Sending a broadcast

Where

Broadcasts → Send Broadcasts

Plan

All plans

Permission

Broadcast → Broadcast

Before you start, you need at least one list with people on it. See Contacts, lists and groups.

How to write and send one

1. Go to Broadcasts → Send Broadcasts and click New broadcast.
2. Pick the Channel: SMS, Email, WhatsApp, In-app or Push.
3. Leave Priority as Normal and Status as Draft.
4. Type the Caption. On email this is the subject line; elsewhere it is just the name you will recognise the broadcast by in the list.
5. Type the Content — the message itself.
6. Under Audience, tick the lists and groups to send to. A counter appears: “Reaches about 184 contacts.”
7. Save.
8. Back on the list, open the row menu and click Preview. Check the wording and the recipient count.
9. Click Send test, type your own phone number or email, and save. Read the message on your own phone.
10. When it is right, open the row menu and click Dispatch.
11. Leave the Recipients box empty — your saved audience is always sent to — and save.
12. A message reports the result: “Sent 180, failed 2, skipped 2 of 184.”

Dispatch sends immediately, with no confirmation

Clicking Dispatch and saving sends the messages there and then. There is no “are you sure”, no undo and no way to stop it once it starts.

Worse: Dispatch is not blocked on a broadcast already marked Sent. Clicking it a second time sends the whole thing again to everybody. Send once.

How to personalise each message

1. In the Content box, put the cursor where the person’s name should go.
2. Under Merge tags, click a tag — it is inserted at the cursor.
3. Repeat for any others, and save.

So “Hi {{first_name}}, we open late on Friday” arrives as “Hi Ama, we open late on Friday”.

The seven built-in tags are {{name}}, {{first_name}}, {{last_name}}, {{email}}, {{phone}}, {{city}} and {{company_name}}.

What happens when a tag has no value

A contact with no first name falls back to their full name, so a greeting is never left blank. Every other empty tag simply disappears from the message, leaving a gap — “Hi , we open late”.

Preview warns about any tag it does not recognise (“Unknown tags: balance”). A misspelled tag is not an error; it just vanishes at send time.

How to schedule one for later

1. Create the broadcast as above and tick its audience.
2. Set the Schedule date, and the Schedule time as HH:MM.
3. Set the Status to Scheduled. This is the step that matters.
4. Save.

It goes out on its own within a minute of the time you set, and the status becomes Sent.

A schedule date on a Draft never sends

Setting a date and time but leaving the status on Draft does nothing at all. The send only happens for broadcasts marked Scheduled — nothing warns you, and the message simply never goes.

Equally, Scheduled with no date sends nothing. You need both.

Date and Time are not the schedule

The form has two pairs of date and time boxes. Schedule date and Schedule time control the send. The plain Date and Time boxes above them are stored and read by nothing — they are a note to yourself.

Two things about the schedule

• A time already in the past sends immediately, at the next minute’s check. There is no “too late to send” guard.
• Leaving Schedule time blank means midnight at the start of that day.

How to read the delivery report

1. On the broadcast’s row menu, click Report.
2. Read the five tiles at the top: Total, Sent, Failed, Pending and Skipped.
3. Below them, every recipient is listed with their address and outcome.
4. Use the status filter to show only Failed or only Skipped.
5. Read the Detail column — it says why each one did not go.

The reasons you will see:

Detail	What it means
opted out of sms	You marked them opted out. Correct behaviour.
no phone number	The contact has no phone. Fix the contact.
no email address	The contact has no email. Fix the contact.
no linked user account	In-app or push. It cannot work.
no sms dispatcher configured	The messaging gateway is not set up on your account — nobody got anything. Contact support.
whatsapp not configured	No connected WhatsApp device.
no marketing consent	The customer refused marketing.

Anything else in that column is the error the gateway sent back, shown as-is.

Pending means the app lost track

A row stuck on Pending was written down but never resolved — usually the send was interrupted. It tells you nothing about whether the message arrived. Treat a handful of them as unknowns and re-send to those people individually.

Which channel to choose

SMS	Works everywhere, costs a credit per message. Needs a phone number.
Email	Costs a credit. Needs an email address. The Caption becomes the subject.
WhatsApp	Costs a credit, and needs a connected WhatsApp device.
In-app and Push	Free, and reach nobody.

Credits never stop a send. If your balance runs out the messages still go and the shortfall is recorded against your account. Nothing on the screen tells you how many you have left.

Things the screen does not tell you

The status filter is missing two statuses

The filter at the top of the broadcast list offers Draft, Sent and Cancelled only. A broadcast waiting to go out is Scheduled, which is not in the list — so you cannot filter for what is queued. Sort by Schedule date instead.

• Priority — Low, Normal or High — is stored and does nothing. Every message is sent the same way.
• Action URL is the screen a push or in-app message opens when tapped, and so has no effect on the channels that work.
• A sent broadcast can still be edited. Changing the wording afterwards changes what the record says, not what people received.
• Deleting a broadcast takes its delivery report with it — the report is only reachable from the broadcast’s own row.

Related

• Contacts, lists and groups
• WhatsApp