Create a SMS Campaign

SMS is a great way to communicate to your contacts on an instant basis. SMS/Text can be used for marketing and transactional uses.

Some examples of sms use-cases include:

• Reminders
• Time Sensitive Offers
  
• Special Events
  
• Last minute event updates
  
• Urgent information
  

To create and send out your SMS message, navigate to the Campaigns tab within the platform and click on "+ Create New Campaign" 

Select the SMS channel (you can also choose to send an Email along with your SMS campaign).

Setting Up Your SMS Campaign

When setting up your SMS campaign, you are prompted to enter the "From" / "Sender ID". 

The Sender ID is an alphanumeric string that will display on the user's mobile as the sender of the message.

It's important to check if custom Sender ID's are supported in your country. If in doubt, get in touch with our support team for details.

When entering the From value, you can also select "Send replies to my SMS inbox". When selecting this option, the From field will be replaced by a local mobile number instead of your custom value. Any inbound messages received on this number will be displayed within the Inbox section of the platform.

Your Inbox keeps track of all inbound messages that are received as replies to your campaigns. The inbox allows you to view and respond to individual messages as well as directly unsubscribe users that have requested it.

To access to the inbox, hover over your avator in the top-right corner and select "Inbox".

Specify your message in the "Your Message" field. All SMS messages require unsubscribe instructions and these are automatically inserted for you. You can choose to customise the unsubscribe message if you like.

While entering your message contents, you will see a counter showing you the amount of remaining characters and the total message count. Every 160 characters is considered one message. From a billing perspective, you are charged for every 160 characters in your message. 

It's always a good idea to test your message on a few different mobile devices to ensure that the content and any special characters/symbols appear correctly.

While in the editor, you can click on "Send A Test" to trigger a test message.

If including URL's in your message, a "Shorten Link" button is available to shorten the amount of characters used by your URL using our Short URL service - available free to all users of the platform.

Once your message content has been created and tested, click on Next to continue on the setup of your campaign.

On the following pages, you can select recipients as well as scheduling. Ensure you have reviewed all details of your campaign prior to scheduling.

When selecting recipients for your message, the platform will automatically exclude any contacts without a valid mobile number. 

Users that have previously unsubscribed will also be excluded from the send. This is an automated process.

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