In this article, you will learn what it means when a campaign is in 'waiting for approval' or 'pending for approval' status and what the consequences are for sending.
What does the approval process entail?
All initial campaigns undergo an approval process. This approval process is carried out to ensure that your campaign complies with ActiveCampaign's terms of service. It may also be necessary for your campaign to be manually approved if you have been using ActiveCampaign for a longer period. In this case, you will see the following message for the respective campaign:
When you see a campaign in 'waiting for approval' or 'pending for approval' status, this usually takes no longer than 10 minutes. ActiveCampaign will review your campaign, and if more information is required, we will contact you. In many cases, the campaign is approved without further action needed.
If more information is required or if you need to take a specific action, we will notify you by email. It is important that you respond as soon as possible because the campaign will not be sent until ActiveCampaign receives a response. After ActiveCampaign has reviewed your response and/or actions taken, your campaign will be approved or (in rare cases) rejected.
Why does my campaign need to be manually reviewed?
There are several reasons why ActiveCampaign may want to personally review a campaign. The most common reasons are listed below:
- Outstanding performance percentages: If you have high spam percentages, bounce percentages, or a high number of unsubscribes, in many cases, more information is needed to investigate the cause. This way, we can help you improve these elements.
- ActiveCampaign policy: It is possible that the content of your email violates ActiveCampaign's policy. If this happens, we will point it out and ask you to adjust the campaign.
- Invalid content: If your campaign text contains errors, prohibited content, or insufficient content, your campaign will be reverted to the 'draft' status. As a user, we will inform you of this so that you can ensure that the campaign complies with the aforementioned policy.
- Missing a physical address or unsubscribe link: It is a legal requirement to include a physical mailing address and an unsubscribe link in your emails. If the mailing address and/or unsubscribe link is invalid, the campaign will be reverted to 'draft' status so that it can be adjusted.
- Missing source information: When you create a list in MailBlue, more information is requested about the collected email addresses. If ActiveCampaign deems that more source information is needed, additional information will be requested. You can read more about this in this article.
- Duplicate of a campaign: If you send a duplicated campaign to the exact same recipients as the original email, ActiveCampaign may ask for the reason for resending the campaign.
- Country sanctions: Sending campaigns from the following countries is not allowed because ActiveCampaign is not permitted to provide services to: Libya, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria.