#Broadcast

#What it is

Broadcast sends one message to many contacts at once. Each send is called a campaign. Typical uses are a sale announcement, a new product, a change in opening hours, or a reminder to customers who have not ordered for a while.

A campaign can go out on three kinds of channel:

• WhatsApp, using an approved message template;
• SMS, as a short text. See SMS;
• Email, as a designed message with a subject line. See Email.

(Telegram campaigns are also possible and send plain text.)

It is an Admin area, reached from Broadcast in the navigation, and needs a plan that includes Broadcast.

#The problem it solves

The Inbox is for answering customers who write to you. It gives you no way to reach out to many people first. Sending the same message by hand to 500 customers is slow and risky:

• the chat apps block numbers that send bulk messages carelessly;
• WhatsApp only allows promotional messages that it has approved in advance;
• you must only message people who agreed to it, and let them say stop;
• you have no idea afterwards who received or read the message, or why some failed.

Broadcast handles these for you. It checks consent, uses approved templates, sends at a safe speed, and reports what happened to each message.

#How it works

1. You choose a channel to send from.
2. You choose the audience: everyone who agreed, a segment, groups or tags.
3. You write or choose the message.
4. You send now or pick a time.
5. Threadline sends the messages in the background, a few at a time, within the limits the app allows.
6. You watch the results on the campaign's report page.

Rules that apply to everything on this page:

• Consent. Only contacts who agreed to receive marketing messages can be sent a broadcast. See Contacts. People who wrote STOP or unsubscribed are always left out.
• The 24-hour rule. On WhatsApp, a free-form message can only be sent within 24 hours of the customer's last message. Outside that window, you must use an approved template. Campaigns always use a template on WhatsApp.
• Your plan. A plan can limit campaigns per month, and the number of SMS and emails you can send in a month. See Plans and Billing.

#1. Preparing your audience

Your audience comes from your Contacts. Before your first campaign:

1. Add or import the people you want to reach.
2. Make sure the ones who agreed to marketing messages are marked as opted in.
3. Optionally, sort them into groups, tags or segments, such as "Spring sale" or "Opted in and in the US".

#Checking WhatsApp numbers

WhatsApp's official API has no way to ask "does this number use WhatsApp?" before you send. (Tools that offer this use unofficial connections, which can get your number banned.) Threadline checks in two ways instead:

• When you import a list, the preview has a Number check column. It tells you if a number looks real: the right country code and the right length. Tick Skip invalid numbers to leave out the ones that cannot be real. This only checks the format; it cannot know if the number is in use.
• After a send, if WhatsApp reports that a number cannot receive messages (error 131026, "Not on WhatsApp"), the contact is flagged. The flag clears by itself the day that person writes to you.

Flagged numbers are left out of later campaigns that go to a group, tag, segment or everyone. The audience step tells you how many are left out and has a switch, Include numbers WhatsApp couldn't reach, if you want to try them again. In Contacts, filter by Not reachable on WhatsApp, and select people to Clear "not reachable" flag.

You can also manage one channel's audience from that channel's Contacts tab in Broadcast. It has the same Add contact and Import contacts tools.

#2. Creating a campaign: the five steps

Go to Broadcast and click New campaign, then choose the channel to send from. The wizard has five short steps, shown as pills across the top.

#Step 1: Channel

Give the campaign a name (only you see it, for example "Fall Sale Announcement") and confirm which channel it sends from. The channel cannot be changed after the first save.

#Step 2: Audience

Choose who gets it:

• Everyone on this channel who has opted in, or
• one or more segments, groups or tags.

Under your choice a live line reads, for example, "120 match · 96 opted in and will be sent to." The first number is everyone your choice matches. The second is who will really receive it, after people without consent and people who opted out are left out. If more than about 250 people will receive a WhatsApp campaign, a gentle warning reminds you that large sends can lower a newer number's quality rating.

Who exactly receives the campaign is worked out when you launch it, from the audience as it is at that moment, so someone who opts out in between is never sent to.

#Step 3: Content

What you see depends on the channel.

