Please note that the Mobile Marketing Association requires you to first obtain your customer’s permission before marketing them via SMS. There are several ways this can be accomplished.  Please contact us for more information.

To get started, you first need to tell TextMe about the data you wish to store about your customers.  You can check out this blog post to see how this can be accomplished.

Once your user data has been defined, you can start uploading your existing customer data into TextMe.  There are two ways to do this.

The first is by selecting the Upload Contacts option under the Contacts tab.  Upload contacts will upload your customer data into TextMe without associating your customers with any subscription list. Hence, it can be done without first obtaining permission from your customers to contact them via SMS.

After uploading your data file, which can be a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, an Open Office spreadsheet, or a comma separated values (CSV) file, you will be brought to a screen where you can map the data in your data file to the attributes that you have defined in TextMe.  If there is a column in the data file containing data you do not wish to upload, simply click the Ignore this column check box for that attribute.

After verifying the data mapping, TextMe will begin processing your data file in the background.  An email will be sent to you when the upload is complete.

The second way to upload existing customer data into TextMe is by selecting an existing subscription campaign, clicking Subscribers, and choosing Upload Subscribers from the list of options.  Upload subscribers will upload your customer data into TextMe as well as add them to the list of subscribers for this particular subscription campaign.  If you have not already obtained their permission, TextMe will send an opt-in message to your customers asking if they would like to opt-in to your subscription list.  If you have already obtained their permission, let us know, and we can help you get setup without sending the opt-in message.

The best part about uploading subscribers with the information that you have already collected about them is that you can immediately start segmenting your customers into groups and targeting groups of subscribers with custom messages.

We hope you find this capability useful.  As always, let us know what else we can do to help!

While the upgrade is occurring, you will be unable to access the TextMe system. Incoming SMS messages will be queued for processing until the upgrade is complete. Scheduled messages will also be delayed until after the upgrade.

Once the everything is back online, you won’t notice any difference in the application. This upgrade is laying the foundation for future enhancements.

Introducing the Lists tab

Recognizing their uniqueness, we have recently updated TextMe to treat Subscriptions differently from the other campaigns.  First and foremost, we have removed “Subscriptions” as a sub-item of the Campaigns tab, and given Subscriptions their own tab, called Lists.  The Lists tab is your one-stop-shop for managing your Subscriptions.  Upon clicking the new Lists tab, you will be brought to the new Subscription lists dashboard.  The new dashboard gives you a nice, high level summary of your active Subscription lists. It shows you a graph of your current confirmed subscribers, which contains a breakdown of the subscribers for each list if you have less than ten active subscription lists.  The dashboard also displays your active Subscription lists, any broadcast messages scheduled to be delivered, and a short list of recent messages sent to your subscribers.  The “Lists” sub-tab will show you a detailed list of all of your subscription lists, regardless of whether they are active or not, and the “Messages” sub-tab will show you the message activity across all of your Subscription lists.

Sending a message now more intuitive

We have also recently changed the “Send / Schedule a New Message” screen to be simpler to understand and easier to use. The new screen gives you three options to identify the recipients of your message.  The first option, “Lists”, allows you to select one or more of your subscription lists. If you choose this option, the message will be sent to all subscribers in the selected lists.  The second option, “Segments”, allows you to specify a list of filters, or segments, to narrow down the list of recipients based on some criteria. If you choose this option, the message will be sent to the subscribers, in all of your lists, that match the filter criteria.  TextMe customers can login and read more about filters here.  The third option, “All subscribers”, will send the message to all subscribers in all of your active subscription lists.

Choosing whether to send the message now or to schedule it for future delivery is now handled by choosing a time. You can either choose “Now” to send the message right away, or choose “Future”, and specify the date and time you wish to send the message.  We feel this is much more straight forward than the previous, multiple button approach.

Finally, in the “Message” section, you specify the description of the message, and the message itself. The message section also allows you to specify an override message for a single carrier (allowing you to send AT&T customers a different message, for example), or to collect data from your customers, if your TextMe subscription plan supports data collection.

When everything has been specified, click OK to be brought to a screen to review your message.  If everything looks good on the review page, clicking “Submit” will schedule your message for delivery.

Where did the Messages tab go?

