ElevenAgents Campaign Manager: what it is and how to use it

ElevenAgents Campaign Manager is a new ElevenLabs tool that calls or messages a list of contacts with an AI agent and keeps following up until each one reaches a goal you set, such as a confirmed appointment. To use it, existing ElevenAgents customers open Campaigns in the Agents sidebar, upload a CSV of contacts, and pick an agent and a phone number.

The post behind it

@ElevenLabs announced it on November 9 with a short pitch: "Give it your contacts and a goal." The company's announcement says the system works each contact until the outcome lands or the person asks it to stop.

The batch calling docs now warn that batch calling will be deprecated in favor of Campaigns, so anyone running outbound on this platform will have to move over. Our Eleven Realtime post covered how these agents sound. This tool decides who gets called and how many times.

What it can do

After each attempt, the system acts on what happened. No answer or a voicemail can trigger a retry. A request for another time books a callback. If someone says to try a different number or person, outreach moves there. Anything it shouldn't guess about lands in a needs-attention queue with the call context attached, and later calls can draw on earlier ones through variables such as campaign__previous_summary.

Here's what works today, per the campaign docs:

In the announcement, AA Ireland's CTO says the team used to reach 50 to 60% of leads on a typical day and now reaches 100%. That's a customer quote in a vendor post, and reaching a lead is a long way from selling to one.

How to set up a campaign

These steps come from the campaign docs:

1. Open Campaigns in the ElevenAgents navigation.
2. In Settings, save your workspace policy: timezone, retry limits and calling windows.
3. Select New campaign, then choose an agent, channel and phone number.
4. Upload recipients as a CSV, or send them by API. The CSV takes phone_number through phone_number_5, so one person can have up to five numbers.
5. Turn on Advanced controls for retries, callbacks and follow-ups. Total calls per contact default to 6, including the first, and can go as high as 30.
6. Watch the Analytics tab, which shows the funnel from enrollment to outcome.

Test it on your own phone before you load a real list. Tell the agent "call me back Thursday at 2," then on the next call say "stop calling me." The docs say callbacks, redirects and do-not-call only work if the agent captures those signals, so this is how you find out whether yours does.

What it costs

I couldn't find a separate Campaign Manager price, and ElevenLabs tells new customers to talk to sales. Its API pricing page lists its agent pipeline and Eleven Realtime at $0.08 a minute, with LLM usage extra on Realtime. Phone line charges aren't on that page. On WhatsApp, Meta charges separately for outbound calls and for permission requests sent outside a customer service window.

Read this before you dial anyone

ElevenLabs' TCPA page says AI voices count as "artificial or prerecorded voices." The page is informational, so check your own case with a lawyer. It says marketing calls need prior express written consent, and pre-checked boxes don't qualify. Calls to residential numbers belong between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the recipient's time zone, and the caller carries the burden of proving consent.

The campaign docs put compliance on you. Do-not-call lists belong to each campaign, so a person who says stop in one can still be called by another unless you remove them yourself. A campaign's policy locks when you create it, so changing a running one means stopping it and starting over. Callbacks set for an exact time get dialed even outside your calling windows. Workspaces or agents in Zero Retention Mode are rejected.

My read

The needs-attention queue is the feature I'd want most, because a person sees the odd cases before the agent improvises. The per-campaign do-not-call list is the one I'd push back on. Someone who tells your business to stop means your business, and any company running two campaigns needs a master list maintained outside this tool.

What this means for businesses

A small company rarely needs more dialing. It needs someone to follow up with people who already raised a hand, and speed matters there, as we laid out in how fast contractors should respond to a new lead. If your bigger leak is inbound, compare an answering service with missed-call text-back before you buy anything outbound.

Start small with open quotes or upcoming appointments, and have your consent language reviewed first. New Face Design's free process audit can show you where a follow-up agent fits and where a person should stay on the phone.