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 or recency

The broadcast wizard can’t filter by tag or pipeline stage. To target those, build the filter once as a saved segment under Contacts → Segments, then select it here. A segment is built from four things: pipeline stage, tags to include, tags to exclude, and days since last activity. See Tags and segments. Custom fields aren’t among them, so there is no way to target a broadcast by custom field — not in the wizard, and not via a segment.

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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 isn’t shown anywhere in the app — there is no per-recipient failure list. For Facebook and Instagram, the Messenger delivery breakdown on the broadcast is the closest thing: it shows how many were reached in-window versus via an opt-in versus skipped. 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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