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Brew builds two types of email: Emails and Automations. They look similar but serve different purposes and run differently. A quick note on the terminology. Everything Brew sends is technically an email, so calling one type “Emails” can feel a little circular at first. What we mean is the one-off, campaign-style send. You write it, schedule it, and send it to an audience at a moment you choose. In other tools this is often called a “campaign.” Automations are the emails that fire automatically in response to an event, like a signup or a purchase. They run in the background forever.

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Use an Email When…

  • You want to send something to a list of people at a specific time
  • The send is intentional and one-off, an announcement, a promo, a newsletter
  • You’re scheduling in advance, “Send this next Tuesday at 9am”
Examples: product launch announcement, Black Friday promo, monthly newsletter, event invite, re-engagement send.

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Use an Automation When…

  • You want to send in response to something that happens, a signup, a purchase, a cancellation
  • The email needs to go to one person, at the right moment, automatically
  • You want a multi-step sequence that runs over time without you touching it
Examples: welcome flow, onboarding drip, abandoned cart, payment failed dunning, win-back.
One exception to the “runs forever” rule: a manual-audience automation runs a saved audience through the flow on demand. Treat it as a one-off rather than a live, ongoing automation. You get the structure of a flow (waits, filters, splits) with the one-off nature of an Email. See Manual audience.

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One Design, Many Sends

The email itself is just a design, the layout, copy, and imagery. A design has no idea whether it’s a one-off send or an automation, and it carries no send state. The same design can be sent as an Email today and referenced by an automation tomorrow. Nothing about the email changes. What differs is the send, the act of delivering that design to real people. Every time Brew delivers a design, it records one send:
  • An Email records a single send, scoped to the audience you picked. One send row covers the whole blast.
  • An Automation records one send per recipient, each contact that flows through a Send Email step gets their own send, fired at their own moment.
Both kinds of send land in the same place, tagged as either an email send or an automation send. That’s why your analytics line up across both. Opens, clicks, and bounces all attach to the send that produced them, no matter which surface created it.

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You Don’t Have to Choose Upfront

Brew figures it out from your prompt. Just describe what you want: Brew routes you to the right type automatically.
  • “Send a Black Friday email next Tuesday” → Email
  • “When someone signs up, send a 3-step welcome flow” → Automation
  • “Write a product update newsletter for this week” → Email

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A Note on Transactional Emails

Transactional emails send one real-time message, such as a password reset or an order confirmation. They’re delivered even to unsubscribed contacts because they carry essential account information, and they skip the unsubscribe footer. Brew’s transactional email isn’t generally available yet. Until it is, keep account-critical messages on your current transactional provider. Automations cover the marketing side of event-driven email today: welcome flows, onboarding, abandoned cart, win-back. They respect unsubscribes, which is exactly why they aren’t a substitute for a password reset.

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Next Steps

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