When you want to send out SMS messages you can use our ‘Quick Send’ or ‘Send Campaign’ feature in the SMS section of your account.

Quick send

The ‘Quick Send’ feature is particularly useful when you are only sending to 1 number and you are not working with templates. Before you start sending, make sure you have enough balance to cover the cost of the messages.

Send Campaign

With our Send Campaign feature, you can send text messages from the MessageBird Dashboard to one or more recipients at the same time in three easy steps:

Step 1: Creating the message

Go to the left-hand side of your Dashboard screen and hit SMS → Send Campaign.

Now you can choose to write down the message or use a pre-created template (Are you planning on sending the same message regularly? You can save time by creating a template.)

You can personalise your message by setting-up variables when you import your contacts. These variables will be automatically imported into the drop-down menu ' +Personalise' on the right side of your screen.

The message will be automatically personalised for each person as the system associates this information with the contact number of the recipient (the person who receives the message). For example, when the SMS is received instead of "Hello [FIRST_NAME]" it will be displayed as "Hello Laura". 

At the bottom right corner of the text area, you'll find a counter with three numbers that update as you type your message. Each SMS message can hold a maximum of 160 characters including spaces, the maximum number of characters you can write down is 1377 (around 8 SMS).

For example:

• 91/1377, 1 SMS: You've used 10 out of your character maximum of 1,377, and it will cost you 1 SMS message to send it.
• 245/1377, 2 SMS: You've used 245 out of your character maximum of 1,377, and it will cost you 2 SMS messages to send it.

You can read more about how to send long SMS messages and concatenation here.

Step 2: Originator & Recipients

Select an originator

An originator is a name or number from which the message is sent. 

• If you use a company or brand name as the originator, the amount of characters needs to be between 3 and 11.
• If you use a Messagebird number as the originator, the maximum amount of characters is 17.

To allow somebody to reply to an SMS, the message needs to have a number as the originator or a number included in the body of the text. Some countries have restrictions that prevent the originator from being shown precisely in the way you send it;  for more information per country go here.

Select one or more recipients 

A recipient is who will receive the message. To add more than one recipients you can choose between:

• Manually add a number: Type a name or number to add a contact from your phonebook quickly.
• Contacts from phonebook: Select specific contacts from your phonebook.
• Groups from phonebook: Select specific groups from your phonebook.
• Submit your own numbers: Write down up to 300 mobile phone numbers manually.

Step 3: Verify and schedule your message

Verify

Go over your message one last time to make sure it's exactly what you want: Are all the settings correct? Are there any typos? Did you select the right originator? Have the proper recipients been added? 

Schedule

If you don't want to send the message right away, you can go to the bottom left corner of your screen and click on 'Schedule', with this feature you can set-up the date and time (hour and minutes), and also set a frequency: once, daily, weekly, etc.

If you need to make any changes, you can select back in the last step without losing the entered information. Keep in mind that the scheduled start time will use the same time zone in which you’ve set up your account. 

You can also see our video tutorial below on how to send an SMS from your Dashboard: