Outbound campaigns

Outbound campaigns are one-off messages to a patient segment, or to everyone who has recently messaged your Facebook Page or Instagram account. They complement follow-ups: use follow-ups for a multi-step journey and a campaign for a single offer, recall or reactivation message.

Campaigns are part of Smileline Core. Owners and managers can create and send them; analysts can see launched results but cannot see drafts or operate a campaign. Front desk and telesales do not have campaign access. There is no approval step.

Campaigns live in the Social workspace: open Social in the main sidebar, then Campaigns. Links and bookmarks to the old campaign pages redirect to the new ones.

Choose the audience

Open Social → Campaigns and click New campaign, then choose one of these audience types:

• a saved patient view;
• the filters currently applied on the Patients page, using Message segment;
• explicitly selected patients, using Message selected. A fixed selection is limited to 500 patients.

An Instagram DM or Messenger campaign doesn't use these: it goes to everyone who messaged the account in the last 24 hours.

To narrow the audience further, click Refine in Patients beside it. The Patients page opens in a new tab, on the saved view you picked (a built-in view such as All patients opens the full list), while your draft stays open in the campaign tab. A short walk-through points out where to add filters, how many patients match, and the view menu, where Save as new view… saves the result (on a phone-width screen the view menu is hidden, so save from a wider screen). Back in the campaign tab, choose the new view under Patient segment: views saved in the other tab appear there as soon as you return.

A filtered audience is resolved once, when dispatch begins. The resulting recipient list is then fixed, so later patient-filter changes do not alter an in-flight campaign.

Shared email addresses and phone numbers are deduplicated. When everyone behind a shared destination belongs to the same open family account, Smileline sends once to the patient responsible for that account; otherwise the shared destination is excluded for review rather than risking the wrong recipient.

If a reachable contact is reassigned to another patient after the audience is fixed but before delivery, that recipient is skipped with a contact-conflict result. Smileline does not keep retrying a campaign message whose destination now belongs to someone else.

Compose and preview

Each campaign uses one channel: SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DM or Messenger. Select an active connection and write the message or start from a template. WhatsApp campaigns require an approved marketing template. Meta does not deliver marketing templates to United States numbers (a +1 dialling code with a US area code), so those recipients are excluded in the preview as WhatsApp marketing is not delivered to US numbers (Meta); Canadian and Caribbean +1 numbers are unaffected. Marketing templates go out through Meta's Marketing Messages API — see WhatsApp marketing templates for the upgrade each number needs before 13 October 2027.

If the channel has no active connection yet, the composer says so instead of offering an empty connection list. Click Connect SMS (or Connect WhatsApp, Connect Instagram DM, Connect Messenger) to go to Settings → Channels, where that channel's Connect button is highlighted. The page opens in a new tab, so your draft stays where it is; when you come back to the campaign tab, the new connection is offered.

Email campaigns are written in the same visual editor as email templates: plain paragraphs by default, / for layout blocks, and merge-tag chips under the editor. Click Image beside those chips to add a picture from your practice's image library. Picking a template that was designed in the editor brings its design across, not just its text.

To write the markup yourself, switch Visual to HTML above the editor — the same two modes email templates offer, including the preview tab. A template the practice wrote as HTML opens here as HTML too.

The preview shows:

• the current audience, eligible and excluded counts;
• exclusion reasons and sample recipients;
• warnings, including patients who recently received marketing.

SMS previews include the practice identity and Reply STOP to opt out footer because the footer counts toward each text's SMS parts. Email tests use synthetic patient merge values and can only go to the sender's verified Smileline login email, so a test never exposes a real patient's details. Each sender can queue up to 20 tests per campaign per hour. SMS and WhatsApp tests stay unavailable until verified staff phone numbers are supported.

Send now or schedule

Before launch, confirm the maximum recipient count and hourly pacing. You can send immediately or choose a future time.

Campaign texts are billed like every other text your practice sends: per SMS part, after the parts included each billing period — see Text messages. Email is capped at 15,000 recipients per campaign.

Smileline pauses instead of silently exceeding the confirmed recipient count. A WhatsApp campaign also pauses when Meta throttles the sending account as a whole (throughput limit, spam rate limit or maintenance) so the remaining recipients wait for Resume rather than failing one by one. SMS and WhatsApp also respect the practice send window. A daily or hourly limit can spread a large campaign over time.

Operate and measure

A campaign moves through Draft, Scheduled, Dispatching, Paused, Completed or Cancelled. From its detail page, an owner or manager can pause, resume, cancel or duplicate it. Content and audience criteria cannot be edited after launch.

Choose Duplicate as draft to copy the source campaign's name, audience, channel, connection, template and content into a new editable draft. Delivery history, recipient results, schedule and launched dispatch state are not copied.

Launch freezes one immutable dispatch: its content, audience, connection and limits cannot be changed by a stale draft edit. Daily send capacity is reserved atomically before delivery, so concurrent workers cannot push the campaign beyond its confirmed daily limit.

If subscription access ends, an in-flight campaign pauses. It stays paused after renewal until an owner or manager reviews and resumes it; missed campaign work is never released automatically.

If sending keeps failing through its automatic retries, the campaign pauses instead of failing: choose Resume to try again. A campaign that makes too many automatic sending attempts also pauses. The detail page says why a campaign paused.

The detail page tracks sent, delivered, read, replied, failed and opt-out results per recipient. It also attributes appointments and the revenue of journeys going ahead to the most recent campaign touch in the 30 days before the booking was made or the journey went ahead. An appointment synced from your practice management system or imported from a file counts from the date it was booked there, and isn't attributed when that date is unknown — see Bookings on the dashboard.

If an SMS or WhatsApp provider response does not prove whether a message was accepted, Smileline records that recipient as Delivery unknown and does not automatically retry. This fail-closed result prevents an uncertain provider handoff from creating a duplicate marketing message.

See Marketing consent for the eligibility and opt-out rules applied to every recipient.

Instagram DM and Messenger campaigns

An Instagram DM or Messenger campaign sends one direct message to everyone who messaged your Instagram account or Facebook Page in the last 24 hours, whether or not they're a patient.

Before you start

• The account's direct messages must be connected to the Inbox: Messenger DMs for a Facebook Page, Instagram DMs for an Instagram account. See Connect Messenger, Instagram and comments.
• The practice policy under Settings → Practice details → Outbound marketing eligibility must be Explicit consent or recorded soft opt-in. These campaigns rely on soft opt-in, so they can't launch while it's Explicit consent only. If it's changed back while a campaign is sending, the people still waiting are skipped.

Who receives it

Meta lets a business message someone on Messenger or Instagram only within 24 hours of that person's last message. So the audience is everyone whose last message to the chosen account arrived in the last 24 hours; saved views, patient filters and selected patients don't apply. After you preview the recipients, the composer shows how many people you can reach now and warns when some of them have less than an hour left. People who have opted out with STOP are counted as excluded.

The audience is worked out again when the campaign starts sending, at launch or at the scheduled time, and is then fixed: someone who messages you after that isn't added. Just before each message goes, Smileline checks the person's window again. Anyone whose window has closed by then is skipped, and the campaign's recipient list shows who and why.

• There's no maximum recipient count to confirm: everyone in the audience is messaged.
• The practice send window doesn't apply. Holding the messages overnight would let people's windows close, so these campaigns send at any hour.
• Hourly and daily limits still pace the campaign, and a message they hold back can miss its window, so keep them high. Pausing has the same effect: when you resume, anyone whose window closed in the meantime is skipped.
• There's no test send: a campaign message can only reach someone whose window is open.

Write the message

Messages are text only. Practice merge tags are filled in for everyone. Patient merge tags are filled in only when the person's conversation is linked to a patient and are left blank otherwise, so write a message that still reads well without them.

Smileline adds a line to the end of every message: "Reply STOP to stop these messages." For practices in Italy and Spain it's in Italian or Spanish. Meta limits the message, that line included: on Instagram to 1,000 bytes of text, where emoji and accented letters count for more than one, and on Messenger to 2,000 characters. The composer shows the count under the message and won't preview or send a message over the limit. It counts merge tags as you typed them; the preview and the launch check the message again with your practice's details filled in, and anyone whose patient merge tags take their message over the limit is skipped.

Anyone who replies STOP gets no more campaign messages from that account unless they send START — see Instagram DM and Messenger opt-outs.

Results

Each campaign message appears in the person's conversation in the Inbox, and a reply lands there and counts as Replied. A STOP reply also counts under Opt-outs for the campaign whose message it answers: the latest one the person received in that conversation in the 30 days before it. Messenger reports delivery, so its recipients move from Sent to Delivered. Instagram doesn't, so Instagram DM recipients stay at Sent. Neither channel shows Read.

A skipped person shows as Excluded in the campaign's recipients, with the reason:

• they had replied STOP to the account;
• their 24-hour window closed before their message went;
• the practice policy was changed to Explicit consent only while the campaign was sending;
• the account's direct messages were disconnected while the campaign was sending;
• their conversation could no longer be found;
• their patient merge tags took the message over Instagram's 1,000 bytes or Messenger's 2,000 characters.