Campaigns (Admin Center SMS Features)

• Usage
• SMS Best Practices and Obligatory Registration 
• Access and Existing Campaigns
• Campaign Settings
  • Sender Phone Number (10 DLC Registration)
  • Text Message (Placeholders and Segments)
  • Recipients
  • Attachments
• Starting and Scheduling Campaigns
• Campaign Message History 

Usage

The Admin Center's Campaigns is an automation feature for sending SMS/MMS messages to a list of recipients. Campaign messages can be delivered instantly or on a schedule. Messages can be general or personalized with placeholders that pull details from recipients' contact cards.

To create a campaign, you first need to have a list of recipients. Recipients are created, updated, or uploaded on the Contacts page.

Campaign messages are charged depending on the message type (SMS or MMS) and the number of segments for each message. Pricing and segments are further explained here. 

SMS Best Practices and Obligatory Registration

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) and other regulatory bodies have enacted principles and laws that protect cellular consumers from unsolicited SMS messages or messages that do not follow certain guidelines. Not adhering to these may not only irritate the recipients and harm your business image, but can also entitle consumers to sue for damages.

Additionally, you are required to register any ten-digit phone numbers (known as 10DLC – 10-Digit Long Code) used in your campaigns with The Campaign Registry (TCR). Failing to do so may prevent your messages from being delivered and may lead to fines levied by the mobile operators.

Therefore, before starting any campaigns, you should carefully study these two articles:

• CTIA Messaging Principles and Best Practices. 
  
  
• Text Messaging Campaign Registry for Telebroad Customers.

It is also recommended that you familiarize yourself with Telebroad's SMS/MMS Messaging Terms of Service. 

Access and Existing Campaigns

The Campaigns page is accessed from the side navigation menu under SMS Features>Campaigns. 

Existing campaigns are listed by Name, the Phone Number used for sending the messages,  the type of Recipient list (All recipients from your contact list, a select number of Contacts, or contacts associated with a Tag), Message Type (SMS or MMS), and Campaign Status (Enabled for live campaigns or Not Enabled for campaigns that require registration or activation).

You can delete campaigns by checking them and clicking  , but be aware that this cannot be undone. Click  on the top-right to download a CSV file of existing campaigns.

Campaign Settings

To add or modify campaigns, a user needs to have an Account Owner role or a role with Campaigns view permission. Roles are further explained here.

Select an existing campaign or create a new one by clicking New Campaign to open the campaign's settings.

Sender Phone Number (10 DLC Registration)

Select one of your SMS enabled 10 DLC phone numbers for delivering the campaign messages. You can enable phone numbers to be used for SMS messaging from their General Settings.

The number also needs to be registered with The Campaign Registry before it can be used.

Unregistered Numbers

If you select an unregistered number, it will be indicated with a note alerting you that the number needs to be registered. You will only be able to save the campaign, but not start it.

When you Save the campaign, you will be prompted to register the selected number with The Campaign Registry. The prompt will direct you to the support article mentioned above or to contact Telebroad's support at smscampaigns@telebroad.com. 

Select REGISTER 10DLC to submit a registration request for the phone number. The Campaign will be listed on the Campaigns page with a "Not Enabled" status. Once the phone number is registered, the status will change to "Enabled" and you can start the campaign.

Text Message (Placeholders and Segments)

This is the text that will be delivered to the recipients. You can enter a general message or personalize it by pressing { to use placeholders that will pull details from contact card fields. The placeholder drop-down menu can be scrolled up and down to show more fields. 

For example, instead of sending the general message "Thanks for confirming your participation. We are looking forward to seeing you next week.", personalize it with the recipient's first name as shown in the figure. The system will insert the first name of each recipient from its contact card before sending the message. 

As you write your message, the system will calculate the number of segments it will require. Multiply this by the number of recipients and by the cost per segment for the total price of sending the message once to all recipients. If you use placeholders, the message will differ for each recipient. The actual number of segments can only be calculated after each message is processed.

Segments do not apply to MMS messages, which are priced at a flat rate.

Recipients

You have three options for selecting the recipients of the campaign:

• All Contacts are available on the Contacts page.
  
  
• Select Contacts lets you check specific contacts to include in the list of recipients.
  
  
  
  
• Has All Of Selected Tags lets you include contacts associated with specific tag(s). For a contact to be included in the recipient list, it has to be associated with all the tags you select here.
  
