I'm Derek Johnson with tatango.com.
Today I'm gonna show you how to send a mass text message to your subscribers using the
Tatango software.
So, the first thing is, you have to get customers to opt-in.
In this specific case in this demo campaign, they're opting in with their mobile phone
by texting a keyword to a short code.
A short code is a five to six digit phone number.
In this campaign I only have one subscriber, but you can imagine that you would have thousands
or even millions of subscribers in your campaign for your business.
When you're ready to send a message, all you have to do is click Messaging.
And then you click New Message.
And it's gonna give you the option to send an SMS or an MMS message.
Right now, I'm gonna show you how to send an SMS message or a text message.
And a text message is 160 characters of plain text.
Now, that plain text can include a phone number or link or just regular text.
An MMS message, on the other hand, can include up to 500 characters of text, a subject line,
and some type of media content, such as a static image, an animated image or a gif,
or a video.
So, again, I'm gonna show you what an SMS message looks like.
Now, again, I only have one subscriber in my campaign, but you can imagine this could
be, you know, thousands or millions of subscribers here on this page.
So, I have 160 characters because in the United States a text message or an SMS message is
limited to 160 characters.
So, as I type out my message, let's say, you know, "acme retail: show this text message
for 50% off your purchase."
As I type out my message, you can see here the counter of the characters that are available
continues to go down, and once you reach zero it won't let you send the message.
So you have to keep it within 160 characters.
So there are a lot of different...now, this is just the basic message.
If you wanna click send message right now, it will go out to all your subscribers.
This is the basic kind of functionality of the Tatango software.
Then as you can see, there's a lot of different features and functionality that can be added
to a basic message.
So, the first one is you can shorten a URL.
And you can actually track how many people click on that URL.
I'm going to shorten the URL tatango.com and it automatically puts it into the message
as you can see here in this preview.
And then Tatango will track how many people click on that link and give you that data
so you can look at and analyze the success of your message.
Another option is to insert merge tags.
So, a merge tag essentially takes information about each subscriber that is going to receive
the message and puts it into the message itself.
So, popular merge tags are things like their first name, or their email address, or their
ZIP Code.
I'm going to select the phone number just as an example.
So, show your, you know, phone number, something like that.
And this essentially, this merge tag, will pull in and insert or merge, each person's
phone number that is receiving this message.
Now, what's really nice about Tatango is there's a preview screen here, but if I click View
Dynamic Data, it will actually let me go through...Now, if I had multiple subscribers, I could go
through and click through each subscriber.
But, since this is the only subscriber I have, I can see that the merge tag here is being
replaced by my actual phone number.
So, it's a great way to just ensure that you're structuring the message correctly.
Then another feature is you can insert coupon codes.
And as you can see here we have many different coupon code sets.
Now, a coupon code is a unique code that is sent to only one subscriber, and each individual
subscriber will receive their own unique coupon code.
And as I was going through these right here, I just uploaded the TEST_UPLOAD coupon code
set.
And it looks like I have one coupon code left out of the three that I've uploaded to that
set.
So, if I go in here and I click refresh, it will show that the coupon code for this specific
subscriber, this phone number, will be 123.
If I have multiple subscribers, they will get a different coupon code but from that
same set.
This is usually used by businesses that can in their point-of-sale system track or restrict
coupon codes for only one-time use.
So, this means I can't share this coupon code with all my friends and then they get the
50% off as well.
Once it's used once at the point of sale, it's canceled out.
So, some pretty cool features that you can insert into a basic text message.
Then you come down here and you have the option to send the message now, which once you click
send, it sends to everybody or you can click Schedule.
There's a bunch of different options down here on how you can schedule your message.
The first option is when you'd like to schedule your message.
On Exactly is going to be a message that is scheduled in the future that sends to all
of your subscribers at the same time.
This one is used primarily for coupons or promotions from businesses.
Now, there are some different options down here which are, After All Opt-in, After Initial
Opt-in, After Non-Initial Opt-in and then Birthday.
