Blue Messages (iMessage)
Overview
The difference between a blue and a green bubble is small technically and large in practice. Green reads as a business text and gets treated like one; blue reads as a person and gets opened. Delivery depends on the recipient having an Apple device with iMessage available - where that is not the case, a message may fall back to SMS, which means you should not assume every send arrives in the blue bubble. Check what a conversation actually used before drawing conclusions from its response rate.
Key Features
- Messages delivered over iMessage where the recipient supports it
- Reads as personal rather than as marketing
- Falls back to SMS when iMessage is not available
- Conversations appear alongside your other channels
How to Blue Messages (iMessage)
Confirm the audience fits
The advantage only exists for recipients on Apple devices. For a list that is largely Android, this is not the channel to reach for.
Write it like a message, not a campaign
The entire benefit is that it does not look like marketing. A blue bubble containing a promotional blast with an unsubscribe footer wastes the channel.
Check which protocol was actually used
A message can be delivered as SMS when iMessage is unavailable. Confirm what a conversation actually used before attributing a good or bad response rate to the channel.
Apply the same consent rules
Being a different transport does not make it exempt. Message people who agreed to hear from you, and honour opt-outs.
Where to find it
Blue messages are not a separate screen. iMessage is one of the channels in your unified inbox, so these conversations appear in Messages alongside Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and SMS. Use the channel filter at the top of the conversation list to show iMessage only.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are blue messages and when should I use them?
Blue messages are sent over iMessage rather than SMS, so they appear in the blue bubble on iPhones instead of the green one. They read as a personal message rather than a marketing text, which affects open rates and replies considerably for audiences that are largely on iPhone.
Why Blue Messages (iMessage) matters
Blue Messages (iMessage) sits inside the Channels & Data workflow inside Inflowave, and the way you configure it shapes how the rest of the platform behaves. The difference between a blue and a green bubble is small technically and large in practice. Green reads as a business text and gets treated like one; blue reads as a person and gets opened. Delivery depends on the recipient having an Apple device with iMessage available - where that is not the case, a message may fall back to SMS, which means you should not assume every send arrives in the blue bubble. Check what a conversation actually used before drawing conclusions from its response rate. Inflowave was built so the building blocks - accounts, automations, calendars, campaigns - connect cleanly without you having to glue together a third-party stack.
The fastest way to get value out of this is to treat the steps above as a checklist on your first pass, then come back and tune the details after you've seen real traffic flow through. Most teams using Inflowave at scale (agencies running 10-50 client accounts, creators with multiple profiles, businesses with several brand handles) find that the initial setup takes 15-30 minutes per account and pays back within the first day of saved manual replies.
If you run into anything unexpected, the support team replies inside business hours via the in-app chat and the documentation here covers every channels & data feature in the same level of detail. The Channels & Data section also has companion articles that walk through related workflows - the "Related articles" links at the bottom of this page point at the most-used ones in this category.
Finally, every channels & data feature in Inflowave is included in the Basic plan. There is no upsell gate to access blue messages (imessage) or any of the steps described above. If your account is missing a button you see in this article, it's almost always because a workflow or permission needs to be enabled - not because it's a paid add-on. Reach out and the team will point you to the toggle.