Sending an email and activating through a smart campaign

There's not really a reason to use a smart campaign to send an email unless it's based on a trigger, or if you're wanting to do a drip setup.

An email program is good for a mass send, while smart campaigns are more for alerts/triggered sends. Then engagement programs are for nurturing (though you can do the old way of nurturing via smart campaigns).

Thank you, Matt.  Just curious, is there any benefit in having smart campaigns set up for reporting purposes?

It again comes down to what your purpose is for the email... if you're sending mass emails, the reporting is going to be a lot better via an email program. Likewise, if you want to set up a nurturing campaign, the engagement program will be the better fit from reporting, since that's its purpose.

For emails sent strictly through a smart campaign, I believe you'd have to generate an email performance report and set up some filters to ensure you're looking at just the emails sent from that campaign... basically it'd be a lot more work than the other ways.