Outbound Campaigns

Overview

Outbound Campaigns are the Dashboard-based way to run structured, large-scale outbound calling — separate from calling the API directly with a single request. A campaign groups a phone number, a recipient list, and an assistant into one managed run that you can launch immediately or schedule, then monitor from a dedicated Campaign Dashboard.

If you only need to dial a handful of numbers programmatically, the /call endpoint's customers array covers that simpler case. This page covers the full campaign workflow: creating a campaign in the Dashboard, formatting your recipient CSV with dynamic variables, and reading campaign analytics once calls are underway.

Before you start, you'll need:

• A Sulus account with Dashboard access
• An outbound-capable phone number already set up on your account (a free/trial number will not work for campaigns)
• Your recipient list ready as a CSV file
• An existing assistant configured to handle the calls

Campaigns are created through a five-step setup flow in the Dashboard:

1. Campaign Configuration — Open Outbound Campaigns in the Dashboard, click Create Campaign, and set a campaign name and campaign type.
2. Phone Number Selection — Choose which of your outbound-capable phone numbers the campaign will call from.
3. Recipient Management — Click Manage Recipients and upload your CSV file, then review the parsed recipient list for accuracy before continuing.
4. Assistant Selection — Choose the existing assistant that will conduct the calls for this campaign.
5. Review & Execute — Review the campaign name, phone number, recipient count, and assistant, then either launch the campaign immediately or schedule it to start at a later time.

Once launched, calls begin dialing out to your recipient list using the selected phone number and assistant, subject to your account's concurrency limits (see the Call Concurrency Limits page for details on how many calls can run at once).

Recipients are uploaded as a CSV file during the Recipient Management step. The only required column is number, which must be lowercase and contain phone numbers in E.164 format.

Any additional column becomes a dynamic variable you can reference directly in your assistant's prompt using double curly braces:

With the table above, your assistant's prompt could reference {{name}} and {{customer_issue}}, and each call would receive that recipient's specific values.

Column naming rules:

• Column names cannot contain spaces — use customer_issue, not customer issue
• Column names must start with a letter
• The number column must be spelled in lowercase

Phone number formatting (E.164):

• Format: [+][country code][subscriber number including area code]
• Example: +14151234567
• Maximum 15 digits total, no spaces or special characters

File formatting tips:

• Save the file using UTF-8 encoding
• Avoid blank rows or duplicated headers
• Double-check that column names match the variable names used in your assistant's prompt

In addition to the columns you supply, your assistant's prompt can also reference built-in default variables (such as the current date/time or the recipient's number) that are populated automatically and don't need to be included in the CSV.

Once a campaign is running or has completed, the Campaign Dashboard gives you two levels of visibility:

Campaign Overview

• Overall campaign status
• Completed call count
• Pickup rate — the share of recipients who answered
• Voicemail statistics — calls that reached voicemail

Detailed Call Reports

• Individual call details per recipient
• Customer information from the CSV
• Call duration
• Outcome status for each call
• Full call transcripts

A few things that affect how your analytics look:

• Recipient numbers not in valid E.164 format can fail outright, which will drag down your pickup rate — double-check formatting before launch
• If your account has a concurrency limit (for example, 10 simultaneous calls), only that many calls run at once; the rest queue and are dialed as slots free up, which affects how quickly campaign metrics populate
• You can cancel a running campaign from the dashboard if you need to stop it before it finishes