How an offer reaches your contacts
Two routes, and the one condition both of them depend on.
What It Is
Creating an offer does not send anything. An offer is a record waiting to be used, and there are exactly two ways it gets used.
Segmentation Intelligence decides to use it. When SI writes an email, an SMS or a video message for a contact, your finished offers are part of what it is given. It can choose to bring one in when the contact's situation warrants it, and it writes the mention itself using the offer's description, terms and instructions.
You place it yourself. In an email template or an SMS, you can insert a smart tag that names one specific offer and one specific field. At send time that tag is replaced with the offer's current text. This is the route to use when you know every recipient of a template should see the same deal.
Why It Matters
The difference matters because the two routes give you different amounts of control.
With Segmentation Intelligence, you are not choosing who sees the offer or how it is worded. You are making the offer available and letting SI judge the moment. That is the point of it — the judgement is what you are buying — but it means you should expect an offer to appear in some messages and not others, and to be worded differently each time.
With a smart tag, you decide exactly where the text goes and every recipient of that template gets it. The wording is fixed to whatever is on the offer record.
Most businesses end up using both: a broadcast or a sequence that states a seasonal deal explicitly, and a standing offer that SI reaches for when a conversation calls for it.
How It Works
Both routes depend on the same condition, and it is worth being clear about it.
An offer is only available if its status is Done and it has a finished description. An offer sitting at Draft is invisible to both routes. An offer marked Done but with no description — which is what you get if you create one with the enhancement switched off and never write the text yourself — is skipped, because a name with no terms is not something either route can use responsibly.
For the Segmentation Intelligence route, your finished offers are collected for the brand and handed to whichever part of SI is composing. Along with each offer's name, description, terms and instructions, SI also receives that offer's email hooks — the per-audience subject-line angles the enhancement wrote — so it has a starting point rather than inventing an angle from nothing.
For the smart tag route, the tag names the offer by record, not by name, so renaming an offer never breaks a template. The replacement happens when the message is actually sent, which means editing an offer updates every template that references it, with no republishing.
Examples
A standing new-customer offer, used by Segmentation Intelligence
You create Two Months Free on Grow as an evergreen offer and leave it finished and Done. You never mention it in a template. Over the following weeks SI brings it into conversations with contacts who have been weighing up a decision, wording it differently for an agency owner than for a solo consultant, and leaves it out of conversations where it would be premature.
A seasonal deal in a broadcast, placed by you
You create November Special with a fixed expiry date. You write a broadcast and insert the offer's description and terms as smart tags. Every recipient gets the same wording. Two days later you tighten the terms on the offer page and save — the broadcast that has not gone out yet picks up the new text, because the tag is resolved at send time.
An offer that quietly never appears
You create an offer with the enhancement switched off, meaning to come back and write the copy. The offer shows as Done in the list, so it looks ready. It is not: with no description, both routes skip it. The offer page tells you so, and writing the four fields in the right-hand column and saving makes it usable.
Tip: If you want an offer available to Segmentation Intelligence but kept out of a particular campaign, that is the natural state of things — SI only uses what it judges relevant, and a template only contains the tags you put in it. You do not need to do anything to keep the two apart.
