Zoho Campaigns 2.0 vs 3.0: what's new and what's improved

Zoho Campaigns 3.0 is the AI-driven, latest version of Zoho Campaigns. It adds WhatsApp as a marketing channel next to email and SMS, puts Zia AI content generation inside all three channels, and rebuilds the screens you use most: campaign setup, the email template editor, contacts, segments, workflows, and analytics.

Click to experience Zoho Campaigns 3.0 before switching.

It's also much faster with large lists. Sending an email campaign to 100,000 contacts is up to 4x faster in 3.0, and importing 100,000 contacts is about 5x faster.

If you're on 2.0 today, this page shows what changes for your team and how the move works. If you're new to Zoho Campaigns, your account already starts on 3.0.

Zoho Campaigns 3.0 at a glance

These are the tasks where the two versions differ the most.

Task or area	Zoho Campaigns 2.0	Zoho Campaigns 3.0
Marketing channels	Email and SMS	Email, SMS, and WhatsApp
Time to send to 100,000 contacts	Baseline (1x)	Up to 4x faster
Time to import 100,000 contacts	Baseline (1x)	About 5x faster
Starting an email campaign	Choose a campaign type first	Start a Regular campaign and add A/B testing, surveys, webinars, events, or products inside it
Dynamic content	Added as a block of its own	Set on any section or block
Segment criteria	Up to 6 criteria	Up to 10 criteria per group and up to 10 groups per segment
Contact views	Statuses in a dropdown	Status tabs, plus custom views you can save and share
UTM tracking	Added to each campaign by hand	Set once in Settings for email, SMS, and WhatsApp
Contact scoring	Based on email activity	Based on email, SMS, and WhatsApp activity, with score decay
Frequency capping	Email campaigns only	Email, SMS, and WhatsApp

Note: Times are approximate and depend on list size, email content, and other factors.

What's new in Zoho Campaigns 3.0

Zoho Campaigns 3.0 adds WhatsApp as a channel, Zia AI content generation in every channel, and analytics dashboards built for each channel and for e-commerce revenue.

WhatsApp campaigns

WhatsApp is now a campaign channel in Zoho Campaigns, alongside email and SMS. You connect your WhatsApp Business account under Settings > WhatsApp, create message templates in the Library, and start sending once Meta approves a template.

Send personalized bulk messages from approved templates. A template can include text, images, video, documents, and up to 10 Quick Reply or Call-to-Action buttons.
Add WhatsApp steps to a workflow, so a message goes out when a contact does something, such as leaving items in a cart.
Keep using the WhatsApp Business App on the same number. WhatsApp coexistence lets you connect a number that's already active on the app without giving the app up.
Track delivery, engagement, and link clicks in WhatsApp campaign reports.

Use case: Zylker Fashions emails its weekend sale on Friday morning. In the same workflow, contacts who haven't opened the email by Saturday get a short WhatsApp message with the offer. Zylker reaches both groups with one setup, and contacts who already opened the email don't hear about the sale twice.

Note: WhatsApp setup isn't part of the migration. Connect your WhatsApp Business account after your organization moves to 3.0. See Connect your account to the WhatsApp Business API.

Zia AI content generation in every channel

Zia, the AI assistant in Zoho Campaigns, drafts email subject lines, preheaders, and body blocks, SMS messages, and WhatsApp headers and body text. You describe the campaign once, and Zia uses that context for every draft, so your email and WhatsApp copy say the same thing.

Zia can also shorten, lengthen, rephrase, or translate text you wrote yourself. In the email template editor, the Zia content analyzer checks spelling and grammar and flags sentences that are hard to read before you send.

An admin turns Zia on under Settings > Zia > Models. Zia can use the AI credits included with your plan, or you can connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI, or Cohere API key. Availability depends on your data center. See Setting up Zia AI in Zoho Campaigns.

MCP for Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns works with MCP (Model Context Protocol), an open standard that lets AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot in VS Code, and Cursor connect to your account. Once connected, you can ask the AI tool in plain language to create email campaigns, update contacts and lists, build segments, or analyze campaign reports. It then does the work in Zoho Campaigns, using only the tools you allow.

You set this up in Zoho MCP, which is free to use. Create a server, choose which of the 83 Zoho Campaigns tools to add, copy the server URL, and paste it into your AI tool as a custom connector. There's nothing to set up inside Zoho Campaigns itself.

Get answers, not just numbers. Ask questions such as "Why did my 'Spring Sale' campaign get fewer opens than usual?" and the AI tool reads the campaign reports to explain.
Handle everyday tasks from a chat. Schedule a campaign, send a test email, or create a segment of contacts who haven't opened an email in the last 60 days.
Stay in control of access. Every request runs with the permissions of the Zoho account that authorized it, and a server can do only what its tools allow.

