SMS capabilities are currently available to North American customers only. We look forward to implementing GDPR-compliant SMS functionality for our UK customers in the future.
Overview
Newsletters are a great way to communicate upcoming sales or convey special messages to your customer audience. Similar to communication profiles, they allow you to target specific types of customers and automatically pull in personal data using placeholders. The primary difference is that a newsletter is a one-off notification that you manually send, while communication profiles are a series of notifications that are automatically sent based on the job triggers. In this article, we'll review how to create an SMS newsletter. If you would like more information about sending an email newsletter, check out this article.
Enabling SMS Functionality
Before you can send SMSes, you must first set up your SMS registration. You may have done this during your initial account setup, but in case you haven't, please click here for more information.
Creating a Newsletter
There are two ways to send newsletters:
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| A. From the Selling tab within a photo job. Using this option will send your newsletter to applicable customers within this specific job. | B. From the Newsletters tab under the Customers tab. Using this option will send your newsletter to applicable customers out of all your customers. |
On the newsletter page, you'll find a number of settings as indicated in the screenshot below:
- Name: Provide an internal name for your campaign. It's good practice to use a name that will be meaningful in the future, as it's possible you'll have multiple campaigns at any given point.
- Recipients: When you click Add/Edit, you'll be redirected to a new window where you can select any number of recipients. Note that you have a number of filters at your disposal, including job, customer status, year, album, etc. You can add multiple jobs by selecting them in the dropdown and then narrow your target market even further by selecting specific albums/groups.
- Automated Scheduling: Tell the system to send the SMS immediately once you click send or alternatively, have the newsletter sent at a specific date and time of your choosing.
⚠ Important: Once you have scheduled your newsletter and saved the settings, you still need to click the Send Newsletter button to activate the scheduled newsletter.
- Design: Design the body and content of your SMS.
Click the SMS tab and type your message into the text box. You can use placeholders to customize your text. At this time we do not provide templates for SMS.
You will see a warning about a character limit (150). This warning is for older phone types only, where the system will split the text into two texts. Modern smartphones will still send just one text to your customers. That said, you still want to keep texts short and sharp.
Finalizing and Sending Your Newsletter
Once you've completed the design and content of your newsletter, click the Save and preview newsletter button at the bottom of the page – you'll then have an opportunity to preview the SMS with populated placeholders and make any last-minute changes before you hit send.
The Takeaway
Whether sending from a specific photo job or your entire customer base, you can effortlessly create impactful newsletters, conveying special messages, promotions, or updates directly to your audience.