Concepts
Lifecycle email
Behaviour-triggered email, aimed at a segment, written once and sent as HTML with a plain-text alternative. The same segment your analytics explained the problem with.
Email is the only channel
This area has no published API yet.
Segments, analytics, experiments, messages, imports and retention are reached through the console's own API, which exists to serve one first-party client and changes whenever that client does. Rather than print a shape we would have to break, this page describes what is structurally true. The public reference lands when the interface is stable enough to promise.
Push and SMS are not built.
The data model names three channels and only email has a provider behind it. A message set to push or SMS would be stored and would never send. Do not plan around them.
What a message is
A subject, a body, an optional call to action, and a segment. Loop renders the HTML and the plain-text alternative from one source, so the two cannot drift; a text part written separately is a text part that goes stale.
What sets it off
Entering the segment. Someone starts matching, and the message becomes eligible for them.
Entry is noticed on the person's next event, not by a nightly sweep.
Someone who matches and then never returns has not visibly entered anything. In practice that means a message aimed at inactive users needs a definition that a still-active person can cross, which is a design question about the segment, not a setting on the message.
Test send, and the ship gate
A test send goes to your own inbox: the real render through the real provider, before anyone else receives it. Nothing reaches a customer without a human approving it, whether a person or the agent drafted it.
What the numbers mean
Opens are measured by a pixel and are therefore a floor: privacy proxies pre-fetch some and block others. Clicks are a signed redirect and are the more honest of the two. Loop shows both and never blends them into one satisfying figure.