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WHERE : Back Office / Notification Center

WHERE : Back Office / Marketing / Promotional Campaigns

WHERE : SMS Broadcoast ( External Web Site )

Overview

There is a greyed out option to send an SMS campaign

We have temporarily (?) disabled this option as one client sent out 10,000 SMS in 1 week

But with a bit of lateral thinking you can build and manage an SMS Campaign that will convert your contact list into paying customers

I have listed this in multiple WHERE :

It even has an external link

Why Create an SMS Campaign ?

If you are a new business, you may want to promote yourself to a database of potential customers.

More commonly I see this being used by businesses that have an existing list of customers collected over a number of years. They want to convert these customers into Mobile APP users. So their first ( and sometimes only ) SMS campaign will be promoting their OscarPOS Customer Mobile App.

Generate SMS Number List

Ideally, you do NOT want to manually enter customer contact details into your BOM, especially if you are going to be using your Mobile APP. Apart from the time it takes, you will often end  up with multiple entries for the same customer. This is covered in more detail elsewhere.

To begin with you are going to need a .csv file ( or spreadsheet ) of your customers or potential customers if you have an externally supplied marketing DB.

To get a list of your current customers : BOM / Reports / Customers Reports / Customer Contact Details and select <CSV>. This will create a nice .csv file for you that you can open and edit in your favourite spreadsheet programme ( I prefer to use OpenOffice as it does not do weird things with long numbers ! ). You only need Name and Number, but keeping Customer Group might be useful later.

Log Into Your Preferred SMS Provider

Who you use is up to you. As at the publication date of this post, we have been successfully using http://SMS Broadcast for as cheap as 2cents per SMS when you  prepay for a block of 500 SMS.

Send Your First SMS

The Documentation provided by SMS Broadcast is excellent, so I will just provide a brief overview …

Under Settings / SMS Settings

  • Default Sending Number … Change it to your Business Name
  • Automatic Opt Out Processing … select Add Opt-Out Text … it is not as nice as their “dedicated web page” but a lot of people are used to using STOP

Using the Address Book option in SMS Broadcast you can IMPORT your customers.

  • If you want to keep them in different GROUPS to match your BOM, I would do that BEFORE you do the data import ( it is just easier to manipulate the CSV before you start ).
  • First column is the phone number
  • Second column is the name
  • No headers

Create your first SMS in Send Messages

  • Be creative
  • Don’t spam
  • Be nice and select Add Opt-Out Text ( will use 19 characters )
  • 1 SMS credit is used per SMS per recipient
  • *** if your SMS goes over 160 characters ( including spaces ) it will be broken down into chunks of 153 characters and extra credits will be used
  • Select <next> <Address Book> select <contacts> or <groups>
  • I like to always <Remove Duplicate Numbers> and maybe “number cleanup”
  • Select “Your Business Name”
  • Select when you want to send your SMS
  • Check and Confirm everything
  • Send Messages

Update

Our wonderful Dev Team are currently working towards integrations into selected SMS broadcasters. This will make it a much easier and faster process to keep in touch with your valued clients. Keep an eye out for these integrations …

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