Create SMS list
You can create a list of subscribers to send SMS to. This will allow you to create SMS campaigns and be able to send the same SMS to multiple subscribers. It will also allow you to include unsubscribe links in your SMS, in order to comply with data protection policies.
In this article
Create a list of SMS subscribers
To create a list of SMS subscribers, you will have to access the SMS panel and then the lists menu, by clicking on the Acumbamail side menu:
Once this is done, if it is the first time you have created an SMS list you will see this:
On this screen you can create a new list by clicking on any of the New List buttons, in case you have a list already created, you will still have the option to create new ones in the button on the top right, which will always be available here. When you click on the New list button, a popup will appear asking you for the name of the list:
Enter the name you want and you will have your list created and you can perform the following actions, which we will detail in the following sections, about it, to continue with the tutorial click on the Edit fields section:
Configure list fields
A very useful feature of subscriber lists is the ability to add custom fields to your list. This will allow you to add information about your subscribers and then include it in the SMS themselves, for example you can include the subscriber's name when you import your subscriber list, so you can address them by name in the text of the SMS itself. If you are not going to need any extra fields in your shipments, you can move on to the following Let's create a name field that allows us to do this. When you click on the Edit Fields button in the menu inside the list, a screen like this will appear:
You will be shown the fields that your list already has, in this case, as we have not added any, only the phone field will appear, which is the mobile phone of the subscriber who is going to receive the SMS. Obviously this field cannot be removed, since the phone is a mandatory field in SMS lists. If you click on the add field button, the following popup will appear, in which we will have to enter the name of the field and its type:
In this case, we will introduce the word "name" as the name of the field and the type of the field will be Text, since we are going to introduce alphabetic values to save each of the names. Then we will press the Add button:
We can repeat this action as many times as necessary to add the fields that we want to use. You can also delete any field except the telephone field by clicking on the red X that appears on the right. You can also modify the name or label of the field. The labels will be the string that we want to use later in our shipments so that this field is replaced by the value assigned to each subscriber, in the case of our name label the field will be * | NAME | *. Once you have defined the fields you need for your list, you can continue with the import of subscribers.
Add subscribers to your SMS list
To import subscribers into your list you must select the option Add subscribers to in the menu that appears on the page of each list:
To import subscribers into your list, you must click the Add subscribers button from the Subscribers menu that appears on the page of each list.
Once this is done, the following screen will appear that will allow you to import a list of subscribers.
When you press the Add button, you'll see the following screen, allowing you to choose between the two methods that exist to import subscribers: manually upload them one by one or import a CSV file (basically it's a plain text file that in each row contains a subscriber and with the row fields separated by commas).
We will begin by choosing the option to Enter manually, when we select it we will be asked for the subscriber's phone field, which we will have to fill in the popup itself and then we must click on Add. It is very important that when importing a phone number the country prefix is included, since we allow shipments to many countries, in the case of Spain you can enter 0034 or +34 indistinctly.
Once the phone is filled in, you can press the Add button and the following confirmation will appear in the upper right part of our screen. The subscriber has already been imported and the campaigns sent to this list of subscribers will be sent to them.
The second option that appears in the popup is something more complex, but very useful when you want to add hundreds or thousands of subscribers without wasting the time necessary to make them one by one.
This is a complex form whose sections we will explain below, but first we will enter the csv that we will use to exemplify each of the fields that we have to fill in. Normally you won't have to fill all of them in, but we've made it especially complex to show a more complete example. The csv is a plain text file (you can export CSV files from any spreadsheet system, Excel, Google Sheets, etc.) with the following content:
Name, Telephone Ignacio, 65005595 Pablo, 00346666666
As you can see, the file contains 3 rows: the first showing the name of the fields and the next two showing the data of two subscribers. The first thing we have to do is drag the file to the part of the interface where it says Choose a file or drag it here. We can also click on this part and this will allow us to select the file with the file editor of our operating system. Once this is done we will have to fill in the rest of the fields in advanced options.
| Advanced option | What does it consist of | Value in the example |
| Separator of the fields of your CSV | It is the value that will be used in the CSV to separate the fields of each one of the subscribers, normally this value is a comma or a semicolon. In our example they are separated by commas. | , |
| Grouping character | It is a character that is used if you want to introduce the separation field within a file. Imagine that the comma appeared within the name of one of our subscribers, the system would not know how to interpret that record. It is usually left blank. | |
| Default prefix code | In Acumbamail we send SMS to multiple countries, so we need to know the country code of the phones to which the SMS is going to be sent. In the case of our CSV, we know that our phones are Spanish, but one contains the prefix and one doesn't, so we're going to enter the Spain prefix (0034) so that it can be added to subscribers who don't already have it. | 0034 |
| The first line determines the name of the fields | In the case of the CSV we are going to enter, we can see that the first row contains the words Name, Phone. This means that they are the titles of the fields, so that row does not contain a valid record and must be ignored. | Marked |
Once the example file has been dragged and the fields marked as indicated in the previous box, the form will look like this:
Once this is done, we will only have to press the Add button in the upper right part of the popup and our import will begin. The following screen will appear to configure the fields that we have included in the CSV. If we have only entered phones, we can skip this step:
In our case we want to import both fields, so in the Drop-down column, we will choose the field to which we want to import it (the first column will be the name and the second we will choose the phone value):
Check the list of subscribers
You can view information about your subscriber list by clicking on two menu zones, Summary, and Subscribers.
In the Summary tab you will find a page that will allow you to obtain information about the opt-ins and opt-outs that your list has had, as well as access the lists of total, active and inactive subscribers. These listings can also be viewed by clicking on the Subscribers button. You will also be able to remove subscribers from the Subscribers button. We recommend that you do not delete subscribers who have unsubscribed, as this will state the date on which they have done so and is useful when processing any complaints that may exist, especially if a subscriber says that they have unsubscribed before receiving an email.
Delete your SMS list
To delete your SMS list, you can click on the actions menu of each of the lists and select Delete list, remember that this action is not reversible, so be careful when deleting your lists:
