Before you start: select the campaign’s channels in Setup. A block appears for each one.
See Create a campaign.
If you send from the trial address, its sender name and address are fixed, and the campaign must
use them as they are.
For building the body, see Design an email with the builder. If the
campaign’s Type is A/B Test, the test settings appear at the top of this block. See
Test two versions of an email.
SMS
The segment counter
Under the message, a live counter shows the character count and how many segments each message is billed as. SMS is charged per segment, so this is what the message actually costs per recipient. A few things move the count:- “Reply STOP to opt out” is added to every campaign SMS, and it counts toward the segments.
- One character outside the GSM-7 set switches the whole message to Unicode, and each segment holds far fewer characters. The counter notes when that happens.
- Merge tags expand per recipient. A long name can push one person’s message into another segment.
The characters
^ { } \ [ ~ ] | € count as two each in GSM-7.
A campaign SMS can be up to 4 segments. Past that, the counter turns red and asks you to
shorten the message. For writing tips, see Writing SMS content.
Push
Data rules: up to 20 fields, keys up to 64 characters, values up to 1,024 characters. The keys
from, notification and message_type, and any key starting with google. or gcm., are
reserved. Expiry can be up to 28 days. See Push overview.
One campaign, several channels
The channels you turn on run side by side and don’t wait for each other. For each channel, Brudcast works out who in the audience can be reached there and sends that channel’s message to them. A contact with an email address and a phone number gets both the email and the SMS; there’s no fallback order in which one channel waits to see whether another worked.
A campaign sends as long as at least one of its channels can reach someone. A channel that reaches
nobody sends nothing, and the others go ahead.
Two kinds of total come out of this, and they answer different questions. Recipient totals count
each person once, however many channels reached them. Channel totals count messages, so a person
who got an email and an SMS appears in both rows. That’s why the channel rows never add up to the
recipient total. See Campaign results.
Credits for every channel are reserved together, in one step, when the campaign starts sending. If
the wallet can’t cover the whole send, nothing is reserved and nothing goes out, so a campaign never
starts on one channel and then stalls because another was short.
Merge tags on every channel
Every Insert variable menu lists the built-in contact fields (First name, Last name, Full name, Email address and Unsubscribe link) and your custom fields. Pick one to insert it where your cursor is, for example{{first_name}}.
If you type a tag that doesn’t match a contact field or custom field, a warning appears at the top
of the Content section. It says the tag sends as empty text, and suggests inserting a variable
from the picker or adding the field under Contacts. See
Placeholders and merge tags.
Related
Email builder
Design the email body with blocks.
Writing SMS content
Segments, encoding and the opt-out footer.
Credits and wallet
What a message costs on each channel.
The send checklist
What each channel needs before it can send.