A broadcast email is a single message sent to an entire list or a chosen segment at one scheduled time, rather than being triggered individually by each subscriber's own actions.
The Channel Automation Can't Replace
With so much attention on triggered, behavior-based email, it’s easy to treat broadcast as the outdated approach automation is meant to eventually replace. What is a broadcast email actually good for, though, is anything time-bound and shared: a sale that starts on a specific date, a product launch, a company announcement. No amount of individual behavior tracking can substitute for a message that genuinely needs to reach everyone on the same day, because the moment itself, not any one subscriber’s activity, is what makes the email relevant.
This is also loosely what people mean by an email blast, though that phrase tends to carry a slightly less deliberate connotation, implying a message sent to everyone without much thought to segment or relevance, whereas a well-run broadcast email is still targeted, just not individually triggered.
Where the Line With Automation Actually Sits
Broadcast email vs automation isn’t really a competition between two approaches, it’s a division of labor. A broadcast goes out because the sender decided today is the day, a specific date and time chosen in advance. An automated email goes out because a subscriber did something, abandoning a cart, making a purchase, going quiet for a month. Neither can fully cover what the other does well: automation can’t announce a flash sale that starts at noon for everyone at once, and broadcast can’t react individually to a subscriber’s cart sitting abandoned at 2am.
Most functioning broadcast email marketing programs run both simultaneously without much conflict, since a broadcast, for a launch or a sale announcement, and an ongoing automation, for abandoned carts and welcome sequences, are solving genuinely different problems rather than competing for the same job.
Why Broadcast Still Matters Even With the Revenue Gap
It’s worth being upfront about the numbers here: automated, triggered email consistently outperforms broadcast sends by a wide margin, with some platform data showing automated emails generating multiple times more revenue per send than scheduled campaigns. That gap doesn’t mean broadcast email is obsolete, it means the two serve different jobs. No automation trigger can announce that a sale is starting today, or that a new product line just launched, since neither of those is tied to an individual subscriber’s behavior. The revenue-per-send comparison, while real, measures the wrong thing if it’s used to argue a store should abandon broadcast sending entirely rather than simply making sure automation carries its fair share of the program alongside it.
Related terms:
Adflipr’s drag-and-drop email builder makes it easy to design and schedule a broadcast email to a full list or a specific segment in a few minutes.
