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Marketing Tools – Broadcast – Sending a Message

This article is about the Sending stage in a Marketing Tools broadcast. There are several stages which can be worked on individually (and in almost any order):

  • Setup – the name and type of broadcast
  • Audience – who the broadcast will go to
  • Message – the broadcast message itself
  • Testing – testing the message by sending tests to yourself, colleagues or a seed list
  • Sending – sending the message
  • Reporting – reporting on a sent message

Getting ready to send a broadcast

You can only send a broadcast once you have completed the setup, audience and message stages. We recommend you test it thoroughly before sending. 

If it is not ready to send, you will see a “Not ready to send” error with instructions on what to do.

Otherwise, you will see a “Ready to send” message.

As of release 4.8, you can also preview your seed list on the send screen.

Live send screen

Sending the broadcast

Review the Query and other items at the top.

Sending the message immediately

You can “Send immediately” which will immediately schedule the email to be sent out to the selected supporters. 

Scheduling the message

You can schedule the message broadcast for a later date/time. Select the appropriate Date, Time and Timezone.

Send Time Optimization

When scheduling the message,  you can also choose to use “Send Time Optimization”. This will attempt to send according to the “Send Date” and “Send Time” for the supporter’s timezone, based on collected data from when they interact with your pages.

This can also be uploaded via the Data & Reports > Import tool. You would need two columns at least in your CSV file – the email address of the supporter, and a column headed as “Send Offset”, which should contain values for supporter time offsets from GMT (+00:00). The software supports a range of pre-defined time-zones.

Currently defined zones for send offsets are:

+10:00
+09:30
+09:00
+08:00
+05:30
+03:00
+01:00
-00:00
+00:00
-03:00
-04:00
-05:00
-06:00
-07:00
-08:00

As not all timezones are included in this list of send offsets, some values representing offsets which fall near one these pre-defined zones will be converted upon import. For example, +04:30, +05:00, +05:45, +06:00, +06:30 and 06:45 are near +05:30, and so will be selected as being part of this “zone”.

After Importing

Make sure you check the result file from your import job after it has completed, as any supporters with wrongly formatted send offsets will be omitted from the import.

Send Time Optimization

Please schedule at least 24 hours prior to sending for best performance

Supporters in Marketing Automations

Depending on your account preferences, the tool might automatically exclude supporters currently in a Marketing Automation workflow from your broadcast. You can override this by switching “”Include supporters on all Marketing Automation workflows” on

This is useful if, for example, you have an emergency appeal email to send out and you want to reach as many supporters as possible.

Rescheduling and Canceling

Once the email has been scheduled or sent, it will show as a job in the job monitor. To cancel a scheduled email, the job can be deleted from the job monitor.

Broadcasts can also be canceled or rescheduled from the Messaging Broadcast area by selecting the clock icon.
Reschedule broadcast

Make sure your links will encode correctly! Check your Allowed Domains under Hello > Account Settings > Allowed Domains to be sure that the first and second domains/subdomains are ones that are pointing to our servers. If there are domains/subdomains that are not pointed to our servers, your links will not encode correctly and your links will fail in a live email.

Updated on March 5, 2024

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