Campaigns in Campaign Composer lets you send personalized, targeted, media-rich messages to your subscribers to let them know about upcoming events, new product launches, special offer promotions, and more.
How you should create and send campaigns
We recommend that you create a new campaign for each message sequence that shares a marketing goal, like driving event signups, engagement for a holiday sale, or views for brand announcements. This will improve your reporting, and make it easier to understand the ROI of each of your campaigns.
Send campaigns with Campaign Composer
Campaigns can include a single text or email message, or they can include multiple text messages or email messages. Each message within an individual campaign can have its own copy, send time + date, and audience. Campaigns end when the final (or only) message is sent to subscribers. Once campaigns end, you can review performance data for the campaign as a whole and for each sent message.
Regardless of how many or what kind of campaign messages you send with Campaign Composer, the basic flow is the same:
- Create a new campaign and select the first message type.
- Set details and design your first message, including:
- Campaign name: By default, each campaign you create includes the date. Customizing each campaign name will make it easier to report on later.
- Message name: Each message in a campaign has a unique name. Customizing each will make it easier to report on message performance later.
- Audience: Set which subscribers will be sent your message by choosing one or more subscriber segments. Learn more about audience targeting.
- When to send: The date and time to send your message. Learn more about scheduling messages. You can choose between the time of your brand’s HQ (set in Company Settings) or based on the time zone of each message recipient. Learn more about using subscriber’s local time scheduling.
- Message: The copy, media, offers, and shortlink you want to include in your message. Learn more about designing text messages, adding personalizations, designing email messages, and A/B test messages.
- If you'd like to send more than one message for your campaign, click Add message and add additional text, email, or A/B test messages.
Subsequent messages can use retargeting options. - Review and test each message in your campaign.
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Preview messages as a recipient would see them. Validate the appearance and content of your messages including dynamic content. You can also preview how your unsubscribe messages appears for AT&T subscribers.
- When everything looks good, schedule your campaign. Once you click Schedule campaign, each message will automatically send at the time you designated.
- After your campaign sends, review its performance from the Campaigns list page by filtering for Delivered campaigns or by running a Campaign Aggregate Performance report.
Audiences for your campaigns
In Attentive, you build audiences for your campaigns by selecting subscriber segments. Segments are groupings of text or email subscribers, and can be based on their location, attributes like their age, how (or if) they’ve interacted with your store, and more. Each message in your campaign can have a different audience, use the same audience, or use retargeting options to send messages only to subscribers who didn’t interact with an earlier message.
See Select and target audiences for campaigns to learn more.
Campaign text message segments
When you send campaigns that include text messages with Attentive, each text message is composed of one or more individual SMS message segments. This is an important distinction as you are billed based on the number of message segments you send, which may vary from the number of messages received by your subscribers. A message segment can be up to 160 characters long, and includes your automatically prepended brand name. If you include media like an image, GIF, or video, then one of your message segments changes to an MMS message.
When you write a text message in Campaign Composer, you can see:
- The estimated remaining characters: How many characters remain before your message segment count increases by one.
- Message segments: The total number of message segments, as well as the message type, that will be sent to subscribers. Messages will either be 1 or more SMS (text only), 1 MMS (media with up to 160 characters of text), or 1 MMS + 1 or more SMS.
See How message character counts are calculated with Campaign Composer to learn more.
Campaign vs. campaign message names
You can assign names to campaigns as well as individual messages within campaigns. By default, campaigns are named Campaign Sequence + date of creation, and each message is named Message + date of creation + current time.
Note: You should take the time to give each of your campaigns – and each message within your campaigns – a unique, descriptive name. Doing so will make reporting on aggregate campaign and individual message performance easier. Also, note that if you send a campaign that includes only a single message, that message is shown on the Campaigns list page by the name of the message, not the campaign name.
You can:
A: Rename campaigns: Click the Pencil icon at the top of the page
B: Rename campaign messages: Click and edit the Message name field
When you build campaigns, you should give both your campaigns as well as each message within a campaign a unique name. This will make it easier to report on campaigns later, as well as find and reference successful campaigns.
As you build campaigns, you see:
A: The campaign name: Valentine’s Day campaign 2025
B: Message names: The four individual messages that are included in the Valentine’s Day campaign 2025:
When you review the Campaigns list page, you can also see your campaigns as well as each message within a campaign along with the performance of each:
A: The campaign name: Valentine’s Day campaign 2025
B: The name of each message in the campaign: Pre-sale heads up, Five day reminder text, Five day reminder email, and Last day for overnight shipping text
Campaigns that include A/B tests work similarly:
A: The campaign name: Memorial Day 2023 Sale campaign
B: The name of the A/B test message: Includes both the A/B test message name, with the name of each test message variation nested within