Send your first campaign

Navigate to Campaigns

Log in to your client dashboard at /dashboard. In the left sidebar, click Campaigns. This is your campaign list — it shows all sent, scheduled, and draft campaigns along with their status and key stats.

Click New Campaign in the top-right corner to open the campaign builder.

Choose a list or segment

The first step in the campaign builder is selecting your audience. You can send to:

• A full list: Every active subscriber in a list receives the campaign. Unsubscribed and bounced addresses are excluded automatically.
• A segment: A filtered subset of a list based on conditions like tags, engagement, or custom field values. Build segments under Subscribers → Segments.
• Multiple lists: Select more than one list. Mally deduplicates by email address so no subscriber gets the campaign twice.

The audience selector shows the estimated recipient count based on your selection. This count excludes unsubscribes, hard bounces, and globally suppressed addresses.

Write subject, preview text, and body

On the content step, fill in:

• Subject line: The headline in the inbox. Keep it under 60 characters for mobile. Avoid all-caps and excessive punctuation. The AI subject scorer gives you a grade and suggestions — click the sparkle icon next to the field.
• Preview text: The grey snippet shown after the subject in most email clients. If left blank, the first line of your email body is used instead. Write 40–90 characters of compelling copy here.
• From name / From email: Defaults to the sender identity configured in settings. You can override per-campaign if needed.

For the body, you have two options:

• Visual builder: Drag-and-drop blocks — text, image, button, divider, spacer. Suitable for styled newsletters and promotional emails.
• HTML editor: Paste or write raw HTML. Suitable for custom-coded templates, transactional-style emails, or when you import from a template library.

Use personalisation tags like {{first_name}} in both the subject and body. If a subscriber does not have that field set, you can define a fallback: {{first_name | "there"}}.

Schedule or send now

On the final step, choose between:

• Send now: The campaign is queued immediately and dispatched within seconds. Suitable for time-sensitive sends.
• Schedule: Pick a date and time (in the client's configured timezone). Mally will dispatch the campaign at that moment. You can reschedule or cancel up until the send time.

Before confirming, the builder shows a final summary: recipient count, subject, from address, and send time. Review this carefully — once a campaign is sent, it cannot be recalled.

What happens when you send

When you click Send now (or the scheduled time arrives), Mally creates a send job and pushes it to a Celery task queue. The queue workers:

1. 1Resolve the subscriber list — filtering suppressions, unsubscribes, and bounces
2. 2Render the HTML body for each recipient, substituting personalisation tokens
3. 3Inject the unsubscribe header and footer link
4. 4Submit each message to AWS SES over SMTP
5. 5Record the send event in the campaign analytics database

Large lists are processed in batches to avoid overloading the SMTP connection. A list of 50,000 subscribers typically completes within a few minutes.

Checking open and click stats

Go to Campaigns → [your campaign] → Analytics. You will see:

• Sent: Total messages submitted to SES.
• Delivered: Confirmed received by the recipient mail server (based on SES delivery notifications).
• Opens: Tracked via a 1px tracking pixel in the email. Note: Apple Mail Privacy Protection causes inflated open rates for Apple Mail users.
• Clicks: Links in your email are rewritten to route through Mally's click tracker before redirecting to the destination.
• Unsubscribes: Subscribers who clicked the unsubscribe link. They are moved to the suppression list immediately.
• Bounces: Hard bounces (permanent failures) and soft bounces (temporary failures like a full mailbox).

The Activity feed tab shows a real-time log of individual opens and clicks with timestamps. Use the Link performance tab to see which links in your email drove the most clicks.