WhatsApp:

1. Pick an approved template.
2. For each blank in the template ({{1}}, {{2}}), choose where its value comes from: a fixed text, or a contact detail such as their first name, phone, email or any of your own fields (with a fallback if the person has none).
3. A phone-shaped preview updates as you work.

The mapping you set here belongs to this campaign and is used at send time.

SMS:

• Type the message. A counter shows characters, number of parts and encoding. A normal text holds 160 characters per part, and one with emoji or non-Latin letters holds 70. Each part counts as one text for your provider and your plan.
• Add merge tags such as {{contact.name}}.
• Keep a short opt-out line, for example "Reply STOP to opt out".

Email:

• Write a subject. Improve subject gives three alternatives, read against your email text; click one to use it.
• Write the email in the Visual editor (bold, italic, heading, list, link) or switch to HTML. Switching keeps one document.
• Click a merge-tag button to insert {{contact.name}}, {{contact.first_name}}, {{contact.email}} or {{contact.phone}} at the cursor.
• Open the template gallery to start from one of ten ready-made designs in five groups: Onboarding, Marketing, Content, Retention and Events.
• Write with AI: type a short brief and choose a tone (friendly, professional, playful, urgent) and get a first draft of subject and body to edit.
• A live, safe preview shows the email with sample values.
• Two tick-boxes: Track opens and Track clicks. A privacy note explains that these use a tiny invisible image and redirected links.

Threadline always adds a footer to a campaign email: why they received it, your business postal address and an unsubscribe link, plus the hidden "unsubscribe" signal that Gmail and Outlook show as a button. You cannot remove it. This protects you and your sender reputation.

#Step 4: Schedule

Choose As soon as I launch it, or Schedule it and pick a date and time. Times are in your workspace's time zone (Settings, Workspace).

#Step 5: Review

A summary lists the name, channel, audience size, message, tracking and when it goes out. If anything is missing, a yellow box says what to fix, for example "Say what {{2}} should be filled with", "Choose an audience", or "Add your business address". Launch stays disabled until the list is empty.

Before launching you can Send a test: enter one phone number (or email address) and a real message goes to it, filled with your own name. It counts as a send with your provider, and is recorded nowhere in the campaign.

Click Launch campaign (or Schedule campaign). A double click is safe: it sends once.

#3. Your campaign list

Broadcast lists every campaign with its channel, status, number of recipients and date. The buttons depend on the status:

Status	What you can do
Draft	Edit (continue the wizard) or Delete.
Scheduled	Cancel it before it starts, or reschedule.
Sending	Pause.
Paused	Resume.
Sent	Open the Report.
Failed / Cancelled	Open the Report.

A scheduled campaign starts within a minute of the time you picked.

#4. Pausing and resuming

Pause stops a running campaign right away, for example when you spot a typo. Messages already queued go back to waiting, and Resume carries on from where it stopped. Nobody is sent twice.

A campaign can also be paused automatically if a WhatsApp number's quality drops. See Automatic pause.

#5. Sending limits and warm-up (WhatsApp)

#The problem it solves

A WhatsApp number that suddenly sends hundreds of messages looks like spam to Meta. The number can be limited or blocked, and that affects your normal customer conversations too.

#Meta's messaging limit

Each WhatsApp number has a limit on how many people you can start conversations with in 24 hours, for example 250 or 1,000. Threadline reads this limit from Meta every hour and never sends more than that in 24 hours. The rest of a campaign goes out as soon as there is room again.

#Warm-up

What it is. An optional setting that makes a number start small and grow a little each day.

How it works. Go to Broadcast, Warm-up. Each WhatsApp number is listed with its quality rating, Meta's limit, and today's progress. Open a number's settings:

Setting	What it does	Default
Use warm-up	Turns warm-up on for this number.	Off
Messages on day 1	How many to send on the first day.	50
Daily growth (%)	How much the daily budget grows each day.	50%
Send from / Until	The hours of the day in which messages may go out.	09:00 to 20:00
Shortest gap / Longest gap	A short random pause between messages, in seconds.

A campaign larger than today's budget simply continues the next day on its own. The budget never goes above Meta's limit for the number.

