Campaigns

A campaign is a bulk send of an approved template to a list of contacts. This guide walks through running one end-to-end — from CSV upload to interpreting the delivery report.

Before you start

You need:

• A connected WhatsApp number (WhatsApp Setup)
• At least one approved template (Templates)
• A list of phone numbers in international format (+91…, +1…, etc.)
• The recipients' opt-in. This is non-negotiable — sending to people who didn't opt in burns your sender reputation and risks getting your number suspended.

Step 1 — Get your contacts in

Go to Contacts → Import & Export and click Import Contacts. Upload a CSV or Excel file, map your file's columns to Lynkist fields, review the preview, and confirm. Full detail is in the Contacts guide.

CSV format

phone,first_name,last_name,city,order_id
+919876543210,Riya,Sharma,Mumbai,ORD-1042
+447700900456,Tom,Hodge,London,ORD-1043

• The phone column is mandatory and must be in international format. Rows with missing or malformed numbers are skipped — the import summary tells you how many and why.
• Columns beyond the built-in fields map onto custom fields, which you create first under Contacts → Custom Fields. Those are what you use as template variables later.

Step 2 — Organise who you'll send to

Lynkist targets campaigns with groups and sources, both of which you manage under Contacts:

• Groups (Contacts → Groups) are named buckets you put contacts in — "Newsletter", "VIP customers", "Trial signups". A contact can be in several at once.
• Sources (Contacts → Sources) record where a contact came from — a website form, a walk-in, a referral, a QR campaign. QR campaigns create their source automatically.

Both are static membership: a contact is in a group because it was put there, by you, by an import, or by a QR scan. Set them up before you import so contacts land classified.

Step 3 — Build the campaign

Go to Campaigns → New campaign. The wizard has five steps:

1. Details — an internal name, an optional description, and an optional schedule. Recipients never see the name.
2. Template — pick one of your approved templates. The list is filtered to approved ones, because nothing else can be broadcast.
3. Variables — one field per value the template declares. Map each to a contact field, or type a fixed value that goes to everyone.
4. Recipients — choose any combination of groups, sources, and individual contacts via the search box. The step warns you about contacts auto-created from inbound messages (the Unknown group), which usually have a phone number and nothing else — so a template with a {{name}} variable will render badly for them.
5. Review & send — an audience summary and a server-side pre-send check.

Preview before you send

Step 5 runs a real pre-send check against the audience you picked, and the campaign detail page has a Send test message action that delivers the rendered template to a number you choose. Use it. Catch a wrong variable mapping there, not after 10,000 messages have shipped.

Step 4 — Schedule or send

Two options:

• Send now — kick off immediately.
• Schedule — set a date and time in step 1. It is interpreted in your effective timezone (your personal setting, falling back to the workspace's), so check that first — see Team & Settings.

Once a campaign is running you can pause, resume or stop it from the detail page. Stopping is permanent; pausing is not.

Step 5 — Monitor delivery

Open the campaign detail page. The KPI row shows Total recipients, Sent (of the total), Delivered (with a rate against sent), and Read (with a rate against delivered). Each recipient carries a status:

The recipients table also flags which contacts have replied. Counts settle within a few minutes for sends under 10,000; Refresh metrics recomputes them on demand.

Step 6 — Read the results

• Delivery rate — should be 95%+ for a healthy list. Lower means many bad numbers; clean the list before next time.
• Read rate — a content and timing signal, not a technical one.
• Errors — the campaign has a dedicated errors panel that groups failures by WhatsApp error code and lets you drill into the affected recipients. This is the fastest way to tell a bad list from a bad template.

Common pitfalls

What's not covered (yet)

• Rule-based dynamic segments — audiences are groups, sources and hand-picked contacts today.
• Recurring campaigns — every campaign is a one-off; recurring sends are on the roadmap.
• A/B testing — also on the roadmap.
• Send at the recipient's local time — scheduling is a single moment in your workspace timezone, not staggered per recipient.
• Per-message CSV export — the recipients table and the errors drill-down are on-screen only.
• Multi-channel campaigns — WhatsApp + SMS fallback is in design.

Next steps