Recalling An In-App Campaign

Whoops... did you hit "Send" before you were ready? 😬 We've all been there! With most campaigns, once it's been sent, it's too late to prevent your users from seeing the message. But with in-app messages, things work a little differently—you can recall a campaign after you've sent it.

Whether you’ve changed your mind, caught a mistake, or your campaign was so successful it wiped out your inventory, we've got your back!

# In this article

# Required permissions

To recall an in-app campaign, you'll need the Journeys, Campaigns, and Experiments > Activate and Manage permission.

# Why recall an in-app campaign?

There are a few reasons why you might want to recall an in-app campaign. For example:

• The message contains an incorrect promo code and your users are unable to redeem it.
• You're receiving higher demand for a promotion than you anticipated and need to end the campaign early.
• The message contains a broken image or link, and you want to fix it.
• You need to change the campaign's expiration time.

By recalling the campaign, you can prevent some or most of your users from ever seeing the message—saving yourself and your support team a headache and minimizing frustration for your users.

# How it works

You can recall any type of in-app campaign, whether it was sent as a blast campaign, a triggered campaign, or part of a journey.

When you send an in-app message, it's delivered to each user's local device queue. At this point, the message hasn't actually been delivered—it's effectively being held until the user opens your app and sees it.

Recalling an in-app campaign works by pulling the message from the user's local device queue in real time. Iterable sends a silent push notification to the user's device to update your app in the background. After that, your in-app message will no longer appear when the user opens your app, and it will be pulled from the user's mobile inbox if it was delivered there.

# Recalling an in-app campaign

Recalling an in-app message campaign works best if you've added your mobile app to Iterable on the Settings > Apps and Websites page, and configured your app to receive silent push notifications from Iterable.

If you don't do this, Iterable can't recall messages that have already been downloaded to user devices.

# Step 1: Make sure the campaign isn't still sending

You can only recall campaigns that have the status Finished or Aborted. If the campaign is still sending, you'll need to stop it before you can recall it.

1. Go to Messaging > Campaigns.
2. Open the campaign.
3. Click Abort campaign (for a blast campaign) or Deactivate campaign (for a triggered campaign).

# Step 2: Recall the campaign

Once the campaign has stopped sending, click Recall campaign. Depending on how quickly you recall the campaign, you may be able to prevent all or most of your users from seeing the in-app message. Any users who have already seen the message will no longer be able to view it in their mobile inbox after you recall the campaign.

# Viewing a list of users who received a recalled in-app campaign

After you've recalled an in-app campaign, you may want to resend it with corrected content and/or follow up with an apology for the error. To make sure you send the new campaign to the right recipients, you can create a list of users who saw the original campaign before it was recalled. Here's how:

1. Go to Audience > Segmentation.
2. Set up a segmentation query that checks for an In App Open event for your recalled campaign.
3. Click Refresh Results.
4. Save the results as a static list.

Now you can send a new in-app campaign to this list.

# Viewing metrics for a recalled in-app campaign

To see the total number of delivered and recalled messages, open the campaign and click View campaign performance.

This will take you to your campaign's Campaign Analytics page.

Here you'll see a few important metrics about your recalled campaign:

• Sends: The number of users Iterable sent the campaign to before it was canceled
• Delivered: The number of messages that were delivered to users' devices/queues before the campaign was canceled
• Opens: The number of users that opened the app and saw the in-app message before it was recalled
• Recalled: The number of messages Iterable pulled from users' devices/queues (including those who had already seen it)
• Send skips: The number of users who did not receive the campaign

To learn more about analyzing campaign performance, see Messaging Insights.