Use SMS to create and send campaigns to your contacts' phones.
Overview
SMS (short message service) allows you to communicate directly with your contacts through their phones. With a delivery rate of 99%, SMS is the ultimate way to instantly connect with your contacts and return high engagement rates.
Watch the video
Types of SMS messaging
There are multiple ways to send SMS campaigns from your Dotdigital account:
Broadcast
SMS broadcasting is an excellent way of sending links or promotions to the contacts in your SMS address books. After importing your SMS contacts into your SMS address books, you can create an SMS campaign and choose which address books you want to send it to. This is great because your contacts don't need to be attached to an email address but can still be shown your marketing content.
Automated
Automated campaigns are used for SMS auto-responders, which automatically send a reply to contacts that message to you. This is can be used to alert a contact that a number is not monitored and includes a link back to a contact us page.
Programs
You can also send SMS messages from your account using an automated program, which is ideal for sending personalised alerts, reminders and notifications. This works by creating a data field that stores mobile numbers for your email contacts’. You can then automatically send SMS campaigns to these contacts by setting up a triggered SMS profile and creating a program to trigger the send.
Dotdigital API
We offer one all-encompassing messaging API which we refer to as the Omnichannel API.
This API lets you send messages to your customers across all supported channels, including SMS, using a RESTful service and JSON data.
To learn more, check out our Developer hub.
Use cases
Here are a few examples of how you can use SMS:
- Confirmation messages
Send a short message to acknowledge product purchases or signing up to your services. - Alerts and notifications
Remind your contacts of upcoming deliveries or appointments. - Marketing messages
Engage your contacts by sending them links to your pages and forms. - Reporting
Analyse your SMS messages performance using analytics and SMS reports. Examine details on sends, deliveries, and failures for your SMS campaigns and see where you can improve.
Do more with SMS
Get started with SMS using one of our guides.
- Set up SMS on your account
Activate your SMS free trial and start testing. - Upgrade your SMS free trial
Once your free trial has ended you can quickly upgrade to have SMS permanently enabled on your account and start sending real messages. - Purchase an SMS number
Purchase a new long or short SMS number to use with your SMS campaigns. - Understand SMS pay-as-you-go and spend limit
Learn about SMS pay-as-you-go and how to use the rate card.
Create SMS campaigns
Useful articles on creating SMS content for your contacts:
- Create, test, and send an SMS campaign
Create your own SMS campaigns and engage with your contacts. - Edit an SMS campaign
Improve your existing SMS campaigns even more with a quick edit. - Insert a pages and forms link in an SMS campaign
Direct your customers to a specific landing page or form with an SMS link.
Regional SMS
Useful articles to help you navigate the regional rules of using SMS in certain regions: