SMS Sending (BETA)

Using SMS sending, you can engage your customers directly through personalized text messages, ensuring your messages are seen in real time. Whether you’re sharing updates, promotions, or reminders, SMS offers a highly effective channel to build meaningful relationships with your audiences.

What Can You Do with SMS Campaigns?

• Create Engaging SMS Campaigns: Design, schedule, and send text messages to your target audience with ease.
• Personalized Messaging: Use MERGE tags to customize messages for individual recipients, improving engagement.
• Real-Time Reach: Get your message seen instantly, perfect for time-sensitive updates or promotions.
• Seamless Integration: Combine SMS with your existing email, social media, and automations for a multi-channel strategy.

How to add SMS credits

Before you can send any SMS messages you need to make sure you have SMS credits.

To buy credits:

1. Go to your Company Profile > SMS.
2. Under the 'SMS Credits Available' heading, click the button to +Top up
3. Choose the number of credits you want, and then pay using the card linked to your account.
4. As soon as you've brought credits, they'll be available to use in an SMS Campaign or Automation.

What happens when you run out of credits

To ensure your SMS messages always send uninterrupted, you can configure Transpond to notify you, or even automatically top up credits when you run out. To do that:

1. Go to your Company Profile > SMS.
2. Under the Low credit settings, use the drop down menu to either Stop Sending SMS, Send an email alert, or Auto top up.

3. If you choose to Auto top up you get further option to configure at what level auto top up should kick in, how many credits to auto top up with, and if it should ever limit the total auto top up amount.

   

SMS Defaults

When sending SMS messages there are a few default fields that will be used. To configure these defaults:

1. Go to your Company Profile > SMS.
2. Under the 'Defaults' heading, you can set the Default From name, and the default phone number field to use from your contacts.

How to create an SMS Campaign

Creating an SMS campaign is similar to creating an email campaign, but of course the template step is a bit different. To create a new SMS Campaign:

1. Go to Campaigns > Start a Campaign
2. Give the campaign a name, and choose SMS Campaign from the list of options
3. Select the group and/or segment you want to send your SMS campaign to.
4. At this point you can also choose to override your default phone number field if needed.
5. Next, choose a From Name and then write your message.
6. You'll notice from the SMS composer that you need to include the {{__OPTOUT}} merge tag to ensure your contacts can opt out of SMS.
7. As you type your message, you'll see the character counter tick down. You can write a message that exceeds a single SMS length, and the campaign will just send multiple messages. Your credits will be used up accordingly.

How to use SMS Sending in an Automation

Using Automations to send SMS messages is a great way to complement your workflow to ensure your communications reaches your contacts without delay.

To add an SMS step in an Automation:

1. Once you've setup your Automation trigger and you're ready to insert your SMS Action, click the + where you want to add it > click the SMS option.
2. Choose the phone number you want to send the SMS from, and fill in the from name and message.

3. Before saving, you can choose how you want this step to behave if the contact in the Automation doesn't have a valid phone number for the field you've selected. They can either remain on that step and not continue through the Automation, or they can skip it and move on to the next step.

   

4. Save the changes.
5. Make sure you click the button to Start Automation when you're ready, and you're all done.

Accepted phone number formats for SMS use

In order for Transpond to reliably send to SMS messages to your contacts, it's important that you format the phone numbers for them correctly.

Acceptable formats for UK numbers are:

• +447123456789
• +44 7123 456789
• +44(0)7123456789
• 00447123456789
• 07123456789