How to send a Broadcast to your customers

If you need to reach a set of customers at once - a pricing change, a new feature, a heads-up about maintenance - Broadcasts let you write the message once and deliver it to every matching Slack channel. Replies come back as normal Plain threads, so nothing falls through the cracks.

Before you start

You need:

• Plain's Slack integration connected

• At least one Slack channel set up as a customer channel

• Owner, Admin, or Support role if you want the message to send under your name

Everyone in your workspace can see every broadcast. There is no per-broadcast visibility.

Write your message

Go to Broadcasts and click New broadcast.

It saves as a draft immediately - nothing sends until you confirm.

• Name - internal only, never customer-facing. Name it for your team: "Q3 pricing update, Enterprise" beats "Hello".

• Notification title - what customers see in the Slack notification banner before they open the message. It defaults to your broadcast name, then breaks free the moment you edit it. Required before sending.

• Content - a formatted composer that becomes a Slack message. Press / to add headings, lists, images, buttons, or @here and @channel mentions. Select text to see the formatting toolbar.

• Send from - choose whether the message appears to come from your workspace name and avatar, or from a specific team member. The message goes out through Plain's Slack app either way; this only changes the name and photo recipients see.

• Unfurl links - on by default, matching Slack's own behavior. Turn it off if several links would otherwise expand into a wall of previews.

Choose who receives it

In the Deliver to section, add filters to build your audience. You can filter by:

• Audience - a saved, reusable filter (see below)

• Channel - specific Slack channels, pinned by identity

• Channel name - channels whose name contains text you type, matched at send time

• Tenant - specific customer accounts by name

• Tier - every customer on a given service tier

• Tenant field - any custom field you track on tenants, like region or plan

Plain resolves those filters into a live list of Slack channels as you build. The count at the top of the list is how many channels receive the message after any exclusions.

Excluding individual channels - uncheck any channel in the resolved list to drop it from this broadcast only. An excluding N pill appears next to your filters. Exclusions belong to the broadcast, not to the audience, so unchecking a channel here does not affect other broadcasts.

Saving an audience - if you will reuse the same filter, click Save as Audience. Audiences live at Broadcasts > Audiences, resolve fresh on every send, and can be combined with other filters on future broadcasts.

Send or schedule

Click Save and continue to reach the review step. Review shows the message exactly as it will arrive, with the audience locked.

Test first - the Test broadcast section lets you post to up to 10 channels before the real send. Pick an internal channel, not a customer one. Test sends are recorded in the broadcast's history but do not change its status.

Send now - posts immediately.

Schedule - pick a date and time in your local timezone. A scheduled broadcast stays editable: change the message, audience, or send time from the Scheduled tab, or cancel it entirely to return it to a draft.

Once a broadcast starts sending it cannot be recalled or edited. Check the audience count and send a test before confirming.

Reading the report

Once sending starts, the broadcast page becomes a live report:

• Delivered / Pending / Failed - a snapshot count. Recipients that fail show a reason on hover; failures here are final (anything retryable was already retried automatically).

• Reactions - emoji reactions totaled across every channel, updated in real time.

• Threads - every Plain thread created when a customer replied, newest first. Handle them like any other thread.

A send that reaches some channels and not others finishes as Partially sent, which is distinct from Sent.

Broadcast lifecycle

A broadcast can only be sent once. To send the same message again, start a new broadcast and rebuild the content, or find the threads the first one created and follow up there.

If your channel count looks wrong

The most common reason: the customer has no enabled, connected Slack channel. Check your Slack integration and confirm those channels are set up as customer channels. Audiences filter to enabled customer channels only - discussion channels and disabled channels are skipped without showing in the count.