Broadcast Email vs Triggered Email: What's the Difference?

A broadcast email is a one-time send to a large group at once - a person drafts the content and schedules it to go out to an entire list or segment simultaneously, with every recipient getting essentially the same message.

A triggered email is sent automatically in response to a specific action a subscriber takes - signing up, abandoning a cart, making a purchase - set up once and then running in the background indefinitely without a person deciding to send each individual instance.

The core distinction is what makes the send happen: a broadcast is triggered by a human decision - someone chose today to send this message to this list - while a triggered email is triggered by subscriber behavior, firing automatically whenever the qualifying action occurs, whether that's once a day or a thousand times. That difference shapes how each is used. Broadcasts suit content that's genuinely the same for everyone at a specific moment - a newsletter, a sale announcement, a company update - where relevance comes from timing rather than personalization. Triggered emails suit content that only makes sense in response to something the recipient specifically did, and because they're tied to individual behavior rather than a shared calendar moment, they tend to be more personalized and consistently see stronger engagement than broadcasts sent to an entire list regardless of individual relevance.