Sending SMS messages

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Sending SMS messages in Engage is quite straightforward, but here are some explanations you might find useful.

The name vs. the sender

• The SMS name is used to identify the message in Engage
• The SMS sender is the name shown as sender in the recipients SMS inbox on their mobile phone

Content

Under Content you'll find a drop-down menu where you can 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 personalization is used, it's a good idea to make sure that relevant data is present in the contact information of all recipients. In the case where relevant data is missing for a contact receiving the message, Engage will simply leave the field in message blank. However, it's possible to provide fallback information that will be presented if a contact is missing the relevant data.

When including a link (e.g., in a registration form) using personalization, avoid using a period after the link. The period will be appended to the link when converting to TinyURL-format.

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 will also be unknown at this stage. Information on how the content (number of characters) influences the cost (number of SMS messages) will be presented.

Selecting recipients

You may include or exclude recipients using your Segmentations, Target audiences, Labels, Previous messages, or the segmentation tool to create a new group. When including/excluding 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 segmentation tool. This is because Engage will ignore contacts that are unable to receive SMS messages (i.e., contacts that have opted out, that are missing a phone number or that have a blocked phone number) when calculating message recipients.

Previewing and sending

In the third and final step of the SMS message creation process you are able to preview the message and check that the number of recipients is correct.

Send or schedule 

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 will be sent out at the scheduled time.

Can I stop a scheduled message?

Theoretically it should be possible to stop a scheduled message (SMS and email) up until five minutes before the scheduled send time. However, Engage will require time to stop a message and the amount of time will differ depending on the number of recipients of the given message.

The greater the number of recipients, the more time will be required for stopping. Not allowing for enough time may result in messages going out before a complete stop has been accomplished.

Stopping a message:

1. Click the Messages tab in the left-hand side menu.

2. Click Email or SMS and then Scheduled.

3. Locate the scheduled message in the list and click the stop icon.