The tools cover email campaigns and their reports, contacts, mailing lists, segments, tags, topics, contact fields, and webhooks.

Alert: Changes made through MCP take effect in your account right away and can't be undone, and the server URL works like a password. Read Zoho Campaigns MCP server before you connect an AI tool.

Analytics Dashboards for each channel and for e-commerce

Analytics in Zoho Campaigns 3.0 has a separate dashboard for email, SMS, and WhatsApp, a contact dashboard that tracks audience growth, and an e-commerce dashboard that shows the revenue, orders, conversions, cart activity, and ROI your campaigns bring in.

If you use Zoho Analytics, Zoho Campaigns sends contact, campaign, and workflow engagement data to it automatically, so you can build your own reports there.

What's improved in Zoho Campaigns 3.0

Most of the screens you use every day were rebuilt in 3.0. The biggest gains are in campaign setup, the template editor, and contact management.

A cleaner layout

Zoho Campaigns 3.0 lists every module in the left navigation. Email, WhatsApp, and SMS sit under Campaigns, followed by Audience, Automation, and Library, with Home and Analytics at the top. Search, settings, and your profile stay at the top of the screen wherever you are. In 2.0, you had to open Campaigns before you could see Email or SMS.

The Home tab is now a starting point for the day, with your main numbers, recent activity, and pending actions in one place. You can switch between a light theme and a dark theme in Settings.

Campaign setup on one screen

In Zoho Campaigns 3.0, you set up an email campaign on a single page. Recipients, email details, and content sit side by side, and the page flags errors and warnings as you go, so problems surface before you select Review and Launch.

You also don't pick a campaign type before you start. Zoho Campaigns 3.0 has two types, Regular and RSS, and the rest are things you add to a Regular campaign:

Turn on A/B testing from the campaign's options menu and test sender address, subject line, and content in the same test.
Add survey, webinar, and event links with merge tags once Zoho Survey, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Backstage, or another supported app is connected.
Add Product and Product Recommendation blocks from Shopify, WooCommerce, or Zoho Commerce.

Before you send, the campaign shows how many contacts will receive it, how many were excluded, and why. If contacts were left out because they aren't associated with the selected topic, you can review them and assign the topic from the same screen.

The campaign list shows drafts, scheduled campaigns, and sent campaigns in one view, with opens and clicks in the list itself. To find a campaign later, filter by the components it uses, such as a survey or a product block. See Campaign types in Zoho Campaigns 3.0.

A rebuilt email template editor

The drag-and-drop editor was rebuilt from scratch for 3.0.

Feature	Zoho Campaigns 2.0	Zoho Campaigns 3.0
Themes	Colors set within each template	Set primary and secondary brand colors once, and every linked element updates automatically, so templates stay on-brand and can be reused across campaigns without manual edits.
Dedicated mobile view	Mobile preview only	A separate workspace for designing and adjusting mobile layouts.
Dynamic content	Added as a separate Dynamic Content block	Target individual content blocks to specific segments within a single email.
Reusable blocks and centralized settings	Styles set from the Design tab of each template	Save frequently used blocks and manage global brand styles in one place.
Leaner HTML	Standard HTML output	Smaller output reduces clipping in major email clients, including Gmail, and helps emails render consistently across inboxes.

These are the changes you'll notice in the first email you build:

Dynamic content works on any section or block. Select it, open Dynamic Content, and set who sees it. In 2.0, dynamic content was a block of its own.
You can hide a block on mobile or on desktop when it doesn't suit that screen size.
Headers, footers, and any group of blocks can be bookmarked and reused from Gallery > My Saved.
Fonts, background, and button colors are set once and apply to the whole template.
The editor produces lighter email code, which helps keep emails under 102 KB, the size at which Gmail clips messages.

Contacts in one place

Each contact now has a profile page with an engagement summary, scores, topics, lists, segments, and a timeline of every email, SMS, and WhatsApp interaction. Associated Zoho CRM deals appear on the same page. You can add or remove tags from the profile, or in bulk from the contacts list.

Contact statuses such as Reachable, Suppressed, and Excluded appear as tabs across the top of the Contacts page. Custom views are new in 3.0: filter contacts by any combination of conditions, save the view, and share it with your workspace so the whole team works from the same audience. Custom views are also available for Lists, Segments, Forms, and all three marketing channels.

Imports take fewer steps too. You can create custom fields while mapping your file, and the import history shows how many contacts were added, updated, or ignored, with the reason each ignored contact was skipped. See Import contacts from a file in Zoho Campaigns.

