Choose who receives a broadcast

Step 1 of the broadcast wizard is Audience. It asks for one thing: which contacts this campaign goes to. There is no tag picker and no filter builder here; you pick a single saved segment, or you retarget the recipients of an earlier broadcast. The audience always resolves against the channel you are broadcasting on, which is the channel active in your workspace when you start the wizard. It is shown on the Message step and can’t be changed once the broadcast is saved.

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Pick a segment

With Type set to Contact, you choose from:

• All contacts: every contact reachable on this channel (by primary channel or a channel identity).
• Active contacts: contacts whose status is active.
• Every saved segment in your workspace, listed by name.

On Facebook and Instagram you also get two extra options:

• Opted in — notifications: contacts who gave Meta’s one-time notification opt-in.
• Messaging window open (24h): contacts who messaged you in the last 24 hours.

Each option shows an estimated <count> contacts. That estimate is taken when you build the broadcast; the real recipient list is expanded when it sends, so a scheduled broadcast picks up contacts added in between. An empty audience is not an error. The broadcast is simply marked Sent with zero recipients.

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Targeting by tag, stage, custom field or recency

The broadcast wizard has no filters of its own: no tag, no pipeline stage, no custom field. Anything more specific than the options above is built once as a saved segment under Contacts → Segments, then picked here by name. A segment works in two layers. The basic filters at the top are pipeline stage, tags to include, tags to exclude, and days since last activity. Below them, Conditions is a rule builder with groups and ALL/ANY matching that reaches much further: Custom field, lifecycle stage, source, birthday month, a single tag, marketing opt-in, total spend, last purchase, order count, loyalty points and credit balance. See Tags and segments. A twelfth condition, Reachable on channel, matches contacts who do or don’t have an identity on a channel you have connected. It rarely earns its place in a broadcast segment, because a broadcast’s audience is already limited to contacts reachable on the channel you are broadcasting on. It is more useful for cross-channel work, such as finding everyone on WhatsApp who is not on Telegram. A custom field can therefore decide who gets a broadcast. Add a Custom field condition, choose which field, and compare it with is, is not, contains, does not contain, has any value, is empty, greater than, less than, at least or at most. Keep the division of labour straight: the segment does the filtering, and the broadcast only points at the segment. There is still no custom-field box in the wizard.

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Opt-outs

This is the part to get right. A contact who has opted out never receives a broadcast. Every channel blocks them at the moment of sending, whatever audience you chose. That guard is not something you can switch off, and it is what keeps you compliant. What the audience does not do is remove them beforehand. Reachable contacts only is unticked by default, and it is the only thing that filters opted-out contacts out of the audience. Leave it unticked and opted-out contacts are still expanded into the recipient list. They get nothing, but they take up a recipient slot and land in your Failed count. Two things about that checkbox to be aware of:

• Its hint says it skips contacts who “can’t be messaged on this channel”. It only excludes opted-out contacts. Contacts outside a messaging window are deliberately not excluded.
• The Audience breakdown donut shown on the Schedule and Review steps, including its <count> opted out figure, is a placeholder. It always shows 95% deliverable and 5% opted out regardless of your actual opt-out data. Don’t use it as an opt-out report; check Contacts instead.

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Unreachable contacts

Contacts in the audience who can’t actually be reached still consume a recipient row. What happens depends on why: The specific reason a contact failed is recorded, but the broadcast itself only shows counts. Two places go further. On WhatsApp, a template’s performance drawer has a Failed sends list naming each failed contact with the reason and the date, though it covers every send of that template rather than this one campaign; see Read broadcast results. On Facebook and Instagram, the Messenger delivery breakdown on the broadcast shows how many were reached in-window versus via an opt-in versus skipped. For failure reasons scoped to one broadcast, on any channel, the API is still the only route. SMS and Telegram have no messaging window, so window-related failures don’t apply to them. WhatsApp broadcasts use an approved template, which is what lets them reach contacts outside the window. See WhatsApp rules and limits.

Facebook and Instagram notification opt-ins are spent automatically

If a Facebook or Instagram contact is outside the 24-hour window but holds a notification opt-in, the broadcast uses it to deliver the message. The opt-in is single-use: once spent it’s gone, and that contact needs a new one before you can reach them outside the window again. The Opted in — notifications segment targets exactly these contacts, so a campaign to it burns the opt-in of every contact who was outside the 24-hour window at send time; contacts still inside the window are reached normally and keep theirs.

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Retarget a previous broadcast

Set Type to Retarget to re-message the people an earlier campaign reached, filtered by what they did with it. Pick a Retarget broadcast and a Retarget engagement type: Only broadcasts that are sending or already sent can be a source, and only ones on the same channel (the 100 most recent). You can’t retarget a broadcast at itself. Retarget audiences show no count in the wizard: the list is resolved from the source broadcast when this broadcast sends, and then narrowed to contacts you can reach on this channel.

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Resending a broadcast that partly failed

A campaign with a big Failed count doesn’t need rebuilding from your segment. All Failed is the resend button, three steps long: All Failed means contacts whose send actually failed: a closed window, a provider error, an opt-out. Contacts who were skipped because their record was deleted aren’t included; there’s nobody left to message.

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