Sending SMS messages

Follow

Sending SMS messages in Engage is very straightforward. This article will teach you all about it.

As you choose SMS on the Messages tab in the left-hand menu, you click on the plus sign, or New SMS to start creating your message.

First, you’re asked to name the message. This name is used to keep track of it in Engage and will not be visible to the recipients. Click Save to open the editor and click Edit to expand the panels.

Adding your content

Go to the Add your content panel to enter your message content and select which sender to use. The SMS sender is the name shown in the recipients’ SMS inboxes. You can see what the message might look like in a mobile phone and keep count on the number of characters and number of SMS messages. Note that some special characters are counted as two. Engage will notify if you’re using such characters in your SMS.

Open the drop-down below the text field to personalize your message based on different metrics. This means that Engage will fetch personal information from the contact card of the recipient and include it in the text message. For instance, it's common to use the "firstName" personalization tag to include the recipient’s first name in the message.

If you add personalization, make sure that the relevant contact information is available for all recipients. In the case relevant data is missing for a contact receiving the message, Engage will simply leave the field in the SMS blank. However, you can provide a fallback option to be presented instead. In our example below, we’re personalizing the content on first name, [[firstName]], with fallback [[firstName,friend]]. In this case, “friend” will be displayed to any recipient missing a name in the first name field on their contact card.

When including a registration form using personalization, avoid adding a period after the link. Otherwise, the period will be appended to the link when converting to a shortened URL, which prevents the specified contact information from being saved in Engage. Also, consider using your own domains. If you opt for public URL shorteners, keep in mind that a phone operator may categorize the domain as spam or fraud, potentially leading to your SMS being blocked and not reaching the intended recipients.

Because the number of characters contained within the personalized field for each specific recipient is unknown, the total cost per number of SMS messages sent is also unknown at this stage. Information on how the content (number of characters) influences the number of SMS messages (and thereby the cost) is presented.

Once you’re done with your content, click Save.

Selecting recipients

Open the panel Choose your audience to create your recipient list. You may include or exclude recipients using your Segmentations, Target audiences, Labels, Previous messages, or the filtering tool to create a new group. When you include or exclude segmentations containing a large number of contacts, you may experience some delay when recalculating the total number of recipients.

The calculated number of recipients will often not correspond exactly to the number given in the results from the filtering tool. This is because Engage will ignore contacts that aren’t reachable by SMS (such as contacts that have opted out, that are missing a phone number or that have a blocked phone number) when calculating the message recipients.

Click Save when you’ve set your recipient list.

Scheduling delivery

In the panel Schedule delivery you set a date and a time for your send-out. It's good practice to always schedule messages, especially if you intend to send the message at a specific time. When a message is scheduled, Engage will comply and prepare it up to one hour in advance, ensuring that it’s dispatched at the scheduled time.

Toggle on Even distribution if you want to distribute the send-out over an extended period of time. This can be very useful for example to limit the load on your e-com site when you’re sending campaign messages to large recipient volumes.

When you’re all set, click Save.

Sending a test message

Before you click Schedule in the top right corner, you might want to check what the SMS will actually look like to your recipients. Therefore, you have the option to send a test message while editing.

Read more on the subject in this article.

Creating a control group

If you want to track the effectiveness of the SMS, you can toggle on the Create a control group panel.

A control group is a randomly selected group (%) of contacts from the original recipients group. The contacts in the control group will not receive the SMS message and can therefore be used as a reference group to compare the results of the message with. After the message has been sent, statistics will be presented for the particular message. You may then compare the purchasing statistics of the recipients against the randomly selected control group.

Learn more about control groups here.

All set?

When your SMS is ready for dispatch, click Schedule in the upper right corner. Note that the metrics in the send-out summary are estimations, as recipient calculation is completed 1 hour before the scheduled time.

Sending to North America?

When sending SMS messages to recipients with North American numbers (+1), you need to have a registered US phone number. Otherwise, your SMS messages will be blocked.

Talk to your Voyado contact for more information.