Broadcasts

A broadcast sends one email to a whole audience: a newsletter, an announcement, or any single piece of content that goes out to many recipients at once. We resolve the audience's members into the recipient list when the send starts, so a broadcast reaches whoever is a member of the audience at that moment.

Create broadcasts in Email > Broadcasts in the dashboard, through /v1/email/broadcasts, or with bird email broadcasts. The SDKs do not include broadcast methods. For a one-off recipient list, use batch sending or single sends.

Start from the Broadcasts list with New broadcast. The composer is a single page: an audience and sender bar at the top, the email content below it, and a settings control for category, tracking, and tags. There is no separate save step. Every change autosaves once the broadcast has an audience and a sender, so a draft exists as soon as those two are set, and sending it later is a separate, explicit action.

Use the To field to pick an audience, or select New to create one without leaving the composer.

Open the settings control in the composer header for three more things:

A broadcast sends from an address on a verified sending domain. Pair a local part with one of your verified domains, and add a display name if you want one. Add a Reply-To address if you want replies routed elsewhere. Selecting Review warns you if the domain is not verified.

A broadcast points at one of your workspace's email templates, and the template has the subject line and the body the broadcast sends. Each recipient's contact properties fill in the template's variables when the send runs, so one broadcast personalizes its content per recipient. A broadcast can only fill in contact properties, so a template variable naming anything else is refused when you send, and the error names the variable.

Write the content directly in the canvas below the subject line, or select Choose a template to start from an existing one. That option is only available while the broadcast is blank, since picking a template once you have written a subject or a body would overwrite it. A broadcast sends the template's published version, so a template that only has a draft cannot back a send.

Sending is a separate, explicit action, available from the composer's Review button or from the broadcast's detail page through Send or reschedule. Each opens a dialog that checks the broadcast is complete, warns you about anything likely to make the send fail, then lets you choose Send now or pick a time up to a year ahead. A scheduled broadcast stays editable, and you can reschedule it right up until sending actually starts.

Sending checks that the audience still has someone to reach. An audience where nobody has an email address, or where every address is suppressed, is refused at that point instead of failing later.

Two organization-level limits are checked when you send.

The first is how many broadcasts you can send in a billing period. Your plan sets the number. Saved drafts do not count toward it, and canceling a broadcast does not give the allowance back. Once you have used it up, you either wait for the next billing period or move to a plan with a higher limit.

The second limits concurrent broadcasts. If you select Send now while the limit is reached, the request is rejected. A scheduled broadcast waits for a free slot.

A broadcast is always in one of four stages, and the Status filter on the list uses those four:

Each row's badge shows the exact status within its stage. That same value is what the API's status field returns.

Cancel a scheduled or sending broadcast from its detail page. Recipients it has not reached yet are skipped, and any message already on its way cannot be recalled. Delete only works on a draft, and it is permanent.

A failed broadcast shows why on its detail page: the reason, and then a sentence naming the exact cause. Over the API, those two are the failure_reason and failure_detail fields. failure_detail is what tells you which of a reason's several causes you actually hit.

A broadcast's sending setup is checked only when the send starts. If the sending domain was verified at scheduling but lost verification before sending, the broadcast fails at that point. Verify the domain and send the broadcast again.

Broadcasts and single sends draw on the same email allowance. The plan card on your organization's billing overview shows how much of it you have used. Plans and pricing covers what each plan includes.

Once sending starts, the broadcast's Overview tab shows its recipient and sent counts, then its delivery, open, click, bounce, and complaint rates with their counts. The Recipients tab lists every recipient along with its delivery status, the reason if it did not deliver, when it was delivered, and its opens and clicks. The Events tab is the broadcast's raw event feed, using the event types described in events and webhooks.