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Retry failed re-attempts recipients whose send genuinely failed, up to 3 times each; Retarget tags a cohort of a finished campaign's recipients (repliers, readers, non-readers, clickers or failures) so you can build a new campaign or sequence from exactly that group. This article explains when to use each and how they behave differently.
Retry vs retarget: first 5 of 7 steps
- 1Open the finished campaign's detail page
- 2Click Retry failed
- 3Watch the campaign resume sending
- 4Open the finished campaign's detail page
- 5Choose a cohort
Before you start
- Both actions require the "Send broadcasts" (
broadcasts:send) or "Create broadcasts" (broadcasts:create) permission depending on the action; both are included in Owner and Admin by default. - Retry failed is available on a campaign in Sent, Failed, Cancelled or Incomplete status, whenever it has at least one failed recipient.
- Retarget is available on a campaign in Sent or Cancelled status.
Steps
Retrying failed recipients
Open the finished campaign's detail page. If it has any recipients in Failed status, a Retry failed (N) button appears in the action bar.
Click Retry failed. Every recipient currently marked failed, with fewer than 3 total attempts, is set back to pending and the campaign is requeued to send. Recipients who have already used all 3 attempts are left alone, and suppressed recipients are never touched by this button no matter how many times it is clicked.
Watch the campaign resume sending. Its status changes to Scheduled briefly, then Sending, and the retried recipients move through the normal delivery funnel again from pending.
Retargeting a cohort
Open the finished campaign's detail page and click Retarget in the action bar. A dropdown opens with cohort options: Tag repliers, Tag readers, Tag non-readers, Tag clickers (only shown if the campaign recorded any clicks), and Tag failed.
Choose a cohort. VGraple CRM resolves exactly who belongs in it (see the table below) and creates or reuses a tag named "[Campaign name] - [Cohort]."
Check the confirmation notice. It states how many contacts were tagged and the exact tag name used, for example "Tagged 340 contacts with 'Diwali Offer - Read'."
Build a new broadcast from that tag. Go to Broadcasts, New Broadcast, and choose By tag on the Audience step, selecting the tag Retarget just created.
Which one should I use?
Retry failed and Retarget solve different problems and are not interchangeable. Retry failed is for recipients the campaign genuinely tried and failed to reach, a transient Meta error, a temporary network issue, a template that has since been fixed, and it re-attempts the exact same message to the exact same people. It never touches anyone who was suppressed, since a suppression means the platform refused to try in the first place for a reason that will not change by retrying (an opt-out, a frequency-cap window), and Meta enforces account-level penalties for retrying those.
Retarget is for recipients the campaign successfully reached (or, in the Tag failed case, for building a new list from people the campaign genuinely could not reach), and it never resends the original message. Instead, it builds a tag you use to construct a different campaign, one aimed specifically at people who read but did not reply, or at people who clicked, treating them differently from the general audience because their behavior already told you something.
Example
A clinic sends a vaccination-camp reminder to 800 contacts. Twelve fail with a transient network error and are fixed with one click of Retry failed; a further 340 read the message but never replied, so the clinic uses Retarget, Tag non-readers, to build a follow-up campaign the next day with a shorter, more direct call to action aimed only at that group.
What you will see
After Retry failed, the campaign's status briefly shows Scheduled, then Sending, with the retried recipients' retry count incremented by 1 in the recipient table. After Retarget, a success notice names the tag and the count, and the new tag appears immediately under Contacts, ready to use in any future broadcast, segment, or filter.
Settings and options
| Action | What it targets | What it does | Repeatable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retry failed | Recipients with status failed or cancelled, under 3 attempts | Sets them to pending and resumes sending | Yes, until the 3-attempt cap is reached per recipient |
| Retarget: Tag repliers | Recipients with a non-null replied_at | Tags them | Yes, safe to re-run |
| Retarget: Tag readers | Recipients with status read | Tags them | Yes |
| Retarget: Tag non-readers | Recipients accepted by WhatsApp but not read and not replied | Tags them | Yes |
| Retarget: Tag clickers | Contacts with at least one recorded click on this campaign | Tags them | Yes |
| Retarget: Tag failed | Recipients with status failed | Tags them | Yes |
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Retry failed button is missing | The campaign has zero failed recipients, or is still in an active Sending or Scheduled state | Nothing to retry, or wait for the campaign to finish first |
| "No recipients left to retry" message | Every failed recipient has already used all 3 attempts | Investigate why they keep failing (check the error reason) rather than continuing to retry the same recipients |
| Retarget button is missing | The campaign is not yet in Sent or Cancelled status | Wait for the campaign to finish sending first |
| Tag clickers option does not appear | The campaign recorded zero clicks, or had no tracked link set up | Expected; the option only appears once there is at least one click to build a cohort from |
| Retargeted tag has fewer contacts than expected | The cohort logic is specific (for example, non-readers excludes anyone who replied, even if they never opened the message in a way WhatsApp reports as read) | Expected behavior; check the cohort definitions in the table above |
Why retarget instead of just filtering the recipient table each time?
You could open the recipient table, filter to Read, and manually copy names into a new list every time, but that does not scale past a handful of contacts and leaves no record of who was in that cohort for a future campaign. Retarget creates a real, reusable tag under Contacts the moment you click it, so the cohort exists independently of the campaign it came from: it shows up in the tag list, can be combined with other filters in a saved segment, and can be excluded from a future campaign's audience just as easily as it can be targeted by one, which matters if you want a totally different group to receive your next send instead of messaging the same responders again.
Do these actions ever overlap in what they affect?
They can touch the same recipients from different angles without conflicting. A recipient who genuinely failed and gets picked up by Retry failed is, by definition, not part of the "readers" or "repliers" cohorts a Retarget action would tag, since they never received the message at all. But Tag failed under Retarget deliberately covers similar ground to Retry failed from the opposite direction: instead of re-attempting the send, it builds a tag from everyone who failed, useful when you want to analyze or exclude that group in a future campaign rather than keep trying to reach them through the same broken template or invalid number. Running both is common and safe on the same campaign: retry what is worth retrying, then retarget what is worth building a new campaign around.
Related reading
For an automatic version of retargeting that runs without a manual click, see automatic follow-ups when someone replies, and for the full status vocabulary these cohorts read from, see recipient statuses explained.