Written By EmuChat

Last updated About 4 hours ago

Use Quick Campaign to send one message to many recipients at once. Each recipient gets it in their own one-to-one conversation, so they cannot see who else received it. Replies come back to the inbox you sent from.

You need send permission on the inbox and an active subscription. Without a subscription, Quick Campaign prompts you to get a plan instead of showing the compose form.

Send a campaign

Open Campaigns (the megaphone icon) from the main sidebar. It lists your past campaigns. Click New campaign to open Quick Campaign and build a new one.

  1. Under Send from, choose an inbox you can send on.

  2. Add Recipients: any mix of contacts, contact lists, and pasted phone numbers.

  3. Optionally, enter a Campaign name. If you leave it blank, emu.chat names it with the date and time.

  4. Write your Message. Use Templates to insert a saved template, Merge fields to personalise it, and Insert emoji for emoji. Sender merge fields fill in with the name of the person who created the campaign.

  5. Send the campaign now, or turn on Schedule for later and pick a time in the future.

A campaign needs a message body, an attachment, or both.

To finish a text campaign later, choose Save as draft (attachments are not saved). Find it under Drafts on the Campaigns page.

Note: If emu.chat has turned on RCS for your inbox, switch from Text to Card to send a card, or pick a card template. Recipients who cannot receive RCS get SMS or MMS instead.

Warning: Contact merge fields come out blank for pasted numbers, because there is no contact record behind them: Hi {{first_name}}, welcome! arrives as Hi , welcome!. To personalise, add recipients as saved contacts or through a list. Sender merge fields still fill in.

Attach files

Use Attach a file in the message box, or drag files onto it. You can attach files from any inbox.

Attachments send separately. Each image sends as its own MMS, with your text in the first one. Files that cannot send as media, such as videos and some documents, send together as one SMS with download links. If the number cannot send media at all, every attachment goes that way.

The message box shows how many messages each recipient gets, for example 3 MMS + 1 SMS for three photos and a video. Hover over it for the breakdown. From an RCS inbox, photos, videos, and PDFs send as RCS and your text as its own message.

  • Each attachment can be up to 20 MB.

  • Some file types are blocked for safety.

Who actually receives your campaign

emu.chat removes these recipients before sending, so fewer messages may go out than the number of people you added:

  • Anyone who has opted out. See Opt-outs and STOP keywords: staying compliant. An opted-out pasted number shows as skipped in the report.

  • Contacts with no phone number.

  • Duplicates. Each phone number gets one message, even if it appears as a contact, in a list, and as a pasted number.

  • Pasted numbers that are not valid phone numbers.

  • Contact lists you cannot use. Only shared lists and lists you own count.

If no recipients are left, the campaign is rejected. To organise the people you send to, see Organising contacts with tags and lists.

Warnings you might see

Quick Campaign warns you before sending when:

  • Large send. The campaign goes to more than 20 recipients. The warning shows the recipient count and reminds you that text messages are charged per part and picture messages per message.

  • Merge fields with pasted numbers. Those merge fields arrive blank. Remove the pasted numbers, or add them as contacts, before you send.

To prevent a double-send, an identical campaign submitted again within 60 seconds is blocked.

Credits and cost

A campaign costs the same as sending each recipient a message. Text messages are charged per part, so a two-part message to 100 people costs 200 parts. Picture messages (MMS) are charged per message. For how parts are counted, see How SMS parts and message billing work.

The footer shows the total number of messages the campaign will produce. If you added a contact list, or merge fields make the length uncertain, the total is a maximum, starting with Up to.

Before queuing the campaign, emu.chat checks your credit balance covers the estimated cost. If it doesn't, you see an error, nothing is sent, and no campaign is created. Top up and try again. See Buying credits and setting up auto top-up.

What happens after you send

If you sent the campaign now, you land on its report page, which refreshes automatically as messages go out. If you scheduled it, you return to the campaigns list.

What happens in your inbox

Each campaign message appears in your existing conversation with that number in that inbox, or a new one if there isn't one. Replies arrive in those conversations as usual; there is no separate campaign inbox.

Tip: Sending a campaign to a recipient with an archived conversation reopens it.

Read the campaign report

Open a campaign from the Campaigns list to see its report. The top shows Recipients, Delivered, SMS parts, and Failed.

Below that, recipients are broken down by status (delivered, sent, queued, skipped, failed), with the send date, sending inbox, and Opt-outs: the number of people in the audience on your opt-out list.

A searchable table lists every message with its status, parts, and date. To understand a message status, see Why did my message fail? (message statuses explained).

The campaign itself moves through Draft, Scheduled, Queued, Sending, Sent, Failed, and Cancelled. To stop a scheduled campaign before it sends, open it and choose Cancel campaign.

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