The new Lists tab does much of what the Messages tab used to do.  But, there are a few functions, such as Message Search and Message Stream, that are not accessible in the Lists tab.  Message Search can now be found at the top right of the page, right next to the My Account link.  For customers with the Message Stream feature enabled, a new “Stream” tab will appear, right next to the “Lists” tab.

Questions/Comments/Suggestions?

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, about this change or anything else, we’d love to hear from you.  Please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@textme.net.

To get started, click Timed Messages from the subscription campaign’s navigation options.

You’ll then be brought to the timed messages details screen.  Click Add timed message to create a new timed message.

There are two different types of timed messages you can create.  The first is a timed message that will be delivered to the subscriber X minutes after they have joined the list.  Simply provide the message, and the number of minutes you would like to wait before sending the message.  Then, click Add timed message to save the timed message.

The second is a timed message that will be delivered at a specific time, up to three days after your customer has opted in to your subscription list.  This type requires a message, the time you wish to send the message, and the number of days to wait before sending the message.  You also have the option to deliver the message the next day if your customer opts in to your list past the set delivery time.

After creating a few timed messages, your timed messages details screen will now show a summary of your campaign’s timed messages.

We hope you find this feature useful for establishing a solid relationship with your new subscribers.  As always, let us know if there is anything we can do to help.

Let’s walk through an example to see how this works.  First, we’ll create a new user attribute called “Team”.  We want this attribute to contain the name of our customer’s favorite local sports team.

Click on the attribute’s name, Team, to be brought to the details screen for that attribute.

Since there are limited valid values for this attribute, we can use the valid values feature to prevent our customers from entering the name of a rival team across the state line.  Simply add a valid value for each of the valid options.

With the valid values in place, TextMe is configured to only recognize these values as valid values.  All others will be considered invalid, and if your customer tries to send something else, they will be told that their response was invalid and asked to try again.  Each valid value can also have an alias.  This is optional, but can make collecting multiple choice data much easier over SMS.  With an alias in place, your customers can either text the value (i.e. “Bulls”) or the alias (i.e. “a”).  If the alias is sent, TextMe will recognize it, and store the corresponding value (“Bulls”) in the database.  With aliases in place, your customers can make their choice by texting a single character.

We also made a few other changes to support the valid values feature.  First, when editing the details for a contact under the Contacts tab, you will see a “?” next to your attributes that have valid values associated with them.  Clicking that “?” will show you the value values for that attribute, so you don’t need to remember all of the possible options yourself.

Also, when building your campaign and specifying the data collection questions, you will see a new Insert valid value options link for user attributes that have valid values associated with them.  Clicking this link will insert the list of valid values directly into your message.

We’re always trying to make TextMe more powerful, and easier to use.  Please don’t hesitate to contact us about anything we can do to help.

The data collection flow is initiated after your customer’s first interaction with your campaign.  This would be after the entry message is sent for random at end and manual sweepstakes campaigns, or after the winning or losing message is sent for all other sweepstakes campaigns.

The data collection setup process is identical to the Survey and Subscription campaigns data collection setup process.  Please see these posts for more information.

In addition to collecting data via SMS, the Sweepstakes campaign continues to support collecting data through alternative means of entry web forms.  All data collected via SMS or the web can be obtained by exporting the sweepstakes entries via the Export entries feature.

We begin by heading over to the subscription list we’d like to send a message to, and clicking the Broadcast Message option in the sidenav.  This will bring us to the Create A New Message screen.  On this screen you will see the same filter configuration options that exist under the Contacts tab (described in more detail here).  Using these filter options, we can create a series of filters that will restrict which of our subscribers will receive the message.  In the screen shot below, we will be restricting our message to subscribers who have a zip code of 60803, 60606, or 60477, and whose first name is not “John”.  Providing a name in the “Save this group of filters for future use under the following name” will save this group of filters for future use.

In addition to being able specify filters on the fly, you can also select an existing filter group to filter on.  In the screen below, we can see that we will only be sending the broadcast message to members of the “Chicago Males” filter group, which we created in the previous blog post.

After clicking Send Now or Schedule, you’ll be brought to a message review screen, which will list the filters that will be applied when sending the message to your subscribers.

After clicking Submit, your message will be queued up for delivery to only the subscribers that match your filter criteria.

We still have a lot of plans with regards to how you collect data from your customers, and how you can use that data to drive a more successful marketing campaign.  Stay tuned!

