Which to use: Broadcasting vs Transactional

Hey @Vish! 👋

As you likely well know, Transactional Messages should really only be used on a transactional basis, e.g. your customer needs to be notified of an update to an order they placed, or they are requesting a password reset and you need to send them a link to proceed with the password reset. So, with that in mind, it seems like the core question here is, are your twice-a-day emails “transactional”? If not, you should use a Campaign, Newsletters, or API Triggered Broadcasts. (https://customer.io/docs/journeys/types-of-campaigns-and-broadcasts/#transactional-messages)

From what it sounds like, I believe you might need to consider sending messages via API Triggered Broadcasts (APITB). You could trigger an API Triggered Broadcast in the morning and evening with a specific segment (or set of segments) in mind. You can also supply specific custom data to each recipient you list by including that data in your request as “per_user_data”. If you have many customer to message in one broadcast, and each profile has custom data you wish to reference, you can work around the request size limitation by uploading that data to a publicly accessible URL and supplying that URL in your API call as the “data_file_url”. More details about this can be found here:

• https://customer.io/docs/journeys/previewing-broadcast-data/#providing-custom-data-per-user
• https://customer.io/docs/api/app/#operation/triggerBroadcast

In terms of the API limit, with some planning, it should be easy to stay well under that rate limit. Customer.io helps marketing teams send millions of broadcast messages each day, so we’re very optimistic that you will be able to accomplish what you’re hoping to with this feature as well! 😊

If you run into any issues setting up your APITB, let us know and we’ll work through the issues with you here, or via email.