1. Select contacts
Open your campaign in the SMS editor and select SAVE & CONTINUE or go to the SMS campaigns screen and select the Send icon for the campaign you want.
Under the heading Select the contacts to send this campaign to, use the tabs to select the lists, segments and marketing preferences you want to send the SMS to.
You can see the total number of contacts for each, as well as the number of contacts with a mobile number that the SMS can be sent to.
Exclude contacts from a send
In addition to choosing which lists, segments, or marketing preferences you want to include in your sends, you can also select which of these you want to exclude from the send.
Exclusions take precedence over inclusions, so, if a contact appears in both an included list, segment, or preference, and an excluded one, they are not sent the campaign.
For example, you might want to send out a campaign, but ensure that you don’t send it to any contact who has already been sent a campaign very recently. You could therefore create a segment to identify contacts sent a campaign in the last one day, and exclude this segment from your send.
To exclude a list, segment, or marketing preference:
Select the Exclude lists, segments or marketing preferences checkbox.
Select the relevant tab from Lists, Segments or Marketing preferences.
Select the checkbox for the sets of contacts you want to exclude from the send.
2. Select send time and speed
For Select send time, select Immediately or Scheduled.
If you select Scheduled:
Use the date picker to set the time and date of your send, then expand the time zone drop-down menu and select the time zone you are sending the SMS to.
This doesn’t affect the time zone set on your account. You can only select one time zone for SMS sends.
If you’re sending to any segments, you can choose to automatically refresh those segments just before the time of send, to make sure that the segment rules are pulling in contacts based on your most recent data. To do this, select the Refresh segments before sending checkbox.
For Select send speed, you can use the default sending speed, meaning as soon as possible, or choose to spread the campaign send out over 1, 2, 3, 6, 12 or 24 hours.
We divide the campaign's audience into 100-contact blocks and send the campaign to each block over the time you choose, so you must send the SMS campaign to a minimum of 100 contacts.
For Undelivered SMS, select Expire after three days if you want the standard SMS expiry time of three days.
If you want your SMS to expire earlier, select Expire on, and then choose a date and time. You can set a minimum time of one hour and a maximum of three days (72 hours).
If a network can’t deliver an SMS at the first attempt, they make multiple further attempts to deliver up to the message expiry time. The custom expiry is useful if your SMS is time-sensitive, for example, a 24-hour sale or travel updates, so you don’t want the network to continue trying to re-send the SMS for the full three days.
Select CONTINUE.
3. Send your campaign
On the Send page, you see the details of the campaign you’re sending:
The Friendly from name you’re sending from.
Whether your message contains any Unicode characters.
Learn more in SMS message length and Unicode.Whether or not you have enabled link shortening.
One final check before you send
The Send confirmation page also shows the following details:
Field | Description |
Send to | The lists, segments, or marketing preferences you’ve chosen to send to, as well as any that you have chosen to exclude. |
Total recipients | The number of contacts with a valid mobile number out of the total contacts from the selected lists, segments, or marketing preferences. |
Excluded contacts | The number of contacts who aren’t included in the send, either because they are in a list, segment or marketing preference you chose to exclude, or because you can’t send to them because they are a member of a list you don’t have permission to send to.
Learn more in List permissions: restrict who can send to specific contacts. |
Final recipient count | The number of contacts that are included in the send. |
Send time | Shows the scheduled date and time you chose for the send, or Immediately if you chose to send your campaign straight away. |
Expires | The expiry time you set for undelivered messages. |
Estimated parts per message | The estimated number of SMS segments the message contains.
This is an estimate only and doesn't account for longer messages due to personalisation.
Learn more in Personalisation for SMS and MMS. |
Once you’ve reviewed the summary information and are ready to send, select SEND CAMPAIGN or CONFIRM SCHEDULED SEND.
The option you see here depends on whether you chose to send an immediate or scheduled campaign.
Triggered SMS
Learn more about sending automated SMS messages: