You can have multiple campaigns working in parallel. Some of your campaigns might send emails, others may assign points based on Contact interactions with emails, and others may segment your Contacts into groups. Because all of these campaigns run in real time, there a few timing considerations to keep in mind if you stop and restart a campaign.

In this article, you'll learn what happens when a campaign is stopped and restarted.

Stop a campaign

Why would I stop a campaign?

The simple answer is you don’t want it to perform any more actions (e.g., send any more messages, assign any more points). This might be for several reasons, including:

• The campaign has a clear end date (e.g., it might be promoting a conference that only occurs once, and once the conference is complete, the campaign can be stopped).
• You have built new campaigns based on new requirements so an existing campaign is no longer needed. For example, you had a single Welcome campaign to send greetings to new members, but now you have three Welcome campaigns for different membership types. In this scenario, the existing campaign is outdated and can be stopped.
• The campaign was accidentally deployed before you finished editing it. You want to make more changes before the campaign runs.

How do I stop a campaign?

There are two ways to stop a campaign.

1. If the campaign is running, edit it and go to the Deploy Campaign page. At the bottom of this page, click the Stop campaign button.

TIP: If you don't want to stop it right away, you can schedule an end date by selecting Schedule end date in the Schedule section. More on this below.

2. The second way to stop a campaign is by scheduling an end date when you initially deploy it. You can select when you would like the campaign to stop automatically (this must be at least one hour in the future). Note that setting an end date will not prevent you from manually stopping the campaign using the Stop campaign button, as discussed above.

What happens when I stop a campaign?

There are several important ramifications to keep in mind when stopping a campaign:

1. Enrollment stops. No more Contacts will be enrolled in the campaign.
2. Contacts stop moving through the campaign. Contacts will stay in whatever stage of the campaign they are in. This includes not being moved to the Goal stage.
3. The campaign stops taking all actions. The campaign will no longer:

• Send emails
• Show Contacts as having met the goal
• Consider Contacts as having renewed a membership
• Add tags to or remove tags from Contacts
• Add Contacts to or remove Contacts from groups
• Update Contact fields
• Assign points
• Suppress Contacts

4. Landing pages will no longer be available. Visitors will see a message telling them that the landing page has been taken down. When you set up a landing page campaign, you can choose to redirect visitors to a web page of your choice.
5. Campaign Tracking will still update for message deliveries, bounces, opens, and clicks. Report counts will still increase if Contacts open messages, click links, etc. However, no actions will be taken based on these actions.

NOTE: Landing pages are taken down when the campaign is stopped, so additional submissions are not possible.

Restart a campaign

Why would I restart a campaign?

If you stop a campaign, you can restart it. However, as explained above, stopped campaigns don't "listen" to incoming events and don't take any actions, but their tracking will still update.

BEST PRACTICE: Because of the aforementioned reason, rather than restarting a campaign, we recommend making a copy of the campaign using the Save As feature on the campaign management page.

Refer to the table below to determine whether you should restart a campaign or make a copy.

How do I restart a campaign?

You can restart a campaign by editing it and clicking the Re-start campaign button in step 4, Campaign Status on the Deploy Campaign page (this is the third page of the Edit Campaign workflow).

NOTE: If you check the box above this button, the system will search for any Contacts who meet the enrollment criteria you specified and add them to the campaign upon restart. This allows you to add Contacts who were missed when the campaign was stopped.

What happens when I restart a campaign?

There are several important things to keep in mind when you restart a campaign:

• Enrollment will resume if you chose either AFTER the campaign starts or BOTH for enrollment when you set up the campaign. If you chose WHEN the campaign starts or BEFORE the campaign starts, additional Contacts will not be enrolled unless you check the box above the Restart campaign button (which adds new members).
• The campaign will resume taking actions, with some important caveats. Triggers cause actions to occur. Everything from sending a message to moving a Contact to the Goal stage is accomplished with a trigger. There are several types of triggers:
• Immediate triggers fire as soon as the Contact meets the criteria. These will resume firing.
• Delayed triggers fire after a specified period of time (e.g., 5 minutes, 1 hour, 3 days). They start over and do not consider any time the Contact spent waiting for the trigger to fire before the campaign was stopped.
• Event triggers fire after an action by the Contact, a user, or another campaign. An trigger action could be opening a message, clicking a link, receiving a tag. Event triggers are not influenced by any actions that occurred while the campaign was stopped.
• Date and Time triggers occur on a specified date and time. If the specified date and time occurred while the campaign was stopped, the trigger will not fire and any messages scheduled while the campaign was stopped will not send.
• Scheduled triggers occur on a recurring basis (e.g., every day at 1:15 pm, every Thursday at 11:00 am). These will fire at the next occurrence of the scheduled time.
• Conditions will consider events that occurred while the campaign was stopped. Conditions are used in Advanced Enrollment, in Message Filters, and can be applied to triggers. Examples include opened a message, is in a group, and has a certain number of points. Conditions check against the central record of all events, so anything that occurred while the campaign was stopped will still be considered.