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How to send an SMS campaign

With the campaigns module of our Mobile Communicator you can easily send SMS. You can send SMS to a list of mobile numbers you provide or for contacts in an address book. In this tutorial we will explain how you can do this.For a campaign you can do settings to send it in batches, schedule it and set recurring. You can find information on how to do that in our tutorial `Campaign batch, scheduling and recurring settings`.To start a new SMS campaign, go to the campaigns page, click on the `New campaign` button.
Select `SMS`, optionally fill in a campaign name and click the `Next` button.
The above screenshot shows what you will see when you create a new campaign. Let’s explain what you see on the screen.

  1. The campaign name. By clicking the `edit` link you can change the name.
  2. The service you want to use for this campaign. When you have only one SMS service the system will fill it in automatically.
  3. The application you want to use for this campaign. When you have for the selected service only application the system will fill it in automatically.
  4. The mobile numbers you want to send the campaign to. See below 'Recipients' where we will explain this in more detail.
  5. The sender of the SMS campaign is what the receiver will see who sent the message. For more information on this, please check our tutorial `What is the sender ID of a SMS`.
  6. The body of the SMS is the actual content you want to send to the customer. An SMS has a maximum length but with our campaign module you can also send long SMS. Check out our tutorial `How to send a concatenated/long SMS` for more information. Besides long SMS you can send SMS in any language, including for example Chinese, Arabic, Thai, etc.
  7. By clicking on the link ‘Show available variables’ you can add variables to the body. With this you can personalise your campaign when you use the address book to send to. Check out our tutorial `How to use personalise your campaigns` for more information.
  8. Before you actually send your campaign, you can send a test message. By clicking on the `Send test` button you will be asked a number you want to send the test message to.

Recipients

The mobile numbers you want to send the campaign to can be added in 2 ways. One way is to paste mobile numbers and another way is by selecting an address book. You can add mobile numbers by clicking on the `To` row.

You can add multiple numbers blocks. So when you have for example two lists with numbers you can paste them separately or you can use multiple (sub-sections of) address books.

Paste mobile numbers

When you select the option `Paste numbers`, you get a form where you can paste your mobile numbers.

When you paste your numbers, you don’t have to remove commas or new lines. The system will replace those automatically to white spaces when you add the numbers. When you pasted the numbers you can press the `Add recipients` button. The system will now analyse the numbers and replace the commas and new lines. When there are invalid numbers, the system will mark them red.

When there are invalid numbers you can either correct them or press the `Remove invalid` button. The button shows between brackets the number invalid numbers found. The button `Add recipients` shows between brackets the number of valid numbers. A valid number doesn’t mean the SMS is delivered already, but just if the number only contains digits with a length between 8 and 16 digits. When you have corrected or removed the invalid numbers, you can click on the `Add recipients` again. When all numbers are now correct the system will add those numbers to the campaign.

Use contacts in an address book

When you have stored your contacts in an address book, you can add those contacts to the campaign.

  1. Select the address book you want to add contacts from.
  2. The number of found contacts in the address book.
  3. A contact has multiple mobile number fields, here you can select which mobile number field you want to add to the campaign. When you want to add multiple mobile number types, you have to add them as separate blocks to the campaign.

To add the recipients to the campaign, press the `Add recipients` button. If you do not want to add the complete address book to the campaign, you can add filters by pressing the `Apply filters` button.

  1. You can specify if the contacts should match `All` filters or `Any`. With all it means the contact should match each filter and with any it means the contact should match at least one of the filters.
  2. The filter you want to apply. Per filter you can select the contact attribute you want to filter on, the operator and the value. Example: you can filter for contacts where the first name begins with `Jo`.

When you want to applied filters, you can press the `Search` button to re-calculate the number of found contacts.

Campaign results

When you have added the mobile numbers to your campaign, you can send the campaign by pressing the `Send` button. The system will now start processing your campaign. After a while you can see the results of the campaign.

So what can you see on the results page? Let’s explain that.

  1. The name you gave to the campaign.
  2. The total number of mobile numbers the SMS campaign will be send to. This might be less than you expected, that’s because the system removes duplicate numbers when you pasted numbers.
  3. The total number of messages which will be send. The number of messages to be send can be higher then the number of mobile numbers the campaign will be send to. This is because that for long SMS multiple SMS parts will be send.
  4. The total costs of your campaign. This is the amount deducted from you wallet.
  5. The progress sections gives you an impression on the status of your campaign. The `Sent recipients` indicates the number of mobile numbers which are submitted already. When the blue bar is 100% it means all mobile numbers are submitted. The `Total results` indicates the number of results received by the system. When the red bar is 100%, all results are received.
  6. The delivery section gives you an overview of the results of the campaign. The percentage in the middle shows the percentage of successfully delivered SMS.
  7. This section shows information who sent the campaign, when it was submitted and when finished and the service and application used for the campaign.
  8. When the campaign is finished, you can download the results of the campaign. You can download a CSV file containing all information returned by the API per mobile number.