Channels & message content
Every messaging pipeline sends your survey invitation over a single channel. The channel decides what the message looks like and which details you fill in. This page walks through the three channels and the content each one carries.
Choosing a channel
When you create a pipeline you pick one of three channels — email, SMS or Viber. A pipeline stays tied to the channel you chose, so if you later want to reach people a different way, you create a new pipeline for that channel instead. Because a survey can have only one pipeline per channel, that gives each survey up to three lanes: one email, one SMS, one Viber.
The content you write always matches the channel. Switch your attention from one channel to another and the fields change to fit.
Email gives you the most room to design. You set:
- A subject line that recipients see in their inbox.
- A rich message body that you build in a visual editor — adding text, images, buttons and styling without touching any code.
Email is the right choice when your invitation benefits from branding, imagery or a prominent call-to-action button.
SMS
SMS is a single, plain-text message. There's no subject line and no formatting — just the words you want to send. Because it lands directly on someone's phone, keep it short and to the point, and remember that special characters and long messages can affect how the text is delivered and counted by your provider.
SMS is ideal when you want a short, immediate nudge that doesn't depend on someone opening an email.
Viber
Viber sends a message body much like SMS, but with one extra safeguard: an SMS fallback. If a recipient can't receive the Viber message — for example, they don't use Viber — your fallback message is sent by SMS instead, so your invitation still reaches them. You write both the Viber body and the fallback text.
One channel per pipeline
A pipeline is locked to its channel from the moment you create it. To send over a different channel, create a separate pipeline for it.
Writing your message
Every pipeline has a default message — the version most recipients receive. What that includes depends on the channel:
A subject line and a rich HTML body.
SMS
A plain-text message body.
Viber
A message body plus an SMS fallback body.
Fields that don't apply to a channel simply don't appear — SMS has no subject and no fallback, Viber has no subject. Only the body is required to make sense of a message; an email with an empty subject, for instance, will still send.
Adding languages
On top of the default message you can add per-language versions so people read your invitation in their own language. Each version carries the same fields as the default for that channel. This is covered in detail in Languages & locale.
Add a tracking id
You can give a pipeline an optional tracking id — an external reference that some messaging providers pass along to their own systems. It lets you match your sends against reports in your analytics tools. It's entirely optional; leave it blank if you don't need it.
Who actually sends the message
The pipeline decides what to send and over which channel. The sending accounts — your email server, your SMS or Viber provider, and the sender name or number recipients see — are set up once by an administrator under messaging providers in the Admin Panel.
That separation keeps things simple: an admin configures each connection a single time and from then on you just choose a channel and write your message. The same provider settings also govern delivery details that live outside the message itself — for example, whether a Viber provider falls back to SMS, or how special characters are handled on SMS — so if delivery behaves unexpectedly, that's the place to check.
Once messages go out, you can follow each one — sent, opened, failed or held back — in the dispatch queue.
Keep an eye on your allowance
Sends count against your plan's message allowance. If it runs out, items are held rather than sent. You can review usage under Subscription & usage.