Broadcasts
Send one-shot lifecycle emails to consented customers or segments, with local-time scheduling and conversion goals.
What a broadcast is
A Broadcast is a one-shot email to everyone who matches your audience (all consented customers, or selected Segments). Use broadcasts for launches, announcements, and one-time campaigns. For multi-step follow-ups, use Automations.
Open Engage → Broadcasts.
Create and launch
- Create a broadcast and open Edit.
- Set a name (optional description and tags).
- Optionally set a Conversion goal — the SDK event that counts as success within a window of days. The goal locks when the broadcast launches so reporting stays comparable.
- Optionally set a Holdout weight (%) — a share of recipients who receive no email so you can compare against people who did. Remaining weight goes to the broadcast message. Analytics can show arms under A/B variants.
- Choose Send on launch or Schedule for later.
- Pick the audience (segments and, when topics mode is on, a marketing topic).
- Edit email to compose the message, then review and Send now or Schedule.
Drafts stay editable until you launch. Scheduled broadcasts can be cancelled from the broadcast detail page before they go out.
Schedule timezone
When you schedule for later:
| Option | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Each recipient's local time | Expands at launch so every Customer gets that clock time in their timezone (app default timezone if theirs is unknown) |
| Same time for everyone | Interpreted in the app default timezone from Frequency Cap settings |
Quiet hours (also under Frequency Cap) can defer a delivery that would land in the quiet window; they do not drop the send.
Audience and topics
- With no segments selected, Rheo targets consented customers who pass send checks.
- Select one or more Segments to narrow the audience. Segments live under Customers → Segments.
- When marketing topics mode is on, assign the broadcast’s topic so only people granted for that topic are eligible.
Templates and the composer
Engage → Templates holds reusable starters. Choosing Use template… (or applying a template from an automation Email step) copies the content into that message. Editing the broadcast or automation email afterward does not change the library template.
The composer supports:
- Visual mode — drag blocks into a layout
- HTML mode — edit the HTML directly
Switching back to Visual after HTML edits that diverge from the layout can discard those HTML-only changes; the composer warns you first.
Personalization
Insert merge tags in subject or body:
{{key}}— replaced with the Customer value when present{{key | "fallback"}}— uses the quoted fallback when the value is missing or empty
Built-in keys include email and app_user_id. Customer attributes (for example first_name) are available when your app stores them on the Customer.
Send test
Use Send test email from the composer to deliver a personalized preview through your connected provider. Test sends do not enroll contacts or count toward broadcast analytics. For test-environment traffic, destinations may be limited by the test destination allowlist.
After launch
Broadcast detail shows delivery counts, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, frequency-cap skips, and conversion metrics when a goal was set. If you configured a holdout, compare arms under A/B variants.
From the terminal
List, create, schedule, send, and export recipient rows with rheo engage broadcasts in the CLI. broadcasts export writes a CSV. Send now requires an owner or admin key; editors can draft and schedule.
Related
- Set up Engage — Provider, consent, quiet hours, frequency cap
- Automations — Multi-step journeys
- Customers — Segments and consent on profiles
- CLI —
rheo engage broadcasts