Why use scheduling?

There may be times when you need an SMS to arrive at a specific time or on a specific date and you want or need to set this up in advance. Our scheduling tool can be a great help in such cases, because you can set a time and date for the SMS to go out, without having to physically press a button at that time. 

Additionally, the time at which you send your SMS messages can have a major impact on the success of your campaign so it’s a good idea to experiment with our planning tool. A famous food delivery service increased its conversion rate with MessageBird by sending promotional messages during the hours before lunchtime rather than early in the morning. They combined this by sending messages with more realistic timings, for example, 11:09 rather than 11:00 on the dot. There are three simple tips:

• Get to know your target audience
• Experiment with different delivery times
• Make your delivery times look realistic
• When scheduling your messages it will be according to the time zone your account is 'based' in. You can confirm or change your time zone by going to your username in the bottom-left corner of your Dashboard → 'Settings' → 'Timezone'.

Scheduling your campaign in Campaign Builder

You can schedule your campaign when using the Campaign Builder in Dashboard.

1. In the third and final step of sending a message, select ‘Schedule’ → ‘Send’.

2. Specify the year, month, day and time you want to send the message.

3. You can also set the frequency, allowing you to send the same message at regular intervals.

The amount for the campaign will be deducted from your balance provisionally when you schedule your SMS. If you should choose to delete or edit your group SMS, the balance will be adjusted accordingly.

If you then want to cancel or change the scheduled campaign later on, click here or go to 'SMS' → 'SMS Overview' → 'Scheduled' tab. You'll be able to edit or delete your scheduled SMS by clicking on the icons on the right. If you want to cancel your scheduled message click on the bin icon to delete them.

Scheduling your campaign for Bulk SMS

When sending SMS via the Bulk SMS tool, you can schedule your SMS by adding an extra column to your file with the scheduled date/time. Read more here about setting up Bulk SMS: Sending SMS in bulk

Scheduling via the API

When sending an SMS through the API that needs to be scheduled to go out at a later time, you can add this in the optional parameter:

scheduledDatetime

Read more in our Developers Documentation.