Using SMS – The EASY way

Are you using SMS in your communications?

Did you know that SMS's get a staggering 98% read rate, with over 90% of those read in the first 3 Seconds?

That's far greater than our traditional email marketing, with stats on average around 20-30%. Watch the video below to see how to add SMS broadcasting Automatically into your campaigns the cheap and EASY way

Hi, it's Jason Buckner here from Automation Made Easy. I've been helping small business and online businesses automate their processes for the last 11 years. And hopefully I can help you automate some of your processes today.

So today I want to talk to you about using SMS in your marketing and SMS in your communications.

In traditional email communications, which most of us are using now, our traditional open rates are around 20% to 30%. So when you send out 100 emails only about 20 to 30 of those get opened on average.

Sometimes it goes a little bit higher if you've got some good strategies in place. But most of the time it goes even lower than that.

Now with SMS… this is pretty cool…

With SMS there's a 98% read rate on SMSs, which is very cool. And the other more important fact is 90% of those are read within their first three seconds.

You know, we're becoming a very mobile orientated community.

And as soon as an SMS comes through, we read it and we action it most of the time, because once it's been read, it's a little bit harder to go back and action on it later.

So with SMS, wouldn't it make sense to use it in your marketing with those sorts of read rates - a 98% read rate, as opposed to 20%-30% for emails?

I'm not saying that this should this should replace your email marketing, but I think it should absolutely be used in conjunction with your email marketing.

However a lot of my customers come to me and say, “You know what, it's too complex. I don't know how to set this up. I don't know how to automate from my marketing efforts, from my Keap (previously Infusionsoft) account through to SMS. And I like to start cheap.”

We can start cheap and then grow from there. They are a very simple service and simple or cheap is where we start. It's SMSBroadcast.com.au.

Now these guys are just one that that I use here in Australia because I find them to be the cheapest and one of the easiest to integrate with. So it's as little as 2 cents per message to send an SMS. That's for one SMS, and of course every time you grow larger, they become bigger.

Let's dive in and take a look at how simple it is to send SMSs from SMSBroadcast.com.au.

We're in our campaign builder and we want to build our campaign to include SMS. So, whatever might start our campaign, whether it's a web form or anything that goes along in there, whatever the goal is, that's irrelevant.

What we want to look at is the functionality in here in the sequence. All of these would connect up and we can go through the details of this later, but in here, we're going to send an SMS.

Now you won't just have someone opt in or apply a tag and then send an SMS automatically. But what we are looking at is just the SMS functionality at this point in time. And then the rest of the campaign you can build out later.

So what we do is we go down here to send a HTT post and this is the way we send an SMS using SMS broadcast. I like to rename these things straight away, send SMS, and then we go into our HTTP post. Now there are a few things we need to send in here.

This is really cool. These HTT posts… it's very good. So for an SMS broadcast, we use this same code (see the link for this at the end of this post).

Every time we send an SMS and we put that code into here, and then we need to remove this in here. What we put in here is username. And then we don't want merge fields. Next we put in here password, and then we need to put into here who it's to or where we get the information from. And then we put in here from, and then here we have the message. Then we have max split.

Now I'll explain this max split to you a little bit later, but let's go through the details.

So first we put our username and our password in. This is the same username and password that you use to set up or to log into your SMSBroadcast.com.au account. So you'll put those in here - your username and your password. This is the cool stuff.

Now, though, in the two sections here, what we'll do is we'll click on the merge field and we will use Contact Fields (most common). And then mobile, I've got mine labeled as mobile phone one I've labeled as mobile. But in your case, you might have this called phone one. So you choose phone one in that case. And I try to always use phone one for mobile devices, so that so that we can always send SMSs.

Then from now, this is cool... you can put in here a ‘from’ name and then you won't get any replies. It'll just come out from ‘JasonB’ or ‘Automation Made Easy’ or something like that. But you can only use six characters in here for the, from name, so be cautious of that.

If you want people to be able to reply to you on your actual mobile phone, this can be done. Instead of having a name in here, put in your whole mobile phone number.

Now the cool thing about the phone numbers that are set up in your account in here is that if you put in 0405…, so forth and so on. Or if you put in 61 405…, or if you just have in, you know, sometimes when we do imports, it drops the zero and it just starts with 405… so forth and so on, SMSBroadcast.com.au will automatically recognise that as a mobile phone - whether it's got the +61, whether it's got the 0 at the start, whether it's got no 0 at the start  - and it will automatically recognise and send to the number, which is pretty cool.

Next we type in our message - let's go there and then we'll put in say, “First name, great choice in coming onto the Automation Made Easy training, looking forward to seeing you in the session.”

Whatever it is that you want to put in there, you can use merge fields in there; you can put… say you've got an event reminder, for example, you can put your URL, your HTTP slash you know, all of that sort of URL into the post and get it out as well.

Now the next bit is the important bit. If this is more than 160 characters long, it will become two SMSs. So you need to put in here a ‘2’, but a really cool trick you can do in here is you can actually put this in as ‘5’. And then if your message is somewhere between one and five messages, it'll work out exactly how many messages it's meant to be, and then it will it will create it together and append all of those messages together.

If you don't put a number in here, and if you're more than 160 characters, it'll send the first 160 is one SMS. And then the second 160 is another SMS, and it gets a bit awkward. It looks a bit silly when it comes through as an SMS.

So just put a ‘5’ in here and that'll sort that out for you. Of course, don't send an SMS that's more than five times 160 characters because it will just be too much for the people to read and then they'll stop reading through it. So try and keep it short and sweet and straight to the point.

Now then we mark it from draft to ready and we publish the campaign as you normally would. Of course, you put in your username and your password. And then when someone comes through to this part of the campaign, it's automatically going to send that SMS for them. Pretty cool, right?

It's one way only in this setup. It's just about sending an SMS. If you put in your mobile number into the ‘From’ though, any replies will come back to you. But if you put anything else in there - if you put in your name, for example - the replies will go back into your SMSBroadcast.com.au account. So you can manage them from in there as well.