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Campaigns, Broadcasts, and Transactional Messages

We support a range of campaigns, broadcasts, and transactional messages to help you automate interactions with your audience at the right time.

Campaigns

Campaigns can have two different subjects: people and data.

Your campaign trigger determines who (or what) enters your campaign and when. Most triggers are based around people: people enter your campaign when they match certain criteria, and these people are the subject of your campaign—you’ll send them messages, set their attributes, and so on.

• When a person moves in or out of a segment lets you create a segment or specify existing segmentsA segment is a group of people in your audience that you want to target with campaigns, messages, etc. You can join groups of people manually, or by attribues and event data. that people must be in (or not in) to trigger a campaign. You can set segment criteria based on your audience’s attributes, events, etc. This option is best for things like recurring NPS surveys, onboarding drip campaigns, inactivity reminders, and so on.

• When someone performs an eventSomething that a person in your workspace did. Events can trigger campaigns, add people to segments, etc. You can access event properties in liquid with {{event.<property>}} helps you respond to a person’s activity in your app or website. They’re helpful for behavioral messages like abandoned cart reminders and responding to page views or transactional messages like receipts and confirmations.

• When a specific date occurs triggers a campaign on a specific or relative date based on an attributeA key-value pair that you associate with a person or an object—like a person’s name, the date they were created in your workspace, or a company’s billing date etc. Use attributes to target people and personalize messages. that people in your audience have. You can trigger based on any customer attributes that are properly formatted dates. This is useful for recurring campaigns like birthdays, anniversaries, subscription renewals, and payment reminders.

• When someone submits a form lets you take advantage of form responses to trigger campaigns. You can connect a form to your workspace or integrate with Facebook Lead Ads. Use this type of campaign to send messages to nurture new leads or respond to support requests.

Create your own trigger from a webhook creates a special, webhook-triggered campaigns based around data rather than people. The purpose of your campaign is to manipulate this data and associate it with people—like Zapier or Segment, but entirely within a campaign. Because data, not people, is the subject of your campaign, webhook-triggered campaigns don’t typically send messages directly; rather, they let you associate data with people, which can trigger subsequent campaigns.

Webhook campaigns help you perform one-to-many interactions with your audience, like notifying a group of people when you post a job or a product becomes available that a cohort of your audience is interested in.

API Triggered Broadcasts

This campaign type is set up to be triggered via an API call, though you can send it manually as well. You can set up a single message (or multiple message types with action conditions), and set it up to send one big message out to many users, such as a breaking news alert.

Use API triggered broadcasts if… you want to regularly trigger a specific message to many people and take advantage of Customer.io’s different message types. A little more technical, but great for sending things like breaking news alerts in multi-message formats (some email, some SMS), or a push notification alerting people to take action by a certain date.

Newsletter Broadcasts

Newsletters in Customer.io are a form of broadcast; a one-time send of a single-message, but with a twist. You can import a CSV of existing customers to send to, but you can also build a dynamic segment of your users and send your email to them.

Use newsletters if… you want to send a single email to a particular subset of customers, something like a special feature announcement for your power users, or a simple Terms of Service update!

Transactional Messages

Transactional messages are one-to-one interactions with your audience, where the “trigger” represents an individual audience action in your app—password reset requests, receipts, shipping notifications, etc. Because your audience does something to trigger a transactional response, transactional emails can be set to send to unsubscribed customers.

Use transactional messages if… you need to respond directly to customer interactions with your app or service, like password reset notifications, shipping notifications, etc.