Create More Targeted Contact Lists Using Segmentation
Dear customers, we wish SMS-Smart to be a useful and flexible tool for your SMS marketing and we are ready to help you in using it.
Today we’ll discover a useful feature, which can be applied with several goals.
It is Segmenting your Contacts. Segmenting contacts using different conditions allows you to create SMS Marketing Campaigns that directly address the demands and requirements of a particular audience.
In the SMS-Smart platform, this feature can be implemented by using Tags in the Contacts menu. Tags help to organize all your phone numbers into groups according to the conditions you need.
Before start using Tags, create an Exel file with your phone numbers. If you have several groups of contacts, i.e. new customers, returning customers; divide them into several files accordingly. The file should consist of columns containing various information about your phone numbers database, but without naming the columns. Phone number column is mandatory, the rest columns such as first name, last name, country or any other data are optional.
You can add optional columns in order to use it while sending SMS template text containing markers %first_name% %last_name% %from% %comments% , read more about markers at the FAQ.
Once you already have a file or several files proceed to upload them. Move to https://my.sms-smart.com/contacts > click Upload contact list > choose a file at your computer > in a pop-up window follow 2 steps.
# 1 choose column names according to columns in your file. If your file consists of a single column with phone numbers, there will be the only field in a pop-up window.
#2 Create a new tag and/or choose from existing ones. Once you’ve added a tag, click it to be marked blue, which means your current upload will be attached to this tag. You can either attach several tags to a single upload. It all depends on your needs.
Click Import. All is done. Now proceed to upload the rest of the files according to your contacts segments. For each upload, you need to follow the steps described above and add a new or existing tag to the phone numbers.
A tag is like a group, which contains particular phone numbers.
If there are the same numbers in the group (tag) while uploading the file, choose “Add duplicates“, so the system will attach a new tag to the existing contacts and you will see this in the Contacts overview TAGS column. If you choose “Ignore duplicates” only the unique numbers will be uploaded. Here you can also choose “Update number tags only” only a new tag will be added to the existing contacts. “Update tags and contact data” – which will update all the data to the existing contacts.
You can experiment with this feature according to your needs.
Now, move on to set up an SMS campaign, while creating it uses the group of contacts to target it. Learn more about creating an SMS campaign here.