Sending Your First Message

Sending Messages and activating your audience through MessageGears is easy, and follows a straightforward four-step process:

1. Connecting to your data
2. Defining an audience
3. Creating message content
4. Activating delivery channels

Step 1: Connecting to Your Data

MessageGears sits directly within your data environment, giving teams secure access to 100% of their data.

1. To connect to your data, first create a data connection from the database connections page.
2. Fill in your connection credentials and test your connection. As a reminder, MessageGears connects to your data regardless of where it sits - see our quick start guides on Snowflake, Redshift, Google Cloud, and MySQL for more information on preparing your data environment for MessageGears.
3. Once you’ve connected to your data, You’ll want to create an initial query to create the starting population for your audience down the road. Navigate to the ‘audience’ section under the Message navigation tab and create a SQL query that defines a simple selection. This can be as simple as a select * against a predefined table. For more information, check out our guides on creating SQL audiences or API audiences.
4. You can preview the audience from the top right ‘preview’ modal - when you’ve successfully created an initial population, give it a name and click ‘Create Audience’.

Step 2: Defining an Audience

Now that you’ve set up a valid initial population, it’s time to define an audience using our Blueprints. 

1. To create a new blueprint, select People > Blueprints and start by using the audience you just created as the source for your blueprint.
2. Define your audience by creating segmentation logic within your blueprint. Segmenting a parent node will create further nodes underneath as your audience gets smaller and more specific 
   • Blueprints come with a myriad of options - click here to see more about defining your audience.
3. When you’re done segmenting your audience, you’ll scroll to the bottom of your blueprint to see a target node - this is a segment of the final audience you’ll be activating. Target nodes receive messages or are activated via third parties.

Step 3: Creating Message Content

After connecting to your data and defining an audience, it’s time to generate creative to send to your target population. 

1. To create your message content, select Content > Templates (under Content Management) and then select Create template.
2. Give your new template a name and description and select your initial audience created in the previous section to use as test data for your creative. It’s important that your template have sample recipients to test your creative against to ensure that your audience has all of the correct attributes to create the personalized copy and images for your campaign
3. Define your cross-channel content. With MessageGears, it’s possible to activate through multiple channels in a single campaign, so you may want to define creative for multiple channels as part of your template.
   • MessageGears gives data practitioners and marketers alike many options for defining creative. From using our drag-and-drop email and landing page creator all the way to defining individual SMS and mobile fields, you have the ability to create targeted and specific material for your audience. For more information, see our help guide on the Freemarker personalization language or using your data to personalize messages

Step 4: Activating Delivery Channels

After defining an audience (the ‘who’) and the message (the ‘what’), now it’s time to put both together and choose the ‘when’ by activating audience members in a campaign. In this example, we’ll send a marketing message to a small audience - see this guide if you’d like to send messages programmatically.

1. To create a new campaign, select Campaigns > Marketing, then select Create Marketing campaign.
2. Define your campaign by choosing the audience you defined in step 2 above with the creative defined in step 3. Alongside your audience and template, choose which channels the campaign will activate on as well as which account you’ll be sending from.
   • Your MessageGears account defines how you’ll messages be sent. Learn more about accounts and sending profiles here.
3. Once you’ve saved your campaign, test your campaign by previewing recipients in the Preview and test section, or send a test to yourself through the Send a test option.
4. To finish, select when your campaign will send through the schedule block. Campaigns can be standalone and send one-time in the future, or can recur on a set schedule - select the delivery method that’s right for you.

MessageGears offers a variety of analytical dashboard options depending on your send type. Find out more about your options here.