TextMe now supports the ability to create segmented “filter groups” of customers based on information that you have collected about them.  Currently, TextMe only supports the ability to send targeted broadcast messages to subscription list subscribers within a certain filter group (more on this in the next blog post), but we have big plans for letting you manage and collect statistics on these filter groups in the near future.

Creating Filter Groups

To create a new filter group, click on the Contacts tab.  From there, you can use the new “Filter” section to create a series of filters to narrow down your contact list.

You can filter on any of the data attributes that exist in the User Data tab under Contacts.  You can also filter on a few system attributes, including opt-in date (the date/time that a customer opted into any of your subscription lists), source campaign (one or more of your campaigns that a customer has participated in), and keyword (the actual keyword a customer used to participate in one of your campaigns).

When your filters are setup the way you like them, click Apply to filter your contacts, and only show the contacts that match all of your filters.  In the screen shot below, we only see my customers who are Male and live in Chicago.

If you’re happy with the results, and confident that you’ve setup the filters properly, you can give the filter group a name in the box that says “Save this group of filters for future use under the following name“.  Clicking Apply with this field populated will save the group of filters into a filter group that can be used at a later point in time.

Managing Filter Groups

Managing filter groups is simple and straightforward.  Under the Contacts tab, there is a new sidenav option called Manage Filter Groups.  Clicking this option will bring you to a list of your existing filter groups.  In the screen shot below, you can see the “Chicago Males” filter group that was created in the steps above.  From this page you can see the number of contacts in each group.  By clicking on the links, you can edit, delete, or show the details for any of your filter groups.

Clicking on the name of the filter group will bring up the details for that filter group.  The details page lists the filters that make up the group, along with the list of contacts that are a part of that group.

Editing a filter group is easy as well.  Clicking the edit link from the filter group list page, or the Edit button from the filter groups details page will bring you to a screen where you can give your filter group a name, a description, as well as add or remove the filters that make up the filter group.  After saving the changes,  you’ll be brought back to the details page for the group, where you’ll be able to immediately see the result of your changes.

In the next post, I’ll describe how you can use filter groups to segment your customers, and send custom subscription broadcast messages to specific filter groups.

Building upon the data collection functionality recently added to the Survey campaign, you can now collect data from customers after a subscription list broadcast.  Setting up your broadcast message to collect data is easy, and works exactly the same as the Multi-question survey.

First, in the Create A New Message screen, give your message a description, and provide a message asking for a particular piece of data in the message box.

Next, check the “This message requests data from the participant” check box to reveal the fields to specify which data attribute to collect, and the response messages to send to the user.

Also, just like in the Multi-question survey, you can chain a series of questions together to collect even more data from your subscribers.  Just check the “This message requests data from the participant” check box after the response message from the previous question to reveal a new area to specify the next data attribute to collect.

After clicking Send Now or Schedule, you’ll be brought to the message review page, where you’ll be able to see a summary of the messages you will be sending, and the data you will be collecting.

In the next post, I’ll describe how TextMe allows you to create segmented groups of customers, allowing to target specific demographics directly.

Select alternate winners

The first scenario is the ability to select an alternate sweepstakes winner, in the case that the original sweepstakes winner is determined to be ineligible.  At the end of your sweepstakes campaign, you are presented with a list of winners.

You will now see an “X” next to each of the sweepstakes winners.  Clicking this “X” will remove them from the list of winners.  TextMe will keep track of previous winners in a new “Previous winners” section on the campaign details page.

To select a new winner, choose “Manually select winners” from the list of actions on the side.

Simply enter the number of new winners you would like to select, provide an optional message to send to the new winners, and click Submit.  The new winners will be randomly selected from the list of participants who are not previous winners, and will be displayed on the campaign details page.

New “Manual” sweepstakes type

The second scenario is the ability to select random winners throughout the course of the campaign.  To satisfy this scenario, we’ve introduced a new “manual” sweepstakes type.

With this new campaign type, no winners are automatically selected when the campaign is in progress, or when it ends.  Instead, the user can manually select winners from the pool of participants, using the process described above, when the campaign is in progress or after it has ended.  This gives you a ton a flexibility, letting you pick the number of winners you want, when you want.

Questions, comments, suggestions?  Please, let us know what you think!