More than a few users have asked for this: After a SMS Receive Campaign has been created, how do you edit the auto-reply message or the Campaign Expiry date?
With today’s update, simply click on the Campaign Report, the Auto-Reply message as well as the Campaign expiry date both have a Edit link which you can now use to make your changes!
Singapore Only: The Kraft Chipsmore SMS Contest is now on, purchase Chipsmore cookies and stand a chance to win a trip to Perth, Australia to swim with Dolphins at the Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort!
To participate, purchase Chipsmore cookies and find within the package a contest card. Answer 2 questions on the card and send the answers to the COMMZGATE shared shortcode 76767. Each SMS received costs S$0.20.
Contest is active until 31 May 2009. Full details at http://www.chipsmore.com.sg
Many users don’t realize that this feature exists perhaps because it’s hidden under an “further options” link. If you happen to have to send a SMS broadcast at a time when you are not going to be physically at your PC or in the office, you can actually create a Campaign and then set the time and date that it will be processed.
To do this, create a SMS broadcast campaign just like you normally would. At the final step where the “Start Campaign’ button appears, there is a link called “further options”. Click on this and a panel for setting the broadcast date appears. See below:
Choose the desired actual broadcast date and time and then click “Start Campaign”. That’s it, your campaign has been scheduled for broadcast!
One of the most popular uses we see on the portal is that for starting a Campaign to receive SMS messages from the public. Such “Receive Campaigns” can be for promotions, contests or even for receiving subscribe/unsubscribe requests.
Here is a quick guide on how to start one for your own use.
1) First go to the “Campaign” tab and choose “Start SMS Receive”
2) As with all campaigns, give this one a name you can use to refer to later.
3) Your SMS users will send their SMS to 73333 (Singapore only!)
Since this 73333 shortcode is shared with all our Basic Plan users, you have to choose a keyword to uniquely identify your campaign. SMS users will have to include this keyword in the front of their message before they send the message to 73333.
As an example, I have chosen the keyword “COKE” here.
4) Click the “next” button and you will be prompted to enter a auto-reply message. This is the message that will be replied to any SMS user that had messaged in. You can leave this text box blank if you do not wish to have any auto-replies sent.
5) Lastly, choose when your campaign will start and send. Do note that Receive Campaigns have a finite lifespan, the default is 2 weeks. You can set this to be longer but after the campaign has expired, no further messages will come into your campaign and your chose keyword will be released.
6) To view the progress of your campaign and to view all the messages that have been sent in, go to “Reports” and select the report for your Receive Campaign. You should see the overall status here. To view all the messages received, click “View Log”. You shall see all the individual messages received and can choose to export these as well if you wish.
For Mobile Inbox Campaign users, you can now configure an auto-reply message of more than 160 characters, up to 800 characters in fact.
i.e. When mobile users send an SMS to your Campaign Inbox, your auto-reply can be as lengthy as up to 800 characters.
Do note that for messages of more than 160 characters, every 140 characters (roman text) will be considered as 1 SMS message and the appropriate number of credits will be deducted from your account accordingly (if you are a Basic Plan users)
You may have noticed that the loading of your data on the Contacts page is now significantly faster.
This is due to back-end optimization work we have carried out on our database cluster over the weekend.
Currently there are more than 5 million contacts in total stored on our portal system by our users, a figure that continues to be growing daily.
We will be doing more for such work to make your user experience as snappy as possible!
We have updated the Portal with more than 20 new features!
The 3 major ones are:
1) QuickSend selection mode
-We have refined the selection mode for manually entering mobile numbers versus selecting from your Contacts. You will find a new mini-tab bar in the middle of the page, click on the appropriate tab for the mobile number entry method you prefer!
2) Broadcast Campaign options
-At the message composition step, the various options now automatically appear in a neat box on the right side of the page. The details for each option further appears when you select that option.
3) Campaign Favourites
-We are introducing a new feature called “Favourites”. This feature became quite critical for users who had sent campaigns that already number in the thousands. With the new “Favourites” feature, you can now mark a campaign in the Reports section as a favourite (click on it’s ‘Star’). This Campaign will henceforth appear in the Campaigns page to be monitored until you decide to un-favourite it again
The rest of the 17 features are improvements, refinements and minor new features found all over the Portal. These include functions for managing your SMS subscription list, daily Email reports, Contact Groups merging and many other cool new capabilities. Have fun exploring!
When starting a SMS Receive Campaign, you will be expecting SMS messages to come in, be received and appear in your Campaign report. Such a Campaign can be created for various objectives, such as to receive enquires for your product or service (most popular!), for receiving feedback, or for receiving submissions for a Luck Draw.
You will of course have to tell mobile users that they have to send in SMS message in respond to your Campaign.
You can let mobile users know of your campaign via various means:
When you created the SMS Receive Campaign on the Portal, you would have been prompted to choose a keyword as part of the Campaign setup. You will have to tell the mobile user to place this keyword as the first word in their SMS message before they send the SMS to the Portal shortcode 73333.
Assuming that you have chosen the keyword “Cola” and you are looking to collect a subscription list of people interested in receiving further news about your product, examples of how you can tell your potential mobile users about the Campaign are as follows:
Send <Cola> < “Your Name”> to 73333
Send “Cola” SPACE “Your Name” to 73333
Send Cola <Your Name> to 73333
All the above examples will work! The Portal is smart enough to filter out the < symbols and quotes to make sure the SMS message appear in your Campaign report!
We’ve overhauled the COMMZGATE Website!
Singapore users will find Singapore specific product info and services at http://www.commzgate.sg while the original commzgate.com site will soon be re-launched to cater for our venerable and faithful Enterprise Edition product.
More significantly, we’ve added a brand new User Forum section to our site. Via the various forum categories, users can now ask questions and discuss various issues ranging from SMS Marketing to in-depth technical discussions. Users of the COMMZGATE Portal under the Basic Plan will also have support issues predominately handled here. Do check it out!
Included in the latest update of COMMZGATE Portal today is a feature that allows you to select recipient groups by simply dragging them from your Contacts list, and dropping them into the “Selection Outbox”.
This method allows multiple selection as well and gives users a much improved visualization of the Contacts selection process.
This new feature is found in both the Campaign and QuickSend sections.
Also included in the update today are a host of other minor improvements such as a date range filter for API message logs and improved search capabilities.
New Feature
QuickSend is a great way to send a simple message broadcast to customers and colleagues without having to take into consideration all of the campaign-related features in a normal campaign.
We released a new feature in QuickSend where on submitting each message, you will be able to view the progress of the message submission instantaneously. The progress will appear a yellow alert box as shown by the screenshot on this page.
A nice feature here is that even if there already are existing messages in the message queue waiting to be processed, you can proceed to submit even more messages to the queue without having to wait for the original batch of messages to clear.
Pfizer has launched a SMS-based smoking cessation programme in support of its smoking cessation drug Champix /Chantix
Apparently, research has shown that half the fight to quit smoking is psychological.
Users of the drug are hence assisted with up to daily SMS encouragement reminders to keep up the good fight , not to give up and basically to keep the chin up until the end of the drug course.
To register, send QUIT to 73333 , you will be prompted to enter your drug course start date to begin the programme.