Email or text: choosing the channel for one audience

Total match, reachable by email, reachable by SMS. Read them in that order.

Build an audience in Stampede and, before you save it, the preview shows three counts: everyone who matches, how many of them you can reach by email, and how many by SMS. Most people read the first number. The decision lives in the other two.

Why the three numbers differ

Consent is applied for you; it is not a condition you add. To be reachable on a channel a guest must have opted in to that channel and have a working email or phone, so the reachable counts are usually smaller than the total match, and the SMS count is usually smaller than the email count. A guest who withdraws consent drops out of reach immediately.

Reachable is not delivered. Unsubscribes and suppression are applied at send time, so the number that actually lands can be lower still. Treat the preview as a guide to reach, not a promise.

What each channel is good at

SMS is up to 130 characters, sent under your venue's sender name, one prepaid credit per message, with the balance and every message's cost kept in the SMS ledger. It reports delivery and opt-outs. It does not track link clicks; attribution comes from a spend-per-head figure and in-venue visits. That makes it right for a tight, relevant audience and a time-sensitive message: a same-day table release, a reminder two days before a long-lead booking, a flash offer with a clear end time.

Email sends from your own verified address with DKIM set up, to guests opted in to email, and it does not draw on SMS credits. It reports delivery, opens and clicks down to the link, with a click-map over the email and your most engaged contacts, and where bookings are connected it estimates the covers and revenue a send drove. That makes it right for anything with more than one thing to say, anything you want to measure by click, and any audience larger than you would happily pay a credit each for.

A worked example

Start from the quick-start recipe "lapsed regulars", then add a condition: not visited in the last 60 days. Say the preview shows 1,400 matched, 1,050 reachable by email, 380 by SMS.

Send the 1,050 an email: a short note from the venue, one button pointing at your booking page (the button adds tracking automatically). A week later, build a second audience from the same recipe with one more condition: received but did not open that campaign. That is your SMS list. It will be a few hundred guests, they have not read the email, and a 130-character text with a date in it is a different kind of nudge.

Two things the builder will not do

Conditions combine with AND, so every condition must match. To reach either of two groups, build two audiences, or tag the guests and build from the tag. And you cannot filter directly on spend or on a cancelled booking; tag the guest or run a workflow off that activity, then build the audience from the tag.

Before you press send

Check the sender name is the one guests will recognise. Check the SMS character count as you type; the text is tidied to standard SMS characters on save. Point the email at a saved audience rather than a one-off list, because audiences are live: recipients are whoever matches at send time, not when you saved it.