Automations vs Campaigns — What's the Difference?

Mailzzy gives you two different tools for sending email: campaigns and automations. They serve distinct purposes, and knowing when to use each one helps you build a more effective and efficient email marketing program.

What Is a Campaign?

A campaign is a deliberate, one-time email send. You create it, choose who receives it, decide when it goes out, and send it. Once dispatched, it is complete — it does not continue sending automatically to future contacts who join your list.

Campaigns are the right tool for:

• Monthly or weekly newsletters

• Promotional offers and seasonal sales

• Product launch announcements

• Event invitations

• One-off communications to your entire list or a segment

What Is an Automation?

An automation is an email workflow that runs automatically in the background, triggered by a specific action or condition. Once you build and activate it, it runs without any manual effort — enrolling and emailing contacts as they meet the trigger criteria.

Common automations include:

• A welcome email sent immediately when a new contact joins your list

• A birthday message triggered by a contact's date of birth

• A re-engagement sequence triggered when a contact has not opened an email in 90 days

• A follow-up email sent after a contact clicks a specific link

Side-by-Side Comparison

• Timing — Campaigns go out at a scheduled moment. Automations fire at any time, whenever a trigger condition is met.

• Audience — Campaigns send to a fixed list of contacts at a point in time. Automations enroll individual contacts as they qualify, including people who join your list months after the automation was set up.

• Effort — Each campaign requires manual creation and sending. Automation is built once and runs indefinitely.

• Best use — Campaigns suit broadcast communications. Automations suit personalized, behavior-driven touchpoints.

Using Both Together

The most effective email strategies use campaigns and automations in combination. Campaigns handle regular broadcast content — newsletters, promotions, and announcements. Automations handle personalized, event-driven communications — welcome sequences, re-engagement flows, milestone messages. Together they create a comprehensive, largely self-running email program.