When a campaign is built, previewed and tested, the last step is sending. PortalHQ supports immediate send, scheduled send and (when needed) drip-style staged sends.
Send now
From the campaign’s review screen, choose Send now. PortalHQ queues the campaign for immediate sending. Most sends start within a minute or two.
For small lists (under 1,000 recipients), the campaign is typically complete in 5-10 minutes. Larger lists can take 30 minutes to an hour to fully send.
Use Send now when:
- The campaign is genuinely urgent.
- You want immediate confirmation it’s gone.
- Timing doesn’t matter much for the audience.
Schedule for later
From the same screen, choose Schedule and pick:
- Date — when the campaign goes out.
- Time — in your school’s local time zone.
The campaign sits in a queue until the scheduled time, then sends.
Use scheduling when:
- You want to send at a specific time (e.g. Tuesday 9 am).
- You want to draft now and have it go out automatically.
- The campaign is part of a series and you want consistent timing.
You can cancel or reschedule a scheduled campaign right up until it sends. After it sends, it’s locked.
Choosing a send time
Best times for school audiences vary, but rough patterns:
- Tuesday 9 am – 11 am is a sweet spot for parents. School-related context is fresh, work week is in flow, no Monday spam pile-up.
- Friday afternoon is usually weak — open rates drop into the weekend.
- Weekend mornings (Saturday 8-9 am) can work for community-style content.
- Evenings (7-9 pm) can be good for content people read after work.
Test alternatives over a few campaigns and use the reports to confirm what works for your audience.
Send to a subset first (segmented send)
For high-stakes campaigns, send to a small segment first as a final check:
- Send to a Test segment mailing list (5-10 recipients including yourself and some colleagues).
- Verify it lands correctly and the metrics start updating.
- After 30 minutes, send to the full audience.
This catches issues that test sends don’t (e.g. real-world rendering on diverse email clients, deliverability to specific domains).
Cancelling a scheduled campaign
Before the send time:
- Open the campaign.
- Choose Cancel schedule.
The campaign returns to Draft. You can reschedule, edit or discard.
After the send time, cancellation isn’t possible — the campaign is in flight.
Pausing a sending campaign
For very large campaigns mid-send, you can pause:
- Open the campaign while it’s sending.
- Choose Pause.
PortalHQ stops sending to new recipients. You can resume later or discontinue. Pausing isn’t perfect — some emails already in the queue will still go out.
Use pause only for emergencies (e.g. you’ve spotted a serious error after pressing Send).
What recipients see
Each recipient gets an individual email with:
- The from address (your sender).
- The subject line you set.
- The content rendered (with their personalisation tokens filled in).
- An unsubscribe link in the footer.
If they reply, the reply goes to the reply-to address you set.
After sending
The campaign moves to the Sent status. Stats start populating within minutes as recipients open and click. See Reviewing campaign performance.
Tips
- Schedule rather than send immediately — even by 10 minutes. Gives you a buffer to spot last-minute issues.
- Send Tuesdays. It works.
- Don’t send back-to-back campaigns. Recipients getting two emails from you within hours are more likely to unsubscribe.
- Have a kill switch. Make sure someone other than the sender knows how to pause a campaign in flight, in case the sender is unreachable when an issue is spotted.