Send a message to all of your clients, or just a few targeted ones, depending on the type of campaign you want to run.
Marketing campaigns can be anything from a Mother’s Day or Birthday offer, to exciting news about a new location or even a reminder to book in before you go on holiday.
You can filter the list of your clients (with valid SMS numbers and have provided SMS marketing consent). This means you can target and personalise your messages, which improves the effectiveness of the SMS campaign.
Before you start
- SMS campaigns is only available to our UK, Ireland, US, Canada, NZ and Australian customers on selected packages (Elevate & Innovate).
- Only the account owner has access by default. You can set permissions for your staff so they can also send SMS campaigns.
- Due to limitations and variances between SMS providers, we don't support the use of emojis or unicode characters in SMS campaigns.
- The data used to run SMS campaigns updates approximately every 6 hours.
- SMS Campaign Credits do not use your month SMS Appointment Credit allocation
Create a new SMS campaign
1.Head to Messages > SMS Campaigns from the main menu
2. Click on New SMS campaign to create a new campaign
3. Construct your audience by choosing different filters to target your campaign. If you would like to send a message to all of your clients don't select any of the filter options
The filters you can use include:
Client attributes
- VIP: Will send to VIP clients only
- Has a birthday in: Will send to all clients who have a birthday within the selected month
Appointment attributes
- Selected locations: Send to clients who have had appointments at specific locations
- Selected staff: Send to clients who have had an appointment with specific staff
- Selected services: Send to clients who have had appointments with specific services.
Date range
-
With appointments in date range: Will send to clients who have had appointments within your selected date range, up to two years.
-
Specific date range: Will send to clients who have had appointments within your specified date range, in the last two years.
Future bookings
-
Has no future bookings: Will send to clients who have no future bookings
4. Then click View number of recipients to get an estimate of how many clients your campaign will send to. Once you're happy click Write message.
5. Compose your message. Make sure to check the wording of your message carefully as this can’t be edited or removed once you send your campaign. When you’re ready, click Review campaign.
Note: Placeholder tags aren't currently supported in Targeted SMS messages. Make sure to include any information, including business names etc, in their full form.
6. Review your SMS campaign. If you’re happy with it, click Send campaign to finish.
Filtering your customer list
Apply filters to the customer list to target specific groups of your clients. You can apply multiple filters to get specific.
For example, you might want to send a campaign to VIP clients that have completed a Colour & cut service by staff member Belinda in the last 30 days. You would tick these filters:
- Client attributes - VIP
- Appointment attributes - by staff (then select Belinda)
- Appointment attributes - by service (then select Colour & cut)
- Appointment attributes - date range (then selected last 30 days)
Note: Client data updates approximately every 6 hours. This means that if you make changes to your client attributes (e.g. mark as VIP, opt-in or out of SMS campaigns etc) you'll need to wait a while to make sure the data has updated before you send your campaign.
Charges & billing
Charges for Targeted SMS campaigns are additional to the included SMS in your package.
You will be charged immediately when you start sending your SMS campaign.
Once the campaign is processed by Timely's SMS provider, if there are any failed SMS deliveries (ie. mobile number no longer in use) Timely will credit your SMS balance. This balance is used up first.
Note: If there are SMS balance transferred on your account, then that balance will be used up first.
Remove clients from SMS marketing
We include a line at the end of the message, which gives clients the instruction to "Reply STOP to opt-out" to future messages.
If the client replies to the marketing message with "STOP", then we will automatically update their individual settings so they aren't included in any future SMS marketing messages.
If the customer asks to be removed in person, or you would like to manually update a client's settings:
- Head to the Customers tab and locate the customer record.
- Click Edit and go to the Notifications tab:
- In the SMS/text marketing section, uncheck the box next to Send this customer SMS/text marketing messages?:
- Click Save to apply your changes.
The client will still receive any reminders and/or notifications, in line with your settings. These settings won't be affected by replying "STOP".
Important information
- It may take several hours for the campaign to fully send to all clients. Message sending can't be stopped or edited once the campaign is underway.
- Like regular SMS reminders and notifications, sending Targeted SMS messages will be restricted to the SMS time restrictions.
- There isn't currently a way to set a business name or number for SMS messages, instead, all SMS in Timely will be sent from a pool of SMS numbers. To ensure your clients know who the message is from, we recommend including your business name in your message.