Campaigns & Broadcasts Overview
We support a range of campaigns, broadcasts, and transactional messages to help you automate interactions with your audience at the right time.
Campaigns
Campaigns offer the most robust options for messaging automation. They offer the most flexible and specific options for triggering a campaign as well as the ability to automate messages over time, as opposed to sending messages all at once.
Your campaign trigger determines who enters your campaign and when. Most triggers are based around people, like when they match certain criteria. Typically, these people are the subject of your campaign—you’ll send them messages, set their attributes, and so on.
Broadcasts
Newsletters
Newsletters in Customer.io are a form of broadcast; a one-time send of a single message. You might send one for a special feature announcement for your power users or a simple Terms of Service update.
API-triggered broadcasts
In an API-triggered broadcast, you craft a workflow to send messages and perform actions like updating users’ attributes, much like a campaign. However, the entire workflow happens once you trigger it, whereas in a campaign, you can modify the timeline with delays.
With an API-triggered broadcast, you control when the broadcast is sent; you can trigger it manually in the UI or through our API. You might send one to announce a new product, share a new coupon, or encourage users to take action like a buy a ticket before a certain date.
Transactional messages
Transactional messages are one-to-one interactions with your audience, where the “trigger” represents an individual audience action in your app like a password reset request. Because your audience does something to trigger a transactional response, you can send transactional emails to unsubscribed customers, too.