  
  
  
• Has One Of Selected Tags also lets you include contacts associated with specific tag(s), but for a contact to be included in the recipient list, it can be associated with any of the tags you select here.
  
  
• Upload List Of Contacts will open the contacts Upload CSV dialog to upload a list of recipients from a file. Supported upload file formats include CSV, TSV, XLS, and XLSX. The file is expected to have certain columns that follow the contact card format, but you can remap columns to upload them correctly. Additional instructions for uploading contacts are found here.

Attachments

To use attachments, you first need to select and enter all the campaign details and Save it.

Click to add new attachments or delete () or download () existing attachments.

Adding one or more attachments will convert the message to an MMS message, priced at a flat rate.

Starting and Scheduling Campaigns

After you fill in and set all of the campaign settings, you can select:

• Save the campaign to be used later (or to wait for registration of its 10 DLC number, if that's the case). On the Campaigns page, the campaign will be listed as "Not Enabled".
  
  
• Save and Start Campaign and select –
  
  
  • Send now to immediately deliver the campaign message. The campaign will be marked with the current date and time in the Campaign Message History (discussed next).
    
    
  • Send later to schedule a later delivery time. Set the date and time, up to two weeks in the future, for the desired delivery. 

Click Start Campaign to proceed. On the Campaigns page, the campaign will be listed as "Enabled" and the message will be sent to the recipients immediately or at the scheduled time. 

Campaign Message History

Use the Select Schedule drop-down list to examine and switch between all active, scheduled, and delivered campaigns. Click the refresh button () if you don't see a campaign you recently started.

Each campaign lists all its recipients with the Name or Number of the Recipient, Status of the messsage (see below), the phone number of the Sender (identical for all messages), a Segment Count (messages with attachments don't have segment count and instead are indicated with "MMS"), and the truncated beggining of the Message (which may or may not be same for all recipients, depending if you used placholders). You can click any message to see a text bubble with its full content.

For scheduled campaigns (with a "Pending" status), you can click Cancel Messages to cancel all recipients or to cancel individual recipients.

Message Delivery Process

The Delivery of Telebroad SMS campaign messages involves downstream providers. These services act as a bridge between web applications and the MNOs (mobile network operators) or other VoIP providers that deliver the messages to the end users (their subscribers).

Downstream providers are needed for bulk SMS messaging because they have the dedicated technology to efficiently process large quantities of messages and route each message to its intended MNO or VoIP provider.

When a campaign is started, the system begins processing its messages by sending them to a downstream provider. The downstream provider checks each message phone number and forwards it accordingly to the MNO or VoIP provider, which then delivers the message to the end user. 

Considering this process, you should pay attention to the difference between a message "Sent" status (received by the Downstream provider and successfully sent to the MNO) and a "Delivered" status (delivered from the MNO to the intended recipient).

Message Status and Status Bar

Messages that were canceled or failed to deliver are shown with icon in the Status column. Click the icon to see the reason for the delivery failure. Usually this will be because the message or campaign was canceled (as seen in the above figure with "user-canceled (4800)" title, but it can also be due to issues with a mobile carrier or the downstream provider.

The Status bar shows the Total Message Count for the campaign and a message count for each status. It also functions as a message filter that lets you click a status and display only messages relating to it (a "Delivered" status in the following figure).

The possible message statuses are:

• Pending: Scheduled messages that the system has not yet started processing. This status is always displayed for scheduled campaigns.
  
  
• Canceled: Scheduled messages that got canceled before the campaign started processing.
  
  
• Processing: Messages that the system started processing for sending to the downstream provider. This will be 0 before the campaign starts processing, then the total message count, and then the number will decline back to 0.
  
  
• Send Failed: Messages that the system started processing but failed to send to the downstream provider.
  
  
• Sent: Messages that the system successfully sent to the downstream provider to be further forwarded and delivered. The number should decline back to 0 as messages get delivered to MNOs or VoIP providers.
  
  
• MMS Forwarding: MMS messages that the downstream provider is currently in the process of forwarding to an MNO or VoIP provider. The system does not track the forwarding status of SMS messages, and these are only shown as any of the sending or delivery statuses.
  
  
• Deliver Failed: Messages that failed to deliver to end users.
  
  
• Delivered: The messages were successfully delivered to end users.