Campaigns

Triton supports not only transactional mailing but also newsletters (bulk emails). The Campaign is a tool for sending newsletters.

Each campaign must have single Template and single List (you should take care of having them before campaign creation).

Campaign fields are following:

  • Name
    May be any string (spaces are allowed). Used just for identifying.
  • Template
    The template that will be used for emails in given campaign.
  • List
    The list of recipients. Learn more about lists.
  • Schedule at
    Date and time (server time used) when campaign should start.
  • Email transport
    Which transport should be used for given campaign.
  • Subject
    Triton supports three ways of generating email subject:
    • static (default)
      Triton will use same subject-template for all recipients.
    • sequental
      Triton will determine which subject was used for given recipient last time and use next one (round-robin distribution). Useful to avoid email chaining by subject (Hello Gmail :)).
    • random
      Triton will use random subject for each recipient.

Note

All types of subjects still are Blade templates, therefore you can use any valid blade or php code within a subject.

  • Description

    Just optional field for easy management.

  • Custom Headers

    This section allows you to add custom HTTP-headers. May be useful for tuning your emails (e.g. List-Unsubscribe).

  • Custom variables

    The section allows you to add own variables into template rendering context (Learn more). For example you may want to add a variable called utm_common with value like “utm_campaign=camp55&utm_source=email&utm_medium=newsletter”. Then you are able to use that variable right in template.

    For example:

    <a href="http://mysite.com/example?utm_content=ad7&"{{ $utm_common }}>Click me ASAP</a>

    In this example we can add some common params to our links. Further, if we consider to change the value of $utm_common we will be able to modify it from single place.

    You can use this tool on your own case, just find some repeatable data and use it as variable.

  • Tracking category

    Specifies the category that will capture sendings and openings.

  • Group

    Allows to group things together for easy searching. Learn more about grouping.

How campaigns works

Campaign may be created or imported from external file (only special .triton files are supported learn more). After campaign addition you will see it on the list. Newly added campaign will have an Idle state. By the way, possible campaign states are following:

  • Idle
    Nothing occurs, because it’s not time yet.
  • Pending
    Campaign is ready to start and is pending for worker.
  • Paused
    Campaign is paused by user.
  • Running
    Campaign is running.
  • Finished
    Campaign is finished.

Campaign may be started by schedule or immediately. You can run, pause or stop campaign any time you want. Running a campaign may take up to one minute. Triton uses two phase sending flow. On the first phase campaign is getting enqueued (Triton generates a job for each recipient). On the second phase workers are pulling jobs from queue and sending emails to recipients. Both processes may proceed in parallel.

You can monitor campaign enqueing and sending progress, just hover cursor to blue label near state badge and you will see four metrics: Enqueued, Sent, Skipped and Plan. Also you will see a progress bar.

A few words on Pause and Stop difference

When campaign is getting stopped, Triton forgets which recipients already received a newsletter, so if you stop and start the campaign recipients may receive email twice. When you just pause a campaign, Triton just pauses workers, all info about processed recipients stays, so you can safely resume your campaign and do not worry about duplicating mails, Triton will avoid them.

Summing up, you should Stop&Run campaign if you want to re-send an email to all recipients and Pause&Run if you need to continue sending omitting already processed recipients.