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Whispir how to: Bulk message

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Lachlan Hessing

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4 Oct 2018
4 min read

With Whispir’s bulk message capabilities, you can reach a large group of people quickly, easily, and in personalized ways. This is ideal for businesses and organizations looking for SMS marketing, trying to nurture potential customers, wanting to get away from simple email campaigns, and more.

If you’ve got a long contact list you need to send an SMS to, bulk messaging is the most straightforward way to build your content, make it personally relevant to every member of your list, and get it out there fast.

Step 1: Download our SMS message template

Log in to the Whispir platform using your username and password, click on the work-space name you want to work in, and select “Bulk Message” from the drop-down menu. It’s under the “Messages” heading. The first thing you’ll need to do is download the example file. Even if you already have a spreadsheet or document ready, grab the template anyway, as it will show you the format you’ll need to use to get the most out of your bulk SMS messages.

Step 2: Prepare your recipient list

Open the template using a spreadsheet editing package (Google Sheets or Excel work well), and paste the contact details of your recipients into the relevant fields. You’ll notice in the template that there are a few extra fields like “Next Shift” and “Start Time” – and these are where you can add personalized details to your text messages.

The template example shows how you might deliver a shift notification to your employees, with each message personalized to the recipient’s information needs. Don't think that you're stuck with just a shift notification, though - our SMS API allows you to use this template to create appointment reminders, promotional messages, and more. Be sure to save the file as a CSV when you’re finished.

Keep in mind: mass text messaging is a great resource to have on hand when a crisis occurs. Often, those who avoided planning usually experience two things: regret, and damage to the business. In all cases, the task of communicating during a crisis is made substantially easier with just a bit of forethought. With the right technology in place and the target audience identified, the planning won’t be nearly as painful as you might’ve thought. In this guide, we’ll take you through what a successful communications life-cycle looks like, from planning to reporting. Once you know where to start, you’ll find it much easier to get going.

Step 3: Create your message

Select the fields from your CSV file that you’d like to map to each message channel. Then, you can start creating your bulk text messages. The custom, personalized fields that you created in the source CSV file have been included as buttons just below each channel tab. So, to send a shift notification to your recipients, just add the fields into your message as you type, and each “@@” tag will auto-populate with the details in that field associated with each recipient. Just remember to click back into the text entry box after adding a custom field to resume typing. Each channel can hold the same message, or a different one, if you like – and you can use a template that you’ve previously created as well, giving you access to rich message content, message aliases, escalations, retries, and message alerts.

Don’t forget to add a subject, and once you’re ready to go, click “Next” to preview the results.

Step 4: Preview and send

In this last step, you can see what your message will look like for your recipients before you send it. Select a recipient from the drop-down box, and the text field below will auto-populate your “@@” tags with the details relevant for each recipient you’ve selected. If you’ve set different content for different channels, you can check each of those here as well. If there’s anything you need to change, just hit “Back” and make the necessary tweaks – but if you’re happy with your message, you can send it immediately, or schedule it to be sent at a later time. This is ideal for marketing messages that are time and day-dependent.

Step 5: Review responses

Once the message is sent, you can review it in the same way you can any other message sent through Whispir, and if any recipients have responded, you’ll see these responses come through underneath the original message. That’s it!

Whispir’s bulk message feature is a great tool for sending out personalized, high-volume messages in minutes, establishing ongoing SMS campaigns, and increasing the engagement of your mobile marketing efforts. Now, you can spend more time on the things that matter most to your business.

And that's just the start. The Whispir platform offers a number of premium features - all included - to elevate your bulk SMS marketing without all the heavy communication costs that typically come along. This includes workflows to automate your marketing campaigns, contact list segmentation to provide unique outreach like SMS reminders, and marketing tools like tone of voice, engagement scoring, and more.

If you'd like to learn more, we'd be more than happy to set up a 14-day free trial following a demo from our team.

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If you’d like to see how easy Whispir makes message building, we’d be happy to walk you through a demonstration.