This is a step-by-step guide on how you can set up and start sending SMS campaigns using Batch. Whether you want to send transactional updates, promotional messages or engage your customers through texts.
1. Define Your SMS Campaign goals
Before launching any marketing or transactional SMS campaigns, it is important that you set clear goals. This will help shape your strategy, target audience, and messaging. It also provides known performance indicators through which you can track and measure the success of your SMS Marketing communications.
Your Marketing campaign goals may include: increasing sales, boosting customer engagement, driving traffic to your website, etc.
Your Transactional campaign goals may include: ensuring a smooth customer experience by providing instant updates on order processing, delivering important information, account alerts, appointment reminders, etc.
2. Build a contact list
Import contact information
For each of your user profiles to be reachable via SMS, you need to make sure to include:
→ A phone number that conforms with the E.164 international standard. (E.g. "+33639981337").
→ An SMS Marketing subscription status if you plan on running marketing communications through this channel.
You can import your existing contact list and automatically sync new profiles by plugging Batch into your data sources:
Using our Profile API to sync profile data from your backend or other tools you might be using.
Using our Mobile (iOS / Android) and Web SDKs to collect data from your mobile apps or website. This is useful if your users can set or update their notification channel preferences from your mobile app or website.
Note: Batch will automatically update the profile's SMS Marketing subscription based on feedback from mobile carriers. E.g. when the user unsubscribes by sending the STOP keyword.
Enrich Profile data
Sending personalized and well-segmented SMS Marketing messages is key to optimizing customer engagement and improving conversion rates.
Enrich your contact list with profile data such as attributes or events and use this data to build your segments (e.g. using filters like location, past purchase behavior, or engagement history) and personalize your messages (e.g. including the recipient’s first name or last purchased item).
Note: Batch's unified data model allows you to leverage Profile data to engage your users across all channels. Thus, if you already have an omnichannel project through which you run email or push notification campaigns, you may already have the necessary Profile data available for your SMS targeting and orchestration needs.
A. Server side data
Setting Profile attributes and tracking events via the Profile API
B. Client side data
Setting Profile attributes from the SDK:
Tracking events from the SDK:
Compliance
You should ensure that explicit consent is obtained and stored for all contacts that wish to subscribe to your SMS Marketing campaigns in addition to providing an easy opt-out option in your messages (e.g. instructing your recipients to click on a link if they want to unsubscribe from your SMS Marketing communications).
To facilitate your compliance, Batch will include a default unsubscription option when required by local guidelines. For instance, the "STOP" mention is always included in Marketing SMS messages sent to French phone numbers.
3. Configure your sender settings
First, you'll need to identify the countries you'd like to send SMS to among the list of countries Batch supports across Europe. This will help establish all requirements regarding your SMS Sender ID(s).
Configuring a Sender ID (the name that appears on recipients' phones) on your Batch omnichannel project is necessary to send SMS communications.
Batch allows you to enhance your brand visibility by setting your brand name (or a recognizable identifier) as a custom Alphanumeric Sender ID (Up to 11 characters).
To ensure compliance with SMS-related laws and regulations in certain regions where Alphanumeric senders are not allowed, Batch will default to an authorized Sender ID format in those regions.
To configure an SMS Sender ID on your omnichannel project, simply reach out to the Solutions Engineer in charge of your implementation or to our customer support team at support@batch.com.
4. Setup and test your SMS campaigns
All that is left to do is to create your first SMS automations or campaigns and test them as indicated in 👉 this guide.
You can also include SMS steps in your omnichannel automations as described in 👉 this guide.
This article belongs to Batch's FAQ. Need more help?