How a Broadcast Reaches Your Contacts
What happens between pressing Create & Schedule and a message landing.
What It Is
A broadcast is a one-off send to a chosen audience. You define the campaign, choose who receives it, and schedule it. Zyntro then works through that audience one contact at a time until everyone has been dealt with.
There are two kinds, and they differ in only one respect — who writes the message.
- A standard broadcast (called Simple Broadcast in the menu) sends one template to everyone. Merge variables fill in each person's own details, but the message is the same message.
- An intelligent broadcast (Intelligent Outreach) writes a different message for every contact, from that contact's own history and from the objective you set for the campaign.
Everything else — the audience, the schedule, the reporting, the controls while it runs — works identically, and works the same way for email and for text.
Why It Matters
Knowing the stages tells you what a campaign is doing when it has not finished yet, and whether that is a problem.
An intelligent campaign in particular does not send everything at once, and it is not supposed to. Each message is written individually, so a large audience is worked through over hours rather than minutes. A campaign that says Sending with most of its audience still pending is behaving correctly — and is exactly why the send window matters, because a window too narrow for the audience will keep pausing the work.
It also tells you where a message can be stopped. Up to the moment it is handed to delivery, a message can be held back. After that it is gone and cannot be recalled.
How It Works
1. Enrolled. Scheduling the campaign records one entry for every contact who will receive it. This is the moment the audience is fixed: contacts added to your CRM afterwards are not in the campaign, and nor is anyone the audience excluded. Each entry starts as Queued.
2. Prepared. Your account's own worker picks up queued contacts a few at a time. For a standard broadcast it fills in the template. For an intelligent broadcast it writes that contact's message, which is slower and is the reason the campaign trickles. While a message is being written the entry reads Generating.
3. Checked. On an intelligent broadcast the finished message is held and reviewed — against the mandates you attached, your brand voice and your campaign objective. A message that passes moves on to delivery. A message that does not is marked Quarantined and is never sent. Nothing can be delivered before this check has run, so an unreviewed message cannot slip out. Standard broadcasts skip this stage; there is nothing to review in a template you wrote yourself.
4. Sent. Delivery is a separate stage with its own queue. Emails go out through your verified sending domain, texts through your messaging service. Opt-out is re-checked at this point, so a contact who opts out after being enrolled still is not contacted.
When every enrolled contact has reached a final state — sent, failed, quarantined or skipped — the campaign marks itself Completed.
Examples
A standard email newsletter to 400 contacts
All 400 are enrolled at once. The template is filled in for each of them and handed to delivery in batches. There is no review stage, so this moves quickly — minutes, not hours.
An intelligent email campaign to 400 contacts
All 400 are enrolled at once, then written individually, a few at a time, only on your chosen send days and inside your send window. Each message is reviewed before it can send. Expect the campaign to run for hours, and watch it progress on the campaign page rather than waiting for it to finish.
A contact opts out an hour after the campaign starts
If their message has not been handed to delivery yet, they are not contacted — opt-out is checked again at send. If it had already gone out, it cannot be recalled.
Info: A broadcast sends once per contact. For multi-step follow-up over days or weeks, use a sequence instead.
