What is a Campaign?

Campaigns are how you send one-off message broadcasts to your customer Segments and Lists. We currently support the following channels for sending these broadcasts:

1. Email

2. SMS

3. Push notifications (FCM)

4. Web in-app

More channels coming soon.

Email

You can send email campaigns to your users with valid email addresses in their profiles. However, to prevent spam, your account needs to have been verified and enabled to be able to send emails. Verification is automatic and happens within a few hours of sign-up. Learn more.

When you sign up, you are automatically provisioned a default sender address to send email campaigns but you can use your custom domain. If you already use any of the email service providers (ESP) we support, you can connect the service and use that for your email campaigns (and Automations) instead. We currently support Amazon SES, Mailgun, and Sendgrid.

SMS

You can send SMS campaigns to users with phone numbers attached to their profiles. At the moment, you will need to connect an SMS gateway to send SMS campaigns. You can do this from Settings -> Integrations on your Engage dashboard. We currently support Twilio, Termii Africa’s Talking, and Hollatags.

Push notifications

You can send push notifications to users by connecting your FCM account to Engage. If you use other push notification services like OneSignal and Expo, you can also connect them instead. This is available in Settings -> Integrations on your Engage dashboard.

If you are using FCM (learn more) or Expo (learn more), a user needs to have their device token attached to their Engage profile to be able to receive a push campaign. You can use the user API or any of the available SDKs to do this, i.e. update the customer’s device_token and device_platform. For OneSignal, this is not necessary. You only need to ensure you are using the same user ID to identify users on both OneSignal and Engage. Learn more.

We currently store up to 5 device tokens per customer. When you send a campaign, it is sent to all the device tokens connected to the user's profile.

Web in-app

You can send messages that display as a message popup at the bottom right corner of your visitor or user's browser. You need to have installed the Engage JS SDK on web pages you want this to show up and identify/track the recipient on the page. If the recipient is online at the moment, the message immediately shows up. If they are not, it shows up when next they visit a page with the JS SDK. Learn more.