Create SMS Campaigns

With Acumbamail, you can create SMS campaigns to get in touch with your subscribers.

Although SMS campaigns have a much higher price than those carried out via email, they have a higher effectiveness, so for specific actions or especially important ones, it is useful to complement both strategies.

If you need ideas about what type of campaigns you can send using SMS, check out the SMS marketing guide we have on our blog. Next, we are going to teach you how to create an SMS campaign with Acumbamail, assuming that you have already created your subscriber list beforehand.

In this article

How to create an SMS campaign

To create an SMS campaign in Acumbamail, you must go to the SMS campaigns menu. To do this, press the SMS button that appears in the left sidebar:

And, in that same menu, choose the Campaigns section. Once you have done this, if you do not have any SMS campaign created, the following screen will appear:

To create your first campaign, you will only have to press the New campaign button and you will be able to create the first of your campaigns.

Keep in mind that in this tutorial we consider that you have already created a list of SMS subscribers. Once you have pressed the button, the following popup will appear in which you have to enter the name of the campaign (only visible to you) and the sender, for example the name of your company. Then, press Create.

Select the list to which the campaign will be sent

Once you have pressed the New campaign button, the following screen will appear, in which, you will only have to choose an SMS subscriber list, in our case we will choose the only list we have created. Remember that with your SMS credits you can send to many countries. 

You can only send to one subscriber list, if you want to send the same shipment to several lists, check the section below to send the same campaign to another list. Check the list to which you want to send your campaign and press the Next button. 

Create the content of the campaign

Next, once you have selected the subscriber list to which you are going to send the campaign, you must create the content of it on the following screen:

In it you can choose multiple options, the main ones are:

• The sender of the text message, which you had already selected when creating the campaign but which you can change if you want
• The sending date: by default it will be configured as automatic sending, but if you click on the drop-down menu you can also schedule it for a specific date 
• You can save your campaign at any time and you will see how many SMS credits you would spend per campaign and how many subscribers it will reach. 
• Finally, click on the blue Send campaign or Schedule campaign button, if you have selected the option to schedule its shipment for later

In the campaign editing, the Insert button appears, which will allow you to insert personalized content in your campaign. When you press it, you will see the following options:

These three options are very useful when sending SMS campaigns, their functionality is as follows:

• Label: allows you to include in your campaign any of the fields, in our list we have included the name of the subscribers so we could choose that label and a *|NAME|* string will be included in the SMS itself that, at the time of sending, will include in each SMS the name of each subscriber.
• Link: in your SMS you can include a link in a normal and ordinary way, but doing it using this option will provide you with two advantages: you will use our shortener so that the SMS takes up fewer characters and reduces the possibility that it takes up more than one SMS and, by using our shortener, we can give you statistics on which people have clicked on that link.
• Unsubscribe link: it is highly recommended to introduce an unsubscribe link in your SMS to allow your users to unsubscribe from your SMS list whenever they want. It will also save you costs by avoiding sending SMS to subscribers who do not want to receive them.

How many credits your campaign can spend

At Acumbamail we make it very easy, while you are creating your SMS campaign you will always see how many credits it will cost you and how much space your text takes up. The calculation of the size of the SMS is complex and depends on several factors that we are going to detail in this section.

SMS have a size established by the telephone operators; this limit varies when using characters that do not belong to the GSM alphabet (such as an accent) since the SMS requires unicode encoding*. When using this encoding, the text content of the SMS will be limited to 70 characters per SMS instead of the 160 of a normal one. With both encodings, you can send an SMS of any size; the recipients will not notice a difference, but it will cost you several credits.

Below, we explain in detail the limits of SMS size:

• Standard: The SMS can occupy up to 160 characters; above that amount, an extra credit will be added for every 153 additional characters.
• Unicode (accents, emojis, and other characters): The SMS can occupy up to 70 characters; above that amount, an extra credit will be added for every 67 additional characters.

* The é and ñ will also be charged as unicode.

The reason why the space for the first credit is larger than the rest is that operators use that difference to insert the concatenation code so that everything arrives as a single SMS.

Finally, another peculiarity of SMS is that operators need two characters to represent some symbols, specifically:

Send the same campaign to another list

In SMS campaigns, you can only send your campaign to one list. If you want to send the same message to several SMS lists, you can duplicate the campaign and, in step 1, replace the recipient list with a different one.

To do this, from the main page of Campaigns, you must select the campaign in question and in the dropdown that appears at the top, click on Duplicate. Then, modify step 1 of the campaign by choosing the list you want to send to, and in step 2, click the Send now button or schedule it.

Check the follow-up report of your campaign

Once you have sent your campaign, you can check the follow-up reports in the campaigns menu by clicking on the campaign itself. When you choose a campaign that has already been sent, a screen will appear where you can choose from the following options:

If you click on the first option Summary, you will see a summary of the campaign you have sent. You will also see the following graph where you can analyze the results of the main indicators of your campaign:

Within the report summary, we have three statuses:

• Delivered: These are SMS that have been received, and the operator has returned the reception time to us.
• Pending: These SMS have been delivered to the telephone operator, but either the operator has delivered them but has not returned the delivery time to us, or they have not yet been delivered for various reasons (mobile off, out of coverage, etc.).
• Not delivered: SMS that could not be delivered because the number no longer exists or is not valid.

It is normal for all campaigns to have some percentage of SMS that are in the pending or not delivered states. These credits will also be deducted from the credits you have purchased, as SMS providers charge us the same amount whether the SMS is delivered or not.

After that, if you have included links created with our editor, you can check the clicks that have occurred by clicking on the URL tracking section:

In it, you will see the information of the URLs you have entered and the subscribers who have clicked on each of them, when, and how many times they have done so. You will also be able to see the number of unique clicks (the number of people who clicked on a link) and the total number of clicks (if a subscriber clicks twice, it counts twice).

Finally, you can choose to have more advanced information about the recipients of the list by clicking on the Recipients option:

Here you will have access to a complete list of your subscribers and will be able to see the status of the SMS that have been sent to them. You will also be able to see your unsubscribe list, the list of subscribers who have clicked on your campaign, and download CSV listings of each of them by clicking on the Generate Report button:

Which countries can I send SMS to?

With your SMS credits from Acumbamail, you can send SMS to your subscribers in the following countries at no additional cost:

• Austria
• Chile
• Colombia
• Croatia
• Denmark
• Slovenia
• Spain
• Italy
• Mexico
• Poland
• Portugal
• United Kingdom

You can also send to these countries, but with a cost of 2 credits for each SMS:

• Germany
• Belgium
• Cuba
• Finland
• France
• Greece
• Ireland
• Iceland
• Norway
• Romania
• Switzerland