How do I add a campaign group and what is it used for?
Essentially, campaign groups are customer segments that you can use to determine which contacts need to receive your outbound message. Use the Groups function to easily manage your contacts, know where they came from, and keep them organized according to your specific segmentation needs.
To create a new group, navigate to ‘Groups’ in the left-hand navigation bar. Click on the ‘Actions’ drop-down at the top right-hand corner of the Groups page and choose ‘Add Group’. You can then name your group and click on the ‘Save’ button.
Manage your groups at any time by selecting the action button in the row of the group you want to edit. You’ll be able to perform the following actions:
Send a message
Add a contact to the group
Edit the group
Delete the group
How do I add a short link?
Campaign Manager is integrated with bitly.com to shorten and track link clicks in the platform. You can shorten any URL link used in your text messages in order to limit the number of characters you use.
From within Campaign Manager, navigate to Tools ->Short Links from the panel on the left. In the top right, click on the 'Actions' drop-down list and select ‘Add Short Link URL’. Give your short URL a descriptive name so that you can identify which campaign it belongs to and enter the full URL (that will be used to generate the new short URL). Click 'Save'.
To send a campaign that includes your short URL, you can do it by selecting the 'Send' button (envelope icon) in the row of the short URL you want to use. You can also copy the link from the page and paste it into the desired campaign.
The number of clicks that each short URL receives throughout your campaign will automatically be updated in the ‘Clicks’ column next to the short URL. You can use this to measure campaign success or A/B test your SMS messages. Learn more about how to calculate the click-through rates for your SMS campaigns here.
How do I add or edit a message template?
Message templates can be created to save common or often-used SMS messages so that you won’t need to re-enter the same message repeatedly.
Select Campaign -> Campaign Template in the left-hand navigation menu. Select the ‘Add Campaign Template’ option from the ‘Actions’ drop-down list. Name your template in the ‘Template’ text entry box and enter your message in the ‘Message’ text entry box before clicking on ‘Save’.
You can edit or delete your template message at any time by selecting the ‘Edit’ button in the row of the message template you want to edit.
How do I change my time zone?
To update your time zone, navigate to the 'Preferences' tab in the Campaign Manager tool. Select the relevant time zone from the drop-down menu and click 'Save' at the bottom of the page.
How do I make sure my message does not contain non-GSM characters?
If a message contains one or more non-GSM characters, the entire message is automatically converted to Unicode in order to successfully deliver the message. One message part equals 160 GSM characters or 70 Unicode characters, which means that using non-GSM characters in your messages could result in additional and inflated costs per message.
To check whether your messages contain non-GSM characters, navigate to Tools -> Non-GSM Character Checker and enter the text that you want to send. Any non-GSM characters will be highlighted in red. Remove non-GSM characters to ensure that you only pay for one message part.
How do I manually add, edit, or delete a contact?
You can view and manage your contacts by navigating to Contacts from the left-hand panel.
To add an individual contact, select Actions -> Add Contact and choose the group to which this contact should be added. Add the details of the contact and submit the form.
To edit or delete a contact, click the edit/delete button in the row in which the contact is displayed in. You can also send a message to an individual.
How do I measure and optimize my outbound SMS campaigns?
Here are some key metrics that you can use to measure and optimize the success of your outbound SMS campaigns:
SMS delivery rate per message: Select 'Logs' in the left-hand menu to view all sent messages. You’ll also be able to view the delivery rate for individual messages here.
Click-through rate: If you used a shortened URL in your SMS, you’ll be able to see the number of clicks received on that link by navigating to Tools -> Short links. Your click-through rate (CTR) is calculated by taking the number of clicks or messages delivered multiplied by 100. If the objective of your campaign was to drive your subscribers to a web page, the CTR will give you an indication of how successful the content of your message was in achieving that objective.