Campaign Statuses
A Spark campaign has ten statuses: draft, ready, scheduled, processing, sending, paused, sent, active, completed, and failed. This page explains what each one means, when you’ll see it, and what action you can take — with an animated walkthrough modeled on the actual dashboard.
One-shot campaigns
A one-shot campaign sends to your recipients once — newsletters, product launches, holiday promos. It moves through four lifecycle states and you can watch each tick by below. Beneath the lifecycle pills, the campaign report mock mirrors the real dashboard: title with status, the Analytics tab, and the same six-card metric grid (Sent, Delivered, Bounced, Failed, Open Rate, Click Rate).
Spring Sale 2026
Preview of the actual campaign report — same layout you'll see in the dashboard. Pause to read each state; full reference table below.
You’ll spend most of your time on the Sent view watching opens and clicks accumulate. If something goes wrong mid-send, the campaign drops to Paused automatically and the report explains why so you can fix it before resuming.
Automations
An automation is a multi-step workflow that keeps enrolling new contacts as long as it’s Active. Triggers like “contact created” or “tag added” feed the workflow; each step is an email, a wait, or a branching condition. The workflow canvas below mirrors the dashboard’s step graph — same node shapes, same layout — and shows the count of contacts in each step. The numbers move when the automation is Active and freeze when Paused.
Onboarding sequence
Welcome new contacts, wait three days, follow up.
Preview of the actual campaign report — same layout you'll see in the dashboard. Pause to read each state; full reference table below.
Automations sit between Active and Paused for as long as they’re useful. Completed is reserved for “I’m shutting this down” — it stops new enrolments and lets in-flight contacts finish their last step.
Every status, explained
| Status | Color in dashboard | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|---|
| draft | slate / neutral | You’re still in the wizard — picking a template, recipients, and a schedule. Editable in every way until you click Save as Ready or Schedule for Later on the final step. | Edit · Schedule · Save as Ready · Delete |
| ready | slate / primed | The wizard is done — recipients are validated, template and sender are set — and the campaign is waiting for you to click Send Now. Stays in this state indefinitely until you trigger it (or edit it back to draft). | Send Now · Send Test · Edit (drops back to draft) · Delete |
| scheduled | blue / info | The campaign is queued for a future send time. Spark will start dispatching at the scheduled timestamp. | Reschedule · Edit · Cancel (drops back to draft) |
| processing | violet / in-progress | Spark is preparing the send — resolving the recipient list, validating addresses, queueing per-recipient messages. Usually moves to sending within seconds. | Wait — typically transitions automatically |
| sending | violet / in-progress | Active dispatch in progress. Messages are going out, paced to match your plan’s send capacity. | Pause (transitions to paused) · Watch progress on the campaign report |
| paused | amber / warning | You paused the campaign mid-send (or paused an automation). No new messages are dispatched until you resume. | Resume (transitions to sending or active) · Stop completely (completed) |
| sent | emerald / success | One-shot campaign finished dispatching to every recipient in the campaign. Delivery feedback (opens, clicks, bounces) keeps flowing into the campaign report after this point. | View report · Duplicate to re-send · Archive |
| active | green / active | An automation is live — new contacts that match the trigger are being enrolled and progressing through the workflow steps. | Pause · Stop (completed) · View report |
| completed | emerald / success | An automation has been stopped manually, or has no remaining contacts in any step. No new enrollments or sends will happen. | View report · Duplicate to a new automation |
| failed | red / danger | Something went wrong while preparing or dispatching the campaign — most commonly a sender-domain issue, a plan limit being hit, or a delivery error. The campaign report shows the reason. | Open the failure detail · Fix the underlying cause (verify domain, set default sender, upgrade plan) · Retry from draft |
Why processing and sending share the same colour: they’re the same thing from your seat — “Spark is working on it.” Most campaigns flick through processing in seconds, so you’ll usually only catch the sending stage on the dashboard.
Per-message statuses vs campaign statuses
Don’t confuse the two — they describe different things at different levels.
| Campaign status | Per-message status | |
|---|---|---|
| Describes | The whole campaign send job | One specific email to one specific recipient |
| Where you see it | Spark dashboard Campaigns list | Campaign report drill-in · transactional Get a message endpoint |
| Possible values | draft, ready, scheduled, processing, sending, paused, sent, active, completed, failed | pending, sent, delivered, bounced, complained, failed |
| Updates after dispatch | Stops moving once sent / completed / failed | Continues — flips from sent to delivered when the recipient’s mail server accepts, or to bounced if it rejects |
A campaign in sent state can still have individual messages in bounced — the campaign-level status describes “did the send job finish dispatching,” not “did every recipient receive it.” Use the campaign’s analytics report (delivered / bounced / complained counts) for the per-recipient picture.
The same per-message status enum is used by transactional API messages — Spark and the transactional API share the same outbound delivery engine.
What’s next
| You want to… | Go to |
|---|---|
| Understand how a campaign flows end-to-end | What is Spark? — campaign flow |
| See per-message statuses for individual transactional sends | Sending Emails — Get a message |
| Roll up delivery metrics across a date range | Sending Emails — Analytics |
See these statuses on a real campaign report
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