These After Opt-in messages are usually scheduled once and then left for the entire lifetime
of the campaign.
Those messages are for usually, rewards or coupons after someone opts in and they're
sent immediately after they opt in.
So, that can be set and kind of forgot.
Birthday messages can be triggered before or after a person's birthday if you have their
birthday stored in Tatango.
But for this demo, I'm just gonna use On Exactly.
I'm gonna click this calendar here.
And I can go in, and I can schedule messages years in advance, or days in advance.
I'm gonna go in and schedule it for one day in advance, I'm gonna change it from 1:00
a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
And then, as I go down here you'll see I have two options, I can send based on my time zone,
which is the business time zone.
I am in Pacific time zone.
Or if you're a national business, you can send based on your subscriber's time zone.
So, if, let's say, my business is headquartered in the Pacific time zone, but I have locations
in all different time zones, and I have customers in all different time zones, I'd usually wanna
select this option because it'll send at let's say 1:00 p.m. in each time zone.
So, the message will be continually sending during the day to hit each one of the time
zones and make sure your message arrives at the exact same time for all your subscribers
no matter what time zone they're in.
Another great feature here besides just looking at the message in the preview over here is
you can send a test message.
Now, this test message can be to yourself.
So, this would be to me.
Or, I can include team numbers on to the text message, or the test message by just putting
a comma, and a space.
So, I could put, you know, team members' phone numbers as well into here, and they would
receive the message as well as I would.
All I do is click Send Test Message, and then a test would be sent to those phone numbers.
So, I can see how it looks on the phone, click on the link, make sure it's all working, and
see if there's any issues I need to resolve before sending to everybody on my list.
The one last feature we have at the very, very bottom down here is, if you wanna send
to everybody on your list, you don't need to worry about this, you just need to click
"Send to the entire list."
But, if there's some reason that you want to segment your list and only send to a specific
portion of your list, you're gonna want to "Send to segments within the list."
You're gonna wanna select this radio button.
As you can see here, it drops down and gives you some options.
You can say subscribers match any or all of the following options.
Most people select "any," and that's what I'm gonna do for this demo.
I'm gonna add a segment.
So, the segment is "Subscribers match any of the following conditions."
And then I can go in here and I can select any one of these custom fields or default
fields with Tatango, and I can segment my message to only subscribers that match these
fields.
So, because I only have one subscriber, it's not gonna show you exactly the power of this
feature, but I can go through and make a quick segment just to give you an idea.
So, let's say, first I want to send a message to subscribers that where the state is, and
I'm gonna select California, and the age is, let's say, less than 32 years old.
So, this is really cool, I can build a segment of subscribers.
Now, let's say I have a million subscribers, million phone numbers that have opted in.
I can go in here and narrow this down to a couple thousand phone numbers because this
would be people that either match their state is in California or their age is less than
32.
I could also go and select "all," and that would mean that the person has to be in California
and has to be...their age has to be less than 32.
So, you can go in here and again customize any of this.
You can delete a segment, add a segment.
You can add as many segments as you want to here.
And you can always click Refresh Segment here to see how big that segment will be.
Now, because I only have one subscriber, this zero segment.
Either there's zero subscribers that match, you know, these specific segments that I've
built here.
But you get that idea.
Then, all you have to do is, once your message has been completely set, your segments have
been set, you've sent a test message to yourself and maybe to your team and they've got approval
on that message.
Then, all you need to do is click schedule the message and then we'll have a pop-up confirmation,
once you click again "Schedule SMS message," it's going to go to either all your subscribers,
if you have not segmented your message, or that specific set of your subscribers.
Once it sends, after a while you'll start getting data back on the sent message report,
and that'll include things like how many messages were successfully sent, if people replied
to the message, even how many people clicked on the link if you're using a link that can
be tracked.
So, again, that's how to send a SMS message using the Tatango SMS marketing software.