New in the portal: build your own SMS campaign

Want to send one message to hundreds or thousands of people? You can now do that step by step in the SMSBOX portal. You choose the recipients, write your message, send yourself a test and schedule the sending. The portal guides you through the four steps.

You will find it in the menu under Campaigns → New campaign. Send SMS and the Excel imports stay available as before.

Step 1: recipients

You pick groups from your phonebook, look up individual contacts by name or number, or type in numbers yourself. You can also upload an Excel or CSV file (.xlsx, .xls or .csv, up to 25 MB). The portal finds the column with the mobile number on its own; you check it and adjust where needed.

You can combine these sources. Duplicate numbers are removed, so everyone gets the message only once. Want to reuse the numbers from your file later? Then tick Also save these numbers as a phonebook group.

Step 2: message

Tags make the message personal. %naam% becomes the contact's name, and every column in your file becomes a tag of its own. The preview shows right away how the message reaches the first recipient, and how many SMS parts it has. If you have your own keyword, you choose under Send via whether the message goes out through the regular SMS gateway or through that keyword.

Step 3: test and schedule

With Send test, you receive the message yourself first, filled in the way the first recipient gets it. That test costs one message. Then you choose Send now or Schedule for a date and time of your choice.

You also see roughly how many credits the campaign will cost and whether your balance covers it. It is an estimate, because the price per number depends on the operator. Tick Email me when this campaign is finished if you want a heads-up. Schedule campaign sets everything in motion.

With test credits you cannot send a campaign, only a test to your own number.

Step 4: processing

The portal processes the recipients in the background, even for large files. You do not have to wait and can safely close the page. As long as the campaign is in the queue, you can still stop it with Cancel campaign.

Stop halfway and continue later

Everything you fill in is saved as a draft straight away. You will find your drafts under My campaigns. If you click New campaign again, your open drafts are shown at the top there as well.

After the sending

Under My campaigns you see for each campaign how many messages were delivered, how many were not and how many are still pending. From there you can also go to the individual messages.