SMS Marketing Campaigns Tutorial

by | Jul 13, 2020 | Latest News

sms marketing campaigns tutorial

The following details setting up SMS marketing campaigns in Leadify:

1. SMS Marketing Campaigns General Settings

Log into Leadify and click SMS Campaigns from the SMS marketing dropdown. You will start off without any campaigns, so let’s add a new SMS campaign by clicking the Create Campaign button. Give your campaign a descriptive name, “Special offer for Product A” and then select a Category. You will need to add a new category, so do so and choose a good name that groups what you are offering, like “eCommerce Sale” or “Insurance”, or “Newsletters”. We will use “eCommerce Sale”.

Leadify comes pre-connected to an SMS Provider, although you can add your own if you choose to. Select “Spread Equally across standard routes” here, this sets it to use standard bulk SMS. If you require Reverse Billed SMS, please contact your account manager.

The default settings to send messages and receive replies should be left as is. Transactional Campaign is used when you want to trigger SMS messages from an API, this is advanced functionality and can be discussed with your account manager.

Since Leadify is a lead generation marketing platform, we like to track the revenue a lead is worth. So work out what a lead is worth and use this value here, we will use R100 revenue for each lead we generate in our special offer sale.

2. Scheduling SMS Marketing Campaigns

Click Next and the campaign will be generated and you will enter the Edit Campaign wizard. The first tab, General is the one you just completed so let’s finish the campaign setup using the other tabs.

Getting your first campaign going is really simple. You are going to want to Schedule a start date and start time for your campaign, select the contacts you want to send to from the Marketing Lists, and craft the Messages to be sent to the contacts. So these three tabs are the most important.

So, Schedule. Choose the Next Scheduled Sent Date, the date you want the message to be sent. We choose today, and we want the campaign to simply send today and the end date defaulted to today. Choose a start time and end time that makes sense to you, we will choose 1pm for both, because we want all the messages to send straight away at 1pm. If you wanted to stagger the SMS send over a few hours, you could set the finish time later in the day.

The schedule days can stay ticked since we have set the start and end date to today anyhow.

Scroll back up to Marketing Lists – it is important not to save the campaign at this stage since the campaign would then try and build the sending segment. We need to complete the steps in each tab, and then save right at the end when we are happy.

3. SMS Marketing Lists

SMS Marketing Lists is where you choose the marketing lists that you want to target in this campaign. You can target multiple lists and you can also choose how many contacts you want to send to from each list. We want to send to all the contacts in the list so we set this to 7 since there are 7 in the list. The last step in getting your first SMS campaign out is to add the message you want to send to these contacts. Let’s click the Messages tab and here you click Add Message.

4. SMS Message & Click URL

You have 160 characters in total to work with. You can also personalise the message, using the dropdown on the right hand side. Let’s add Firstname and Lastname and then “ Leadify has a special trial offer for you, reply YES if you want 100,000 SMS at 12c per SMS.” You must always give the opportunity to opt out, so include “ Reply STOP for out”.

You don’t have to take our word that Personalisation works, you can A/B split test this yourself, click Add Message and let’s just copy the message above, without personalisation. Now the system will automagically send half of message A and half of message B and you can use the insights reporting to see which message actually converts better!

You can also add a website link to your SMS, using our Link Shortening system which also then allows tracking of clicks to your website!

Scroll down to the ClickURL and put your website address there “https://leadify.biz/request-a-quote/?nature=quote-request” you can also add custom variables that you can pass through to the web call.

Let’s put this website into our message as well, scroll back up and select #click_tracking_url# from the dropdown – you will see it places it at the end of each message.

Targeting Criteria, Exclusion Criteria, and Inbound Triggers are advanced functionality and will be detailed in a separate tutorial.

5. SMS Campaign Segmentation

You can now Save & Exit the campaign and Leadify will build the segment and queue the contacts. You will be directed to the SMS Campaigns page and should see the Building Segment label. If you reload the page after a short while, you will see the blue Queued label and this is how you know the campaign is ready to go. If you click the View Status page, on the right under actions, you will see the campaign overview and how many messages are scheduled to be sent.

And that’s it, now you can schedule as many SMS marketing campaigns as you like.

SMS Marketing Campaigns. Email Marketing. Direct Marketing. Lead Generation. Performance Marketing. Leadify Video Tutorials.