The cards at the top show how many numbers are warming up, today's budget, how many were sent today, and how many numbers Meta rates as healthy.

Without warm-up, and for a number with no limit reported yet, a campaign is sent all at once.

#SMS and email speed

SMS campaigns send at most about 10 a second and email campaigns about 5 a second, so a provider is never flooded.

#6. Consent, STOP and unsubscribe

• A campaign only reaches people who agreed, on that kind of channel.
• On SMS, someone who writes STOP is marked as opted out for that number only.
• Every email has an unsubscribe link. One click opts that person out of email. It does not affect their WhatsApp consent.
• An email address that bounces because the mailbox does not exist is marked as bounced and skipped in every future campaign. A temporary refusal never blocks an address.

#7. Automatic pause

WhatsApp gives each number a quality rating: green, yellow or red. It drops when recipients block or report your messages.

When a number's rating drops to yellow or red, Threadline pauses its running campaigns and notifies your Admins. Nothing more is sent until you open the campaign and click Resume.

Before resuming, look at who you are sending to and what you are sending. Continuing to message people who do not want it is how numbers get restricted.

#8. Reading the results

Open a campaign's Report.

Cards at the top: how many are Queued, Sent, Delivered, Read and Failed, then percentages of all recipients (delivered, read, failed) and opted out since: people who wrote STOP after the campaign was created.

Delivery funnel. A bar chart of Recipients, Sent, Delivered and Read, so you see where people drop off.

Sent over time. How many went out each day. Useful for a campaign that spreads over several days.

Why messages failed. Failures are grouped by cause with a plain explanation, so you can fix the cause once instead of reading hundreds of rows.

• WhatsApp: grouped by WhatsApp's error number, with about 25 explained in plain words, for example "recipient is not on WhatsApp" or "the 24-hour window is closed".
• SMS and email: the gateway's or mail server's own sentence, grouped.

Recipients table. One row per person with status, when it was sent, delivered and read, and the error. Filter with Everyone, Queued, Sent, Delivered, Read, Failed. Export CSV downloads the same table, safe to open in a spreadsheet.

Email only: opens and clicks appear when tracking was on. An open is counted when the person's mail app loads the invisible image, so it is a good estimate, not an exact figure (some apps load images for everyone, some block them).

Status	Meaning
Queued	Waiting to be sent.
Sent	Handed to the app, the gateway or the mail server.
Delivered	Arrived on the person's phone.
Read	The person opened it.
Failed	Could not be sent. The reason is shown.
Bounced	An email address that does not exist.

WhatsApp reports delivered and read. Telegram does not share this, so those columns show "Not supported by Telegram". Several SMS gateways only confirm that a message was accepted. For those, messages stay at Sent, which is normal.

For all campaigns together, see Reports, Campaigns in Reports.

#Good to know

• Messages are sent in the background. You can close the page and keep working.
• Replies to a campaign arrive in the Inbox.
• If your plan does not include Broadcast, the whole area is locked (the sidebar shows a lock), including campaigns you sent earlier. Upgrade the plan to open it again. Nothing is deleted.
• You need at least one active channel before you can create a campaign.
• Your plan may limit campaigns per month. At the limit, Launch is refused with the reason; the count starts again next month, and drafts do not count.
• You cannot upload a file as an audience. Import it into Contacts first, then pick a group or segment.

#Common questions

I have no approved templates. On WhatsApp, create one in WhatsApp Templates and submit it. Approval usually takes from a few minutes to a day.

Some contacts did not receive the campaign. They had no consent, opted out, or the send failed for them. The report shows which.

The campaign is still sending the next day. The number reached today's limit or warm-up budget. The rest goes out when there is room.

My campaign was paused and I did not do it. The number's quality rating dropped. See Automatic pause.

Can I send a broadcast to someone who has not opted in? No. This protects your number and respects the customer.

Launch is greyed out. Open the Review step. A yellow box lists what is missing.

My SMS campaign used more messages than I expected. Long messages and emoji split into several parts, and each part counts. Check the counter in step 3.