SMS messages offer many marketing benefits for all types of businesses: they are easy to create, highly engaging, and easy to integrate with other customer communication channels, such as email or mobile applications. This article shows you the basic steps you need to take before creating your first SMS campaign.

Before you begin

• The provisioning team enables one of the SMS platforms for your organization.
• Your organization administrator must enable SMS for you at the user account level.
• You can confirm your access by going to Settings > User management | User accounts > select user > User permissions. If the Enable SMS checkbox is not visible, SMS is not available to your organization. Contact our support team to enable this feature.

Note: Campaign supports up to 500 active SMS campaigns.

Message types: SMS and MMS

Apart from using text-only SMS messages, you can enhance your communications with image, video, or audio content, which makes your message an MMS. This kind of messaging works particularly well for organizations that rely highly on visual content: retail stores, restaurants, travel agencies, and many more. Apart from media content, there are a few differences between the two message formats:

MMS usage also varies from SMS in a few other ways:

• MMS visual content may not be displayed on simple mobile devices.
• The frequency limits for MMS are usually lower than for SMS, depending on the carrier.

SMS campaign types

Choose the optimal SMS campaign for your communication goal from the selection below.

Note: SMS documentation varies, depending on your SMS integration.

SMS experiences

There are three ways to run your SMS campaigns with Acoustic:

• Integrate Campaign with the campaign manager, operated by our partnerKaleyra (formerly mGage). It is a separate platform used only for launching and managing SMS campaigns and campaigns. The total payment for the SMS service and each SMS message goes to Acoustic so you don't need to split it between different providers. If you have this experience, you'll see two menu options to create and send messages, and you'll see the Campaign manager option that leads to Kaleyra's website.
• Integrate with one of the other gateways that have direct integrations with Acoustic (reach out to our customer support for more information). You create SMS campaigns in the Acoustic platform. The total payment for the SMS service and each SMS message goes to Acoustic. If you have this experience, you'll see two menu options to create and send messages, and you'll see Character mapping, and you'll see the SMS programs option where you can define your two way SMS interactions with customers. 
• Integrate with any other gateway of your choice. You create SMS campaigns in the Acoustic platform. You make two separate payments: for your SMS service to Acoustic and for each SMS directly to your gateway. If you have this experience, you'll see two menu options to create and send messages, and you'll see Character mapping, as well as SMS campaigns and SMS campaigns classic which offer different UIs to define the two way SMS interactions. In this new experience we are referencing the new SMS campaigns, formally known as SMS programs.

Character mapping

Define your character mapping. SMS messages typically contain a maximum of 160 7-bit characters or 70 2-byte characters. Certain characters impact the total length of the message. If the allowed character count is exceeded, the SMS is split into multiple messages and additional costs are assessed accordingly.

Create an SMS database

1. Go to Data > Databases and click the Create button. On the Create database/list page, select the flexible database option and ensure it is in a shared location. You can use an existing flexible, single opt-in database, as long as you can add SMS fields.

   Note: Any required fields in your database must have a default value, as SMS cannot update null values. If your database includes any required fields, make sure to remove the Required flag from those fields.

2. Add the SMS phone number type field. In Field name, type the name of the field that will contain the SMS phone number value.
3. In the Field type list, select SMS phone number.
4. Click Add field and save.
5. On the View data page, select the name of the database you want to use for your SMS campaign.
6. Click Settings on the Database summary page.
7. Click the Mobile settings tab, select Enable SMS, and enter the name of the SMS phone number field.

The remaining steps are only if you use the SMS campaign manager. If you create SMS campaigns directly in Campaign, you completed the setup and you won't see campaign manager option in the SMS menu.

Integrate SMS campaigns and SMS campaign manager

1. Go to Organization settings and expand Application account access.
2. Click Add account access and select SMS integration under Application.
3. Select an org admin user for the integration under User account. The org admin must have SMS enabled at the user account-level because certain API calls from SMS partners require that the API user is enabled for SMS in the application. To verify that this setting is enabled, go to User accounts and expand User permissions. Verify that the Enable SMS option is checked.
4. Click Add. An email is sent to the org admin that contains the user account refresh token.
5. Add the refresh token to set up the SMS campaign manager for your organization.
   1. Navigate to SMS and group messaging > Campaign manager on the navigation. A new browser window will open.
   2. In Campaign manager, click Admin and select ID configuration.
   3. Click Edit and paste the refresh token.

   Note: This setup occurs one time for the entire organization.

Each organization can have only one SMS-enabled database. If your organization is also mobile app notification-enabled, it can have one SMS database and one mobile app messages database, or one database that is enabled for both SMS and mobile app messages. The administrator adds the database ID after SMS is enabled in the database.