Email
Best for: Transactional messages, invoices, detailed information, and anything that needs formatting, attachments, or context.
Email gives you space to breathe. You can include images, PDFs, detailed explanations, and links. It's perfect when your message needs more than a quick alert.
When to use it:
- Order confirmations with full details
- Monthly statements or invoices
- Welcome sequences for new customers
- Policy updates or terms and conditions
- Anything requiring attachments or documentation
The trade-off: Email gets buried. Open rates are lower (around 20-30% for business emails), and urgent messages can sit unread for hours or days.
Voice Calls
Best for: Critical emergency alerts, urgent notifications, and messages that absolutely cannot be ignored.
Voice cuts through everything. When you need to reach someone immediately - like emergency evacuations, critical system failures, or urgent safety alerts - voice ensures the message is heard, not just delivered.
When to use it:
- Emergency notifications for staff or residents
- Critical system alerts for on-call teams
- Urgent facility closures or evacuations
- Phone number verification and login codes
- High-priority reminders for time-sensitive matters
The trade-off: Voice is more intrusive and more expensive per message. Use it when the situation genuinely demands immediate attention.
Instant Messaging (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger)
Best for: Customer service conversations, rich media marketing, engaging with customers where they already are.
Instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp let you have actual conversations. You can send images, videos, documents, interactive buttons, and create a more dynamic experience than plain SMS.
When to use it:
- Customer service and support queries
- Sharing product catalogues or visual content
- Engaging marketing campaigns with rich media
- Two-way conversations that need context
The trade-off: You're operating within someone else's platform. WhatsApp requires pre-approved message templates for business-initiated conversations, and you can only reach customers who use that specific app.
In-App Notifications (Slack, Microsoft Teams, CRM platforms)
Best for: Internal team communications, workflow alerts, system notifications, and logging.
This channel delivers information directly into the tools your teams already use. It's perfect for getting alerts to the right people in the right context.
When to use it:
- IT alerts to your support team's Slack or Teams channel
- CRM notifications when a lead takes action
- Workflow updates for project management
- System monitoring alerts to operations teams
The trade-off: This is internal-facing only. It's designed for known users (employees or platform members), not for communicating with the general public.
Branded Mobile App (Push Notifications)
Best for: Engaging your most loyal customers, delivering secure member-only updates, driving app usage.
If you've built your own mobile app, push notifications give you total control. You own the channel, the branding, the content, and the delivery rules.
When to use it:
- Engaging existing app users with personalised content
- Delivering exclusive offers to members
- Time-sensitive updates for active customers
- Building deep engagement with your most loyal audience
The trade-off: The barrier to entry is high. You need to build and maintain an app, then convince customers to download it and grant notification permissions. This only makes sense for larger organisations or businesses with compelling app value.
How TNZ Brings It All Together
Here's where things get interesting. You don't have to choose just one channel and stick with it forever. TNZ is a unified platform that gives you access to SMS, email, voice, instant messaging, and in-app notifications - all from one place.
One Platform, Multiple Channels
Instead of juggling separate tools for SMS, email, and voice (each with their own login, billing, and dashboard), TNZ combines everything into one system. You can:
- Send an SMS reminder from the same place you send a Voice alert and an Email notification
- Send a WhatsApp message which falls back to use SMS or Voice when necessary
- Monitor delivery and replies across all channels in one dashboard
- Manage your contacts and templates in a single location
- Get one transparent bill for all your communication
Choose How You Send: Dashboard or API
Use the Dashboard if you want to send messages directly, manage campaigns, or give your team a simple interface for day-to-day communication. The web-based dashboard makes it easy to:
- Send one-off messages or schedule campaigns
- Create and save message templates
- View two-way replies and conversation history
- Generate reports and track engagement
- Manage user permissions for your team
Use the API if you want to automate everything behind the scenes. Connect TNZ to your CRM, calendar, booking system, or internal software so messages trigger automatically based on events. Some TNZ customers never log into the dashboard - they let the API handle everything.
Or use both. Your operations team might use the dashboard for urgent announcements while your developers automate appointment reminders through the API. TNZ adapts to however your team works.
Smart Automation and Intelligent Fallbacks
This is where TNZ gets really clever. You can create workflows that automatically adapt based on what's happening.
Example: The Escalating Reminder
- Send an email reminder 24 hours before an appointment
- If the email isn't acknowledged within 12 hours, automatically send an SMS
- If there's still no response, trigger a voice call 2 hours before the appointment
Example: The Multi-Channel Alert When a critical system failure happens:
- Send a push notification to your branded app
- If it's not delivered within 60 seconds, send a WhatsApp message
- If that fails, send an SMS immediately
- Simultaneously post to your team's Slack channel
The entire cascade is managed through a single workflow. You set the rules once, and TNZ handles the intelligent routing automatically.
Unified Workflows Across Teams
You can also coordinate communication across different teams and channels at the same time.
Example: Payment Processing
- Customer receives an SMS payment reminder
- Your accounts team gets a notification in their CRM
- If payment isn't received, an automatic email follow-up goes out
- All activity is logged in one place for compliance
This kind of orchestration used to require multiple platforms and complex integrations. With TNZ, it's built right in.
Your Next Step
Already using TNZ? You've got access to all of this right now. Log into your dashboard to explore additional channels, or contact the team and we'll walk you through setup for your specific needs.
Not a TNZ customer yet? Contact our team and we'll open a free trial demo account for you - see how simple it is to bring SMS, Email, Voice, and more together in one platform!