Outbound call campaigns

The Dialer runs outbound campaigns from the Retell dashboard. It calls or texts your contacts with your agents, retries on a schedule you set, and decides each contact’s next step from what happened in the conversation. You build a campaign on four tabs (Overview, Contacts, Sequence, and Numbers), launch it, and follow every contact’s progress on the campaign page. Open it from Dialer under Deploy in the dashboard sidebar.

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When to use it

• You need several attempts per contact. Appointment reminders, payment follow-ups, and lead reactivation rarely connect on the first call.
• You want new contacts called automatically. An Auto-enroll campaign calls every contact that matches your rules, such as each new web lead, without a new upload.
• You must screen numbers before dialing. Campaigns can check federal and state Do Not Call registries, TCPA litigators, and line types before the first call.
• You want more calls answered. Local presence calls each contact from a number in its own area code, and spam check tells you when carriers label one of your US numbers “Spam Likely”.

For example, a dental clinic runs an Auto-enroll campaign for contacts tagged recall-due. The agent calls each patient up to four times over three weeks, during clinic hours in the patient’s time zone. When a patient books, the campaign writes booked to a contact field and stops calling them. If you only need one call to each number in a CSV, with no retries, set the sequence to one attempt. Batch calls are deprecated but still available. To place calls from your own code, use Create Phone Call.

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Standard and Auto-enroll campaigns

Choose the type when you create a campaign. You can’t change it later.

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Key concepts

• Contact: a record in your workspace Contacts, keyed by phone number. Its contact fields reach the agent as dynamic variables.
• Sequence: the plan each contact follows. It’s made of conversation nodes connected by outcomes. See Build a sequence.
• Conversation node: one step of the sequence, run by one agent over a phone call or SMS, with one or more attempts.
• Attempt: one call or SMS conversation. If the contact doesn’t answer, the next attempt runs after the delay you set.
• Outcome: a result such as “Success” or “Not Interested” that sends the contact to another conversation node or ends the sequence. The Disposition mix chart on the Analytics tab counts contacts by outcome.
• Calling window: the days and hours when the campaign dials, in each contact’s time zone.
• Stage: where a contact is in the campaign, such as Enrolled, In progress, or Completed. A campaign has a status instead, such as Running or Paused.

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How a campaign runs

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Before you start

• An agent for each channel you use. Call steps need a voice agent and SMS steps need a chat agent.
• Billing and identity verification. Your workspace’s billing must be in good standing, and its identity verification complete. Billing isn’t in good standing when, for example, an invoice is overdue, a free trial has ended, or a spend budget or credit is used up. Buying your first phone number starts verification. Without both, you can’t create, edit, launch, resume, or duplicate campaigns. You can still pause, stop, and delete them. A running campaign stops dialing while billing isn’t in good standing, and resumes when it is. Buying numbers for a campaign also needs a payment method on file.
• The right role. Admins and Developers can create and run campaigns. Members can view campaigns but can’t change them. See access control.
• Phone numbers. Use numbers you own, or buy new ones while you set up the campaign.
• An FTC registration, if you screen against federal or state DNC lists. See Set up your FTC registration.

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Create a campaign

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Launch a campaign

If something is missing, the launch stops with “Campaign is not ready to launch” and names the first problem, such as a sequence step without an agent. At launch, Retell runs the compliance checks and enrolls the contacts right away, even for a scheduled campaign. Calls start at the start time, inside each contact’s calling window. The only exception is a callback the lead asked for, which goes out at the requested time (see Build a sequence). Each contact is dialed at the start time, or when its calling window next opens, but never faster than the campaign’s concurrency and calls-per-second limits allow. See Caller ID and pacing. If the screening provider is unavailable, contacts stay in Validating until it recovers. Contacts of an Auto-enroll campaign show Validating for about 5 minutes before their first attempt is scheduled. The launch runs in the background. While it runs, you can’t edit or delete the campaign.

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What you can change after launch

Contacts, compliance checks, and the sequence lock at launch. You can still rename a running, scheduled, or paused campaign, and change its phone numbers and dialing rate. To change anything else, duplicate the campaign and launch the copy. On the campaign page, click Edit to open the setup tabs. They’re read-only, except Numbers. For a stopped or completed campaign the button reads Details, and every tab is read-only.

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Monitor a campaign

A launched campaign opens on its campaign page, with an Analytics tab and a Contacts tab.

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Analytics

Disposition mix shows how many contacts reached each outcome, starting from Enrolled. Dials over time counts every call and SMS attempt, retries included, and how many of them connected. Conversion rate over time shows the share of dialed contacts that converted. Both charts group by day, week, or month, depending on the date range. Filter everything on the tab by date range, stage, phone number, or contact ID. Dates use your browser’s time zone unless you pick another in the date range.

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Contacts

The Contacts tab lists every contact in the campaign with its stage, current conversation node, next attempt, and whether it was contacted and connected. Click a contact to see each call or SMS grouped by conversation node, with its outcome and the next scheduled attempt. Click a conversation to open its full transcript and recording. Each contact has one of these stages: The first three stages are active. The rest are final. Hover over a failed contact’s stage to see the reason. To stop one contact, open its menu and click Stop contact. The contact gets no more calls or messages from this campaign, and a conversation already in progress finishes.

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Pause, stop, duplicate, or delete

Open a campaign’s More actions menu on the campaign page or the Dialer list.

• Pause stops new dials within about a minute. Calls already placed or about to start finish. When you Resume, contacts that came due during the pause are dialed first, inside their calling window.
• Stop ends the campaign for good: it “stops dialing new contacts and cannot be resumed. Calls already in flight finish.” It also releases the campaign’s phone numbers and stops Auto-enroll intake.
• Duplicate creates a new draft named “Duplicated from” followed by the original name. It copies the settings, number pool, planned number purchases, and dialing capacity, but not the schedule. Choose Just settings, Settings + contacts, or, for a stopped or completed campaign, Contacts not yet contacted.
• Delete removes a draft, stopped, or completed campaign, and “its dialing history will be removed. This cannot be undone.” Stop a scheduled, running, or paused campaign before you delete it.

A Standard campaign moves to Completed on its own once every contact reaches a final stage. An Auto-enroll campaign keeps running until you stop it.

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Limits

These limits apply to every workspace (as of October 2026).

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FAQ

Related: Choose contacts, Compliance checks, Build a sequence, and Caller ID and pacing.