Email campaigns let you send tracked marketing email — newsletters, announcements, promotions — to your project's contacts and to lists you import. Campaigns are completely separate from the transactional email Chatonio already sends for you (channel replies, magic links, ticket notifications): they use their own dedicated sending domain, their own suppression list and their own pay-per-email billing. Unsubscribing from marketing never stops transactional mail, and campaign emails don't count against your plan's monthly email quota.
Email campaigns are available on all paid plans (Advanced, Pro and Ultimate). You'll find them under Admin → Projects → [Your Project] → Email campaigns, with four tabs: Campaigns, Audiences, Sending domains and Suppression.
Step 1 — Verify a marketing sending domain
- Open Sending domains, enter a dedicated subdomain such as news.yourdomain.com or mail.yourdomain.com — never your root domain — and click Add domain.
- The page lists the exact DNS records to add: an ownership record plus the sending (DKIM/SPF) records, each with a copy button. Add them at your DNS provider.
- Click Verify. Propagation can take a few minutes. Once verified, the domain becomes selectable as the from-address in the composer, and open/click tracking is enabled automatically.
A domain already used for transactional email can't be reused — the dedicated subdomain keeps marketing sender reputation separate from the operational mail your business depends on.
Step 2 — Get your sender identity approved
At the top of Sending domains, fill in the Sender identity card: the From name recipients will see, and your company's real physical postal address (bulk-email laws require one). Click Submit for review — the Chatonio team reviews the identity, and campaigns can't be sent until it's approved. While it's pending you can still compose drafts and send test emails to yourself; any later edit goes back for re-review.
Once approved, every campaign — including Custom HTML ones — automatically gets a footer with an unsubscribe link and your postal address. You never have to add those yourself.
Composing a campaign
On the Campaigns tab, click New campaign. Pick the from-address (your verified marketing domain), a subject line and optional preview text, then write the body in the rich editor — or switch to Custom HTML to edit the whole email yourself. Load the default design gives you an editable starting layout, and Templates offers preset designs plus your own saved ones. Uploaded images are optimized automatically so they render in every major email client.
Personalization
- Merge tags insert per-recipient data: {{first_name|there}} renders the recipient's first name, or "there" as a fallback. Extra columns from a CSV import become custom merge tags too.
- Phrase rotation (spintax): [[Hello|Hi|Good day]] gives each recipient a random variant — helpful for deliverability.
- AI assist can suggest subject lines, draft the body from a short brief, or add spintax variants for you.
Preview and test
Preview renders the email with sample data — shuffle to see other spintax variants — including the plain-text version shown when a mail client strips HTML (auto-generated, or write your own). Send test delivers a real copy to your own inbox.
Audiences
A campaign's audience can combine:
- Existing contacts — everyone with an email address who has messaged your channels, optionally filtered by recent activity and language.
- Imported lists — create lists on the Audiences tab, add members by hand or use Import CSV (first row = column headers, one column must hold the email; other columns become merge fields).
Recipients are de-duplicated by email, and suppressed addresses are skipped automatically. The composer shows a live recipient count and estimated cost.
Sending, scheduling and stats
- Send now asks for confirmation with the recipient count, estimated cost and current project balance.
- Schedule sets a future send time — the campaign fires automatically.
- While sending you can Pause, Resume or Cancel. If the project balance runs out mid-send, the campaign pauses by itself — top up and click Resume to send the remainder.
- A sent campaign can't be edited — use Duplicate / re-send to clone it into a fresh draft for a new audience.
The campaign page tracks delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, unsubscribed and complaints in real time, with delivery, open and click rates and the final cost.
Unsubscribes and the suppression list
Every campaign email carries a one-click unsubscribe. Unsubscribes, hard bounces and spam complaints are added to your project's suppression list automatically and are never emailed again; you can also add or remove addresses by hand on the Suppression tab. The suppression list only affects marketing — transactional email keeps delivering.
Consent matters: only email people who agreed to hear from you. Cold, purchased or scraped lists violate anti-spam laws and our terms of service.
Pricing
Campaigns are pay-as-you-go: each sent email is charged a small flat fee from your project balance — the same balance that funds AI usage. The exact rate is shown in the composer's cost estimate before you send, and campaign emails never consume your plan's monthly email quota. See Understanding plans and billing for how to top up.