Segments with more room

The segment builder in Zoho Campaigns 3.0 allows up to 10 criteria in a group and up to 10 groups in a segment, compared with 6 criteria in 2.0. You can mix contact fields, engagement metrics, and e-commerce data, such as products purchased or items left in a cart, and join groups with AND or OR. Segments also process faster than before.

Zoho CRM sync you control

You can now choose to sync every Zoho CRM contact or only the contacts that match criteria you set. Syncing only the records you plan to market to keeps other contacts out of Zoho Campaigns and helps you manage usage and cost.

You can also import a Zoho CRM custom view straight into a mailing list without rebuilding its filters. The sync history shows when each sync ran and how many contacts were added, updated, or ignored, with the reason for each ignored contact.

Workflows you can edit while they run

The workflow builder has a cleaner canvas and simpler setup for triggers, actions, and wait steps. Day to day, these changes matter most:

Edit a live workflow without disrupting contacts already moving through it.
Combine email, SMS, and WhatsApp steps in one workflow, and branch on how each contact responds.
Send data to another app with a webhook step.
Start a workflow from e-commerce triggers such as Abandoned Cart and Purchase Follow-up.
Before launch, the canvas points out any step that isn't fully set up.

Workflows also run on a new processing setup built for time-sensitive automations, so triggered messages go out faster.

Tracking and limits that cover every channel

Settings in Zoho Campaigns 3.0 are grouped by purpose. Topics and Contact Scoring now live under Settings > Contacts and Customization, and three account-wide controls work across email, SMS, and WhatsApp:

UTM parameters. Define up to 8 parameters once under Settings > Tracking and Sending Limits, and Zoho Campaigns adds them to campaign links in every channel. In 2.0, you added UTM tags to each campaign by hand.
Contact scoring. Score contacts on how they engage across all three channels, and use score decay so scores reflect recent interest rather than lifetime history.
Frequency capping. Limit how many messages a contact receives per day, week, or month.

See UTM parameters and Frequency capping.

Moving from Zoho Campaigns 2.0 to 3.0

An admin moves the whole organization to Zoho Campaigns 3.0 at once. Individual users can't switch on their own. The migration takes up to 30 minutes for most accounts, and larger accounts take longer. It's one-way: once your organization switches, it stays on 3.0.

Work through the checklist in Prerequisites for migrating to Zoho Campaigns 3.0. It covers topics, integrations and syncs, user roles, SMS numbers, contact scoring, and scheduled campaigns.
Clear every item in the Action required alert at the top right of your account.
Email support@zohocampaigns.com to request the switch. During the current rollout phase, the Zoho Campaigns team reviews each account, confirms what will be migrated, and turns on the switch for you.
Select Switch to new version, accept the updated terms and conditions, and confirm.

While the migration runs, only the web interface pauses. These keep working:

Scheduled campaigns send on time.
Signup forms keep collecting contacts.
API calls, webhooks, and inbound syncs keep running.
The mobile apps keep working.

Alert: Workflows pause until the migration finishes, and contacts who meet a trigger during that window are skipped rather than queued. Run the migration during a quiet period and let your team know beforehand. Users with the Standard User role become Editors in 3.0, so check roles for anyone who sends campaigns.

For a module-by-module list of what moves across and what works differently, see What's changed and what's deprecated in Zoho Campaigns 3.0.

New to Zoho Campaigns?

New accounts start on Zoho Campaigns 3.0, so there's nothing to migrate. WhatsApp campaigns, Zia, and the rebuilt editor are available from your first day. Sign up for Zoho Campaigns to try it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Zoho Campaigns 3.0 a separate product?

No, it's the new version of Zoho Campaigns. Your contacts, lists, and past campaigns move to 3.0 when your organization migrates.

Will scheduled campaigns go out during the migration?

Yes. The migration pauses the web interface only. Scheduled campaigns, signup forms, API calls, webhooks, and the mobile apps keep working.

How long does the migration take?

Up to 30 minutes for most accounts. Accounts with more data take longer.

Can we go back to 2.0 after migrating?

No, migration to Zoho Campaigns 3.0 is one-way, and a completed migration can't be reverted.

Is WhatsApp set up as part of the migration?

No, connect your WhatsApp Business account once your organization is on 3.0.

Do I need my own AI key to use Zia?

No, Zia can use the AI credits included with your Zoho Campaigns plan. If you prefer, you can connect your own key from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI, or Cohere.

Zoho Campaigns 2.0 vs 3.0: What's New and Improved - Online Help | Zoho Campaigns