Broadcasts

A broadcast sends one message to a stored audience: pick the audience and a published email template, and Bird resolves the audience's current members into a recipient list at send time, rather than you enumerating addresses yourself. Broadcasts are built and sent entirely in the dashboard, under Email → Broadcasts; there is no /v1/email/broadcasts endpoint, CLI command, or SDK method, so there's nothing to automate here today. If your recipient list isn't already a stored audience, batch sending or a loop over single sends covers a one-off list instead.

Create a draft

Start a broadcast from the Broadcasts list. Filling in the composer and submitting only ever creates or saves a draft: the buttons read Create draft and Save draft. Sending is a separate step, covered below, and a draft can be edited and re-saved as many times as you like first.

The composer has three steps:

Recipients: pick an existing audience, or create one on the spot. Set a From name and address; the address must be on a verified sending domain. Reply-To addresses are optional, up to 25.
Content: choose one of the workspace's published email templates. A broadcast has no inline body editor: its subject and body always come from the template, so authoring happens in Templates, not here. Each recipient's contact properties fill the template's merge variables at send time, so the same broadcast personalizes per recipient. A draft can be created before a template exists, but one must be chosen before you can send.
Review: confirm the audience, from address, and template, then set the category, the open and click tracking switches, and up to 20 tags for filtering broadcasts later. The category defaults to marketing, which respects every suppression including unsubscribes; switch to transactional to still deliver through complaint and unsubscribe suppressions.

Send or schedule

Sending is a separate, explicit action from the broadcast's row or detail page, labeled Send or schedule. Choose Send now, or schedule up to 365 days ahead with at least a minute of lead time. A scheduled broadcast stays editable and can be rescheduled right up until dispatch begins.

Two organization-wide limits are enforced at this step, independent of anything about this particular broadcast: a cap on how many broadcasts your organization can send in a billing period, and a cap on how many can be sending at the same time. Hitting the first means waiting for the next billing period or upgrading your plan; hitting the second means waiting for an in-progress broadcast to finish; a scheduled broadcast simply waits for a free slot rather than failing.

Broadcast status

A broadcast is a draft until submitted, then scheduled once submitted with a future send time (still editable), then accepted once accepted for immediate send, then sending while delivery is in progress, and sent once every recipient has been dispatched to. Canceling a scheduled, accepted, or sending broadcast moves it through canceling to canceled.

Cancel or delete

Cancel a scheduled, accepted, or sending broadcast from its detail page: recipients not yet sent to are skipped, but messages already delivered cannot be recalled. Delete only applies to a draft, and it's permanent: there's no recovering a deleted draft.

Why a broadcast fails

A failed broadcast names one of these reasons on its detail page, in roughly the order you can act on them yourself:

Empty audience: the audience resolved to zero deliverable recipients at send time, either because it's empty or every member is suppressed. Add members, or check your suppressions.
Audience unavailable: the audience no longer exists or couldn't be resolved. Point the broadcast at a different audience, or rebuild it.
Content invalid: the template no longer renders as pinned, for example because a contact property it references was deleted after the broadcast was scheduled. Fix the template or the referenced property, then resend.
Quota exceeded: the audience resolved to more recipients than your organization's email send limit allows; the failure explanation includes the recipient count and the limit. Narrow the audience, or raise your plan's limit.
Internal error: the send failed on Bird's side. Retry, and contact support if it recurs.

Track delivery

Once dispatch starts, the detail page shows recipients, sent, delivered, bounced, complained, opens, and clicks, plus the delivery and engagement rates computed from them. This is a per-broadcast view, distinct from the workspace-wide numbers on email metrics: a broadcast is one send among everything else your workspace sends. Two views go deeper: View recipients lists every recipient's status, delivered time, opens, and clicks, including the failure reason for anyone who didn't deliver; View events shows the same broadcast as a per-recipient timeline, the same event types documented in events and webhooks.

Next steps

Audiences: build and manage the recipient lists broadcasts target
Categories: marketing vs transactional and what each does to suppression policy
Email metrics: the workspace-wide view broadcasts feed into
Events and webhooks: the per-recipient event stream behind a broadcast's delivery numbers