Overview

Batch messages are used for one-time sends. They can be sent immediately or scheduled for a future date. You can send batch messages through any available channel: email, SMS, or mobile.

Create a new message

When creating a new batch message, you will need to give the message a name, add any message tags, and choose the sending channel.

1. From the Cordial dashboard, navigate to Messages on the left sidebar and select Create New Message.

2. In the Create New Message pop-up, complete the new message info.

• • Message name: The name that will be referenced in the system.
  • Tags: Tags are used for grouping related messages, searching and building audiences, and filtering message reports.

    Tags are case sensitive. For example, promo and Promo are two unique tags.

  • Channel: The channel—email, SMS, or mobile push—will affect the type of message being sent. This selection will determine the message content method, as well as the transport.
  • Editor: You can decide whether you want to create your message with our easy-to-use Sculpt Editor, or by manually creating the HTML.
  • Classification: Promotional messages are general-purpose and used in batch messaging with rare exceptions. Transactional messages are sent in response to a person's behavior on your site or app.

Schedule a message

Batch messages can be sent immediately or scheduled to be sent on a future date in the Schedule pane. When scheduling for a future date, you have the option of scheduling the send according to the contact's time zone.

Message sending can also be throttled so messages go out in batches according to audience size or maximum number of batches. This is useful when you switch from another ESP (event stream processing system) and need to warm up the new IP address for improved deliverability. Learn more about IP ramping here.

Messages will send immediately by default. To edit the schedule, click the Edit button under Schedule and choose a schedule option:

• Send immediately
• Schedule for future date
• Throttled batch sending

• Learn more about message scheduling and throttling here.

Build an audience

Before a message is sent, you must choose the audience by selecting Edit in the Audience pane. You have the option to either send to all contacts, or use the Audience Builder to filter your contacts according to include and exclude audience rules.

• Learn more about our Audience Builder here.

Create message content

The type of message content you create will depend on the message channel. If choosing the email channel, you must also fill out Message Header info that includes the Subject, From Email, Reply Email, and From Description.

Visit the following articles to learn about creating content for different message channels:

• Create message content for the email channel.
• Create message content for the SMS channel.
• Create message content for the mobile push channel.

Configure goals and tracking

In the Goals and Tracking pane, you can choose whether to enable or disable link tracking and appending for all links in the message.

• You can disable link tracking and appending for individual links using the data-crdl-notrack Smarty attribute or conditionally at the message level using the setEmailLinkTracking Smarty utility.
• You can disable email opens tracking using the setEmailOpensTracking Smarty utility.

All event activity is stored in Cordial for 18 months. Message open and link click events are tracked for 30 days from the time the message is sent. Links will continue to work after 30 days, but tracking will be disabled. Attribution is not tracked for purchases made via links after the 30 day period.

Select the message transport

Transport names available for selection in the Message Header pane will depend on whether your message is Promotional or Transactional. The From Email domains available for selection in the dropdown menu will be determined by the transport you choose.

• Visit this article to learn more about message transports and how to set message header defaults for new messages.

Send a test message

You can send a test message to check rendering in the inbox. Before a test message can be sent, the message headers and content must be provided. Once you've created headers and content for your message, the Send Test button will appear in the left sidebar.

Enter contacts: Type or paste one or more email addresses, separated by commas. This is convenient for sending test messages to frequently used test accounts.

Search and select contacts: Search for contacts by keyword. This is useful for retrieving a list of contacts that match your criteria, such as those that have your email domain: @yourdomain.com.

When ready, click the Send Test Now button.

1). All test email addresses must exist as valid and subscribed contacts in your account. 2). Test message links will expire after 24 hours if link tracking is enabled for the message. 3). If you receive the error "Internal Render Error" when trying to send test messages, it may be a result of badly formed links in your HTML. Make sure to check all links for any unnecessary spaces or characters in your URLs. The Internal Render Error can also be the result of a missing HTML Include. Ensure that all HTML Includes that are referenced in a message do in fact exist in the account. 

Tip

When sending multiple message tests, it's sometimes useful to have a unique subject line per send since some email clients will group all messages with the same subject line within a message thread. (Gmail, for example, does this.) You can use the following getNow Smarty utility to generate a unique subject line per test send:

 {$utils->getNow('America/Los_Angeles', "Y-m-d H:i:s")} This is a subject line

• Learn more about date and timestamp variables here.

Send the message

Once all required content has been completed, you can send the message to the specified audience by clicking the Send Message or the Schedule Message button.

Once a message has been sent, you can pause, resume or cancel a message send.

Campaign alerting

You can to set up custom alerting for batch messages across channels that fall below or exceed a specified threshold. Once you've configured the alert, an email is automatically sent to the designated email address(es) and logged in the Account Monitor dashboard. This increases awareness of potential issues for you and your team to resolve more quickly.

1. When creating a new message or editing an existing one, click Edit in the Alerting pane to configure your campaign alert.

2. Set the Status to Enabled. 

3. Configure your alert settings under Condition. By default, the When condition for the alert is total sent messages.

Use case

You could set an alert when the total messages sent falls below 2,000. You can also use greater than as a condition metric for triggering an alert.

4. Enter a destination email for the alert under Notify.

5. View details for your alert in the alert email or on the Account Monitor page. 

6. To view alert details on the Account Monitor page, select Batch messages in the categories dropdown, then select Alerts from the levels dropdown.

View and search sent messages

After a message has been sent, you are able to view it on the Sent Messages page (Messages > Email Sent). By default, messages are sorted by Send Time. You can also sort messages by Name by clicking its column header in the sent messages table.

Search sent messages

You can quickly search a message by Name using the search field at the top of the page. Additional search and filter functionality is available by selecting the Advanced Search menu.

• Search by Tag: Use the Tags search input to search any messages that contain specified tags. Tags are case sensitive. To search multiple tags, use a comma to separate each tag. The comma acts as an "or" operator.
• Filter by Send Time: Using the Send Time search input, you can filter messages that were sent On, Before, or After a specified date.
• Filter by Status: Using the Status dropdown, you can view messages with a sending status of Sent, Cancel, Pause, or Sending.
• Filter by feature: You can display messages that contain specific features using Filters. Select the checkboxes to filter sent messages that have an Inbox Placement Test, a Throttled send, Timezone sending, or an Experiment.

You can view the status details of sent or sending messages by hovering over the sent time.

In the next article, learn about scheduling and throttling a message send.