Email, SMS and journeys

Email needs your sending domain verified with DNS records, and SMS needs a registered sender number. Until each is done, that channel is blocked rather than queued — getting started covers both.

Build rules on any customer field, RFM tier, predictive score, or browsing behaviour, and nest them with and, or and not for combinations like “bought in the last 90 days, but not from the sale collection, and not already in the VIP tier”.

Membership updates as orders and customer changes come in, rather than waiting for an overnight pass. It is fast, not instantaneous — a customer who ordered seconds ago may take a moment to appear.

A campaign almost always reaches fewer people than the segment count suggested. This is intended, and it is worth understanding before you treat it as a bug.

• Suppression always wins. Anyone unsubscribed, bounced, marked invalid, or who replied STOP is removed from every send. There is no way to override it, by design.
• SMS requires recorded consent. If there is no affirmative consent record for a number, it is skipped. Having a phone number on a customer record is not treated as permission to text it — that is a deliberate choice, because the penalties for getting SMS consent wrong are severe.
• Email works the other way round. Absence of a record means subscribed; only an explicit negative excludes someone.

A journey is a flow with steps, waits, branches and conditions — welcome series, abandoned cart, win-back, post-purchase. Build it once and it runs per customer from the point they enter.

Waits are durable. A journey that pauses for three days genuinely resumes three days later, and a customer cannot be double-sent because something restarted. Branches can test what the customer has done since entering, so a win-back flow can stop itself when someone buys.

• Frequency caps limit how many messages one person can receive in a window, across email and SMS together rather than per channel.
• Quiet hoursmute a nightly window in the recipient's own timezone.
• Send-time optimization delivers each email at the hour that recipient is most likely to open. Off until you turn it on, and email only.
• Send approval requires a second person to sign off before a campaign can go. Also off by default.

Campaigns support two to ten variants with weighted traffic and a statistical winner call. With more than two variants the comparison is corrected for the extra tests, so a variant has to win by more to be declared a winner — this avoids calling a fluke.

Journeys can issue native Shopify store credit and generate a unique discount code per customer. Codes are generated fresh each time, so no two customers ever share terms, and re-entering a journey never mints a duplicate. Store credit has its own page.

Every marketing email links to a hosted page where the recipient chooses channels and topics rather than only unsubscribing entirely. It needs no login — the link carries a signed token identifying them — and updates there feed straight back into consent records.