Sending email

Choose a sending path that matches the customer moment. Broadcasts reach a defined audience once; templates let your product trigger a saved message for a recipient; workflows send as part of a journey. All use the same composer and the sending mode set on the email.

The sending path and the sending mode answer different questions. Choose the path for timing and orchestration; choose marketing or transactional for the message’s purpose and consent behavior.

Templates: send per recipient via the API

A template is saved email content plus a list of the information it needs. You send it from your application with an API call, one recipient at a time. Use it for receipts, password resets, order confirmations, and welcome emails.

When you send, you pass only enough to identify each record, for example { "email": "[email protected]" }. maxclicks finds or creates that contact, reads the full record back, loads the attribute expansions configured for the email, builds the email, and sends it.

Broadcasts: mass-send to an audience

A broadcast is a one-time campaign sent to a group at once. Use it for newsletters and announcements. Each broadcast targets one contact schema, then narrows to an audience one of three ways:

• All contacts in that schema.
• A saved segment.
• A custom audience filter you describe in plain language, which maxinja turns into a readable condition.

Then you pick timing. A broadcast is one-time: send now, or schedule for a date and time. There is no recurring schedule. For anything that repeats in response to what people do, use a workflow. The broadcast reference covers composing, audience targeting, scheduling, and the send pipeline.

Workflows: send within a customer journey

A workflow starts from a configured trigger and can wait, look up data and choose what happens next. Its Send Email step carries its own email content and receives data from earlier steps. Write and test the draft, then publish the workflow before expecting new runs to use it. Start with the workflows lesson.

Understand when a send becomes fixed

A broadcast can prepare messages before its scheduled dispatch time. Preparation fixes the selected recipients and campaign revision; later audience changes do not add customers to that run. Before preparation you can Cancel send and edit again. After it begins, Stop sending permanently cancels remaining work, while messages already being sent may still arrive.

A saved template is different: new requests use the current saved content, with no publication step. Published workflow runs keep the email templates in their version. Review those timing differences before editing a message used in production.

An individual email’s Sent status means provider acceptance. Delivery, opens and clicks are later signals. The campaign funnel’s Sent total counts its email records; inspect their statuses before equating that total with accepted messages. See report definitions. Check the email history before retrying or starting a replacement campaign, especially when acceptance is uncertain.

Marketing vs transactional

Whether an email is marketing or transactional belongs to the content, not to how you send it. You set it on the email itself, so a template, a broadcast, or a workflow can each send either kind. It decides who actually receives the email once consent and suppressions are applied.

A message to a bare email address, one that is not a contact yet, can only be transactional. Marketing requires a consenting contact behind the address.

Next

Workflows are the third way to send, automatically and in response to events. Continue to the workflows lesson, or open the broadcast reference for the full send setup.