Sending a Campaign
Choosing who to text
Customer buckets are the audience for every campaign, and who is actually included is decided at send time.
Last updated September 2, 2026
Every campaign sends to one customer bucket — the same buckets Marketing Automations uses. Build them under Customer Buckets in the SMS menu, or reuse ones you already have.
The bucket is not the final list
A bucket of 4,000 people does not mean 4,000 texts. When the campaign runs, people are dropped for any of these reasons:
- No mobile number on their contact record.
- Explicitly opted out of SMS.
- Their number is on your blocked list.
- For a tribe campaign, they are not a member of that tribe.
- They share a mobile number with somebody else in the list — only one message is sent.
You cannot preview the real audience
THE RECIPIENT COUNT IS ZERO UNTIL YOU SEND
There is no pre-send preview of exactly who will receive the message — the list is built at the moment the campaign runs. The bucket's people count is the only number you get beforehand, and it is always higher than reality. Budget on the bucket count and expect to send fewer.
Duplicate numbers
Two contacts sharing a mobile — a couple, or a business and its owner — get one message between them, not two. That is usually right, but the merge fields use whichever contact record is older, so the greeting may name the other person.
Build the bucket for the message
A TEXT IS AN INTERRUPTION
Because you pay per message and every recipient is interrupted, a tight bucket beats a big one. "Customers of this tribe who bought in the last year" outperforms "everybody" on both cost and results.