A message is what you want to send. But before you send a message, you have to determine who to send your message to and when to send it. You answer these questions when you set up a campaign, broadcast, newsletter, or transactional message.
Each of these mechanisms has a different use case, but they all contain the same basic concepts/questions:
- How do I trigger messages?
- Who should receive messages?
- When should people get messages?
- What messages should people get?
When should I use campaigns, broadcasts, or newsletters?
There are a multitude of factors that can help you pick the right message mechanism for your needs. But, in general, you can use the following guidelines to help you pick the right one.
I want to control when people get messages: You should send a newsletter or a broadcast. You’ll send newsletters manually (or on a schedule), which makes it easy to determine who gets messages and when. Broadcasts are a bit trickier, but you base the send on an API call that you control—so you can send messages when something relevant to your business happens.
I want to send messages in response to my audience’s behaviors: You should send a campaign or a transactional message. These things are very different, but they’re both predicated on your audience’s behaviors. You’ll send transactional messages when a person performs an action that expects a message—like a receipt or a password reset. You’ll send campaigns when people meet certain criteria, like when they perform an event, gain certain attributes, and so on.
If you want to send multiple messages or perform multiple actions: you should send a campaign or a broadcast. Campaigns contain a workflow that you can send people through to get multiple messages, or perform multiple actions over time. Broadcasts also have a workflow, but the whole workflow happens at once; this means broadcasts aren’t really ideal for sending multiple messages, but you can perform multiple actions—like changing your audience’s attributes or sending webhooks.