How to send a bulk message
SMS marketing is all about reaching your customers on their terms. With Helios, businesses can reach all of their contacts at the same time. Have a big announcement? Want to communicate a new deal or loyalty reward? The answer is bulk messaging.
To start, go to Lists & Segments on the left side menu. Select the list you would like to message. We suggest having all of your customers in a master list. Once you’ve selected the group you want to message, go to compose message.
The next page will display New message to list at the top. Underneath you’ll see the number your messaging From and the name of the businesses associated with that number. Businesses with multiple numbers or business entities can choose which number the message is coming from. Beneath that, you’ll see To: with the name of the list of contacts your message will go to.
Now it’s time to craft your message. As you type in the message box you’ll notice the mockup phone screen and message bubble to the right will update with your message in real time. This helps you visualize exactly how your message will be seen by your recipients. Along the bottom of the message box you’ll see three icons and a character count.
The first button in the bottom left is the emoji icon. Click this to bring up our entire menu of familiar emojis. Next is the AI icon (</>). Select this and a list of various auto-fill options appear. Your recipients’ messages will automatically fill with the name, number, org, etc. that is relevant to them based on the information in your list. Talk about a timesaver. The third icon will pull up all your message templates and allow you to paste in your preferred auto-fill. Remember, your recipients will see whatever information is between the two curly brackets { }.
In the far right corner you’ll see 0 chars/ 0 msgs. This is the character count. This feature is particularly useful. Every 160 characters is one message, also called a segment. So, if you type a message that is 161 - 320 characters, it will be billed as 2 segments, even if they appear in the same message. This is industry standard across all platforms, however, not everyone keeps you aware. Back to that 161 character message. Knowing what you just learned, you may want to reconfigure the message to save 1 extra character. On a list of 10,000 customers, this will save you 10,000 messages.\
Once your message is crafted and recipients are chosen, it’s time to schedule when the message will go out. Helios will automatically default to send now. If you would like to schedule for a later date, select schedule for later, then choose the date and time you want the message to go out. Finish by hitting send message. And that's it! Your first blast is ready to go. Sit back and watch those replies pour in in real time.
