Learn how to create campaigns to reach your audience with communications and promotions that drive attention and revenue for your brand.
Campaigns are one of the most effective ways to capture your customers’ attention by delivering short and relevant messages at the right moment.
They are especially effective for building anticipation or driving focused sales moments. Use them as part of your regular messaging strategy, alongside captures, playbooks, and Inbox workflows.
To create a new campaign, visit the Campaigns section and click on the New Campaign button near the top right of the page.
Selecting an audience
Campaigns can reach your full eligible audience by keeping the All audiences option selected.
An estimate of the total recipients this campaign can reach is visible on the right side of the page.
Reaching everyone is not always desirable. A campaign is usually more effective when the message targets a specific audience.
It is a good practice to create different campaigns targeting specific audiences. If you are already using Lists or Segments, you can include them as audiences by selecting them from the All audiences dropdown.
You can include multiple Lists and Segments in your selection by clicking the 
button at the right of the dropdown.
The aggregated total of recipients to reach will be visible on the right side of the page.
Learn more: Lists and Segments.
Excluding audiences
It is possible to exclude certain audiences by selecting them first and then clicking on the Include label.
For an audience to remain excluded, its label should say Exclude.
Composing your message
Take your time to write a clear message. Imagine yourself as the recipient. How would you feel receiving this message?
Typically, short and effective messages work better than longer ones.
If your campaign uses SMS, keep SMS length in mind. SMS messages have a limit of 160 characters. If you include characters that are not originally supported in the GSM-7 specification, such as accents and emojis, an encoding conversion to UCS-2 will be done and the total length per SMS message will be reduced to 80 characters.
If your SMS message exceeds this limit, it will require an additional SMS. Whenever possible, Hellotext tries to merge different SMS into one message, and when this is not possible the message will be sent in separate SMS messages.
A counter with the remaining SMS characters and the number of SMS messages this campaign will consume per recipient is available in the compose area when SMS applies.
A preview of the message is available on the right side of the page. It can help give you an idea of how the message could look when it is split into different SMS.
Add a shortened link
This feature creates a shorter version of any URL in a simple format that looks like hello.link/abcdef.
We always recommend using this tool to shorten the URL that will take visitors to your site, promotion, or a product.
The benefits of shortening links are two-fold: it keeps your message shorter, leaving more characters for the actual message.
It also tracks which recipients clicked the short link and the actions that followed, such as purchases or other tracked events.
For this to work, you previously need to have installed the Hellotext.js tracker or created your own implementation to process the session and track the events using the API.
Add tags
Make your messages more personal by referencing customer profile properties. For example, display the profile’s name using the tag {name}. The delivered message will replace the tag with the customer profile’s name.
You can find tags for all your customer profile properties such as:
- {name}
- {last_name}
- {phone}
- {birthdate}
- Any custom properties also have a matching tag following the same tag naming convention: For example, if the property is called My Property a tag to reference this property will be automatically available with the name {my_property}
Setting a default value
Not every customer profile is likely to have the property you want to use in a tag. For example, not every campaign recipient may have a name. Depending on how you craft your message, this can make the message read oddly if no value is shown.
| To solve this, you can pass a default value inside your tag separated by the pipe like _{name | customer}_. |
If your message is for example:
- Dear {name|customer}, we have a special offer…
For a recipient without a name, it will be sent as:
- Dear customer, we have a special offer…
Add coupons
You can reference coupons already created. Referencing coupons instead of manually writing them gives you powerful reporting and better insights and understanding of the impact they had on your campaign results.
Choose channel and sender
Choose the channel and sender that match the audience and campaign goal.
For SMS campaigns, make sure your account has an active sender or short code available before launching.
For WhatsApp campaigns, make sure your WhatsApp account is connected and ready before sending.
Keep reading: Messaging channels overview.
Schedule and deliver
You can send your campaign right away or schedule it to send in the future on a particular day and time.
Editorial review
Please keep in mind that if your campaign targets more than 100 recipients it will be subject to a quick editorial review before it is delivered.
During business hours this is fairly quick and usually takes less than 10 minutes.
Once a campaign is approved, it will continue its course to delivery. You do not need to do anything on your part during the approval process unless there is a request to adjust the campaign, in which case after a new change is made it will be marked for review again.