Before you need to send any important (and potentially urgent) messages, we recommend you make some time to adequately prepare your data, content and overall strategy so that you are ready to send when the time comes.
You can download a printable version of the checklist by clicking the attachment with this article
Following this checklist will help you to ensure you are ready to send effective messages and to comfortably manage responses:
- Prepare your data
- Organise your contacts
- Consider your audience
- Optimise your account features
- Prepare your team/users
- Consider your message content
- Think about the end-to-end journey and set-up automations if required
- Check your credit balance and top-up/switch to a plan if needs be
- Send to a test group
- Send your message
- Track engagement
1. Prepare your contact data
- Make sure you have the correct contact information (including any custom information such as location) for your target audience
- Read this article to learn how to create/import contacts in the web portal
- You may also want to send a test broadcast to your contact list, asking recipients to send a response to acknowledge their receipt of the message
- Read this article for more information on how to use broadcast tracking to check which contacts have and have not responded to your message
- Ensure your contact numbers are entered in the correct format (international format is required - e.g. +61400000000 for Australian numbers)
- You can find a full list of international dialling codes here
2. Organise your contacts effectively
- When sending to large audiences, it's beneficial to segment your contacts to help you track your broadcasts - E.g. segmenting staff lists by state or department
- You may need to write segment-specific messages if the content needs to vary (e.g. if sharing links to state government sites for updates)
- Read this article to learn how to create contact groups in the web portal
- Read this article to learn how to add and remove contacts from contact groups in the web portal
3. Consider your audience, regional compliance obligations and languages
- If you are sending to multiple states/provinces/jurisdictions/countries then you may want to consider the local legislations with regards to opt-outs and permitted message content
- This article provides some links to useful sources to help you understand the regulations and compliance obligations for various countries
- Think about the local languages and other regional dialects - you may need to translate your message into other languages before sending.
- Read this article to learn how to use the in-app Google Translate function
4. Make sure you have the right features available on your account
- Do you want people to be able to communicate with your organisation by sending messages to a single number? If so, you'll need to have a Dedicated Number set up
- Do you want to send messages from your organisation/business name as opposed to a number? If so, you'll need to request an Alpha Tag that'll need to be approved before being made active on your account.
- Do you need to be able to trigger automated workflows from inbound replies (e.g. automated responses, assigning contacts to groups, forwarding responses to mobile or email)? If so, you'll need to have Automations active on your account
- Will you be using SMS to send links to additional information sources? If so, you might benefit from using Short Trackable Links
- Will there be people needing to send messages who don't have access to the platform? You may need to have Email to SMS set up on your account
- Do you need to send a visual to help communicate your message (e.g. hygiene guides)? You may need MMS or Mobile Landing Pages active on your account
5. Get your team ready
- If you need to give access to other people to be able to send messages, you may need to add users and create sub-accounts
- Read this article to learn how to create sub-accounts and send invites
- Read this article to learn how to add users to your account/sub-accounts
- You may want some people to be able to send SMS messages by using Email instead of having to set them up in the web portal.
- See this article to learn how to use Email to SMS
6. Think about your message content
- You should identify yourself in your messages so that people know who is communicating with them.
- Read this article to learn how to create a default template that you can use as a signature for all your outbound messages
- You can create message templates to save you from having to take time writing your messages and maintain consistency.
- Read this article to learn how to do this.
- Do you want to personalise your messages to include information such as the recipient's name?
- This video shows you how to include personal information such as contact names and other custom information in your messages
- Think about the length of your message and how this translates to credit and cost
- Read this article for information on character limits and the impact of "special" characters
- Think about the best way to send information in your message. For example, including images (MMS or Mobile Landing Pages) or links in your message
- You can use the "Short Trackable Links" feature to automatically shorten lengthy URLs to just 22 characters, while allowing you to track engagement by recipient, so you can keep track of who has and has not opened the link
7. Automations
- Think about the end-to-end flow - do you just want to send a single message that terminates with the recipient, or do you want to encourage responses with actions to follow?
- E.g. sending out a message to students at a university asking them to reply which have travelled within the last 28 days, and then wanting to place all those that have into a separate contact group so you can send specific messages with instructions just to them
- Do you want to forward responses to your messages to a mobile number or email address(es)? This is especially helpful if you want to be able to keep a team of people across responses without having to have them set up in the web portal
- It's possible to trigger actions based on keywords in responses to your messages, such as forwarding to mobile or email, sending automated responses to replies, adding contacts to groups based on their responses, and more
- See this article for an overview of automations
8. Check your credit balance & credit limit
- You may need to increase the credit limit on your account to accommodate an increased number of messages being sent. Do this by contacting us
- See this article for instructions on adding credit to your account
- When sending messages using "normal" or "GSM" characters (i.e. no emoji's or special characters), the character limit per message is 160 characters
- Each single message uses one credit
- Make sure you have enough credit on your account to send your broadcast
- When you compose your message, you will be shown (underneath the message field) how many credits the message will use. Multiply this by the number of contacts you need to send to in order to work out how many credits you need to be able to successfully send your message to all contacts
- See this article for instructions on adding credit to your account
- You may find it more convenient to move to a post-paid plan if you are not already on one. Contact us to arrange this.
9. Send a test message
- Use the "Send Test" button to send test copies of your message to a test group of numbers
- This is especially useful if you have created an automation flow and want to make sure it works properly before sending out to a large database of contacts
10. Send your message
- If you are sending to a large volume of recipients, it might be a good idea to stagger your send - especially if you are requesting responses that you are forwarding to mobile, or want to be able to manage via the inbox. This is so that you don't inadvertently become inundated with responses all at once
- To stagger your send, select "Send message over a period of time" in the "Send Period" dropdown under "Message Details"
- If you are sending to different time zones, you may want to schedule your message to send at a convenient/socially acceptable time
- Read this article to learn more about scheduling messages
11. Tracking
- It's important to know the delivery status of your broadcast (i.e. whether there were any delivery failures) and, where possible, the engagement rates (if you have added any links to your messages)
- You can use the various reporting tools in the web portal to run reports - see this article for more help
- If you are asking people to respond with confirmation that they have read your messages, this article provides information on how to cross check which recipients have and have not responded