Send an SMS campaign

How to create and send a SMS campaign

In this guide, we'll show you how to set up and send your first SMS marketing campaign.

What you'll need

• An installed SMS channel instance.

• A list or segment of customers that have opted-in to receive marketing messages on SMS.

Create your SMS campaign

1. From the side menu, click Campaigns.

2. Click Create campaign

3. Select SMS as your channel

4. Clicking on SMS will open the Campaign builder. You can start by giving your campaign a name.

Step 1: Recipients

1. Select the lists or segments in the Send to dropdown to target your campaign. You can create a segment directly from here as well.

Note: You can only select upto 5 lists or segments here

1. Select the lists or segments you want to exclude in the Don't Send to dropdown

Advanced Options

You can expand to define any advanced options such as:

• Skip recently messaged contacts: Turn this ON if you want the frequency cap settings defined in your workspace to be applied. By default, this is turned ON and the frequency cap settings are 1 message in 1 day.

• Limit maximum number of recipients: Turn this ON and define if you want to limit recipients to be targeted to a specific number. This will randomly select recipients to be limited out of your defined lists/segments

• Global Holdout: This will skip any recipients of they match the global holdout criteria defined in your workspace. If no criteria is defined, no one will be skipped. This is turned ON by default but no global holdout is defined by default on the workspace hence it will not impact your sending

• Campaign Holdout: This will skip recipients based on a defined percentage randomly as a control group out of your campaign recipients. This is OFF by default.

Step 2: Sender

1. Automatic sender selection: For SMS, by default your sender phone number will be selected based on the applicable coverage for your recipient's country. You can keep this turned ON as a best practice to ensure better delivery.

1. Manual sender selection: If you want to select specific phone number to send from, you can disable it and select a number manually. If your targeted recipients include countries which are not covered by this number, they will fail sending

Step 3: SMS Content

1. On the right side of the builder, you can directly type in your SMS content including links

2. You can ask the users to use STOP keyword to opt out or use our standard opt out link which will open our standard SMS unsubscribe page.

3. You can also add any image for MMS campaign by following the image specifications guidelines

4. Our SMS shortener is by default enabled. This will help track any link clicks. Note that no link clicks will be tracked without link shortener turned ON

5. You can preview your SMS content by switching to the Preview tab

Note that you cannot select SMS templates here.

Adding personalization

You can add any personalization variables by clicking on { } icon and select the type of variable from dropdown. For example, you can select Contacts > First name to insert first name dynamically.

Once the variable is adding, you must define a default value for that variable

Step 4: Schedule

1. Under Schedule section, you can select if you want to send the campaign on a fixed time, gradually or immediately

2. For a fixed time scheduling, you can select a date, time and timezone for sending

3. By default, we have selected local recipient timezone for scheduling but you can select a specific timezone

More Settings

Tags

You can optionally apply one or more tags to your campaign before sending

Additional data

This section allows you to upload a csv file of additional data for personalization such as personalized links which are specific to the campaign. You can map this to the unique identifier of the targeted contacts when uploading as a column and then define which column contains the unique identifier for matching

Once done, you can map any predefined custom variables in the SMS content to any columns of the uploaded csv file

Tracking

By default we have UTM parameters automatically appended to all the links in the message so that you can track clicks on your web analytics solution.

You can edit the UTM parameters under settings and also customize if needed for this campaign

Locale Matching

Locale matching is set to Automatic. This feature is more relevant for other channels where you can add multi-language templates and not relevant for SMS.

Campaign A/B Test

You can turn ON A/B test for an SMS campaign here. Note that if you have selected maximum recipient limit or recipient local timezone, you will need to change them before enabling A/B tests.

Once enabled, you will have 2 variation added for your SMS message automatically by cloning. You can edit content for each of these variations

You can define A/B test settings as follows:

• Winning metric: Select click rate or conversion rate based on what you want to optimize on

• Test size: Select the test audience pool size for each variation. Rest of the audience will be sent the winning variation

• Test duration: Select how long the campaign will be waiting to collect winning metric data for the test result after sending to the A and B test pools before determining the winner

• Winner fallback: Select your strategy in case there is not sufficient data to make a test winner decision.

Estimated Recipients and Cost

At the bottom of the page on the left side, you will see number of estimated recipients based on your targeting criteria, contact attributes and campaign settings. Similarly you will also see the estimated cost of sending SMS.

Send a test message

Click on Send test option on the top right to test your SMS before sending.

You can send your test to a phone number, contact or a proof list.

Send or schedule your campaign

Click Schedule campaign or Send campaign button on the top right to finally confirm to schedule or send.