Learn how to create text message campaigns to reach your audience with communications and promotions that drive more revenue and attention towards your brand.
Text-based campaigns are one of the most effective ways to capture your customers’ attention by delivering short and captivating messages that will be read almost immediately by the majority of their recipients.
They are especially effective at building anticipation or driving more sales. The possibilities with text messaging as part of your regular marketing communication strategy to unlock new revenue opportunities are virtually endless.
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 entire subscriber base simply by keeping the All audiences option selected.
An estimate of the total subscribers that this campaign will reach is visible on the right side of the page.
Reaching all your subscribers may not be always desirable. Typically a campaign is most effective when its message targets a particular demographic.
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 subscribers to reach will be visible on the right side of the page.
Learn more on 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 think a catchy message. Imagine yourself as the recipient. How would you feel receiving this text message?
Typically short and effective messages work better than longer ones. Your campaign will be delivered as a SMS text-based campaign. SMS 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 message exceeds this limit it will require an additional SMS. Whenever possible we try 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 subscriber is always available on the bottom right area of the compose.
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 keeps track of whom of your subscribers clicked on the short link and all the successive actions performed, like knowing who made a purchase, or completed a certain action.
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 the properties of the subscriber. For example, display their name using the tag {name}. The delivered message will replace the tag with the name of the subscriber.
You can find tags for all your contact properties such as:
- {name}
- {last_name}
- {phone}
- {birthday}
- 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 all your subscribers are likely to have the property you want to use in a tag set. For example, not everyone in your subscriber list 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 subscriber without his 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 sender
Messages are sent using the best routes possible. This is managed automatically by Hellotext so you don’t need to worry about it.
You can still specify any of your existing phone numbers as the sender including any short code that you may have associated.
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 subscribers 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.