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 tag than those carried out through email, they are more effective, so for specific or especially important actions it is useful to complement both strategies. If you need ideas about what kind 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, taking into account that you have already created your subscriber list previously,

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, click on the SMS button that appears in the left side menu:

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

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

Please note that in this tutorial we consider that you have already created a subscriber list for SMS. Once you have pressed the button, the next 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 tap Create.

Select the list to send the campaigns to

Once you have pressed the New campaigns button, the following screen will appear, in which, only, you will have to choose a list of SMS subscribers, in our case we will choose the only list we have created. Remember that with your SMS credits you can send to a multitude of countries.

You can only send to one list of subscribers, if you want to send the same message to several lists see the section below to send the same campaign to another list. Check the list you want to send your campaigns to and click the Next button.

Create campaign content

Then, once you have selected the list of subscribers to whom 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 can change if you want
• The shipping date: by default it will be set as automatic shipping, but if you click on the drop-down menu you can also leave it scheduled for a specific date
• You can save your campaigns at all times and see how many SMS credits you would spend per campaign and how many subscribers it will reach.
• Finally, click on the blue button to Send campaigns or Schedule campaigns, if you have selected the option to schedule its sending for later

In the campaign edition, the Insert button appears, which will allow you to insert custom content into your campaign. When you tap it, you'll see the following options:

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

• Label: allows you to include in your campaigns any of the fields, in our list we have included the name of the subscribers so we could choose that label and a string *|NAME|* in the SMS itself which, at the time of sending, will include the name of each subscriber in each SMS.
• Link: you can include a link in your SMS in a normal and ordinary way, but doing so using this option will provide you with two advantages: you will use our shortener so that the SMS occupies fewer characters and reduces the possibility that it occupies more than one SMS and, by using our shortener, we can give you statistics of 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 allow you to save costs by avoiding sending SMS to subscribers who do not want to receive them.

How many credits your campaigns can spend

In Acumbamail we make it very easy, while you are creating your SMS campaigns you will always see how many credits it will cost you and how much space your text occupies. Calculating SMS size is complex and depends on several factors that we are going to detail in this section.

SMS have a size set by telephone operators, that limit varies when using characters that do not belong to the GSM alphabet (such as an accent) since 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 the size you want, the recipients will not notice a difference but they will cost you several credits. Below we explain in detail the limits of the size of the SMS:

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

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

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

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

Send the same campaigns to another list

In SMS campaigns, you can only send your campaigns to one list. If you want to send the same message to multiple SMS lists, you can duplicate the campaign and, in step 1, replace the list of recipients with a different one. To do this, from the main page of  Campaigns, you must select the campaigns in question and in the drop-down that appears at the top click on Duplicate. Next, modify step 1 of the campaigns by choosing the list you want to send to and in step 2 press the Send now button or schedule it.

View your campaigns' tracking report

Once you have sent your campaigns, you can consult the tracking reports in the campaign 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 between the following options:

If you click on the first Summary option, you will see a summary of the campaigns you have sent. You will also see the following graph in which you can analyze the result of the main indicators of your campaigns:

Within the reports summary, we have three statuses:

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

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

Later, if you have included links created with our editor, you will be able to check the clicks that have occurred by clicking on the Tracking url's section:

It will show you the information of the URLs you have entered and the subscribers who clicked on each of them, when and how many times they have done so. You can also see the number of unique clicks (the number of people you clicked on a link) and the number of total clicks (if a subscriber double clicks, it is counted twice).

Finally, you can choose to have more advanced information on the receivers on the list, by clicking on the Receivers option:

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

To which countries can I send SMS?

With your Acumbamail SMS credits 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