Our Announcements feature allows you to send one message to a group of contacts, instead of texting each contact individually.
To create an Announcement, head to Messaging Tools > Announcements on your dashboard, select your department number you wish to send the Announcement from (if you have more than one) and click the blue New Announcement button to the top right.
Step 1
Enter the title of your message (this is only seen internally) and the body of the text. Please note that the Announcements feature is not to be used for SPAM. Textline reserves the right to review announcements and block access to anyone abusing the feature. Announcements also support MMS and attachments.
If you want to customize your message per contact, include variable fields (pieces of information pulled from the customer's details). You can reference fields from the Address Book or custom columns from a CSV file (done in Step 2). Learn how to use variable fields here.
Step 2
On the next screen, you select the contacts that should receive the Announcement in several different ways:
Manually enter contact phone numbers
Select any number of contacts directly from your Address Book
Select contacts with a specific tag
Select contacts via a Saved Search (typically a combination of tags)
Upload a CSV file with contact numbers (and custom columns if you want to use variables that don’t exist in your Address Book) Download the CSV template here)
Step 3
This screen allows you to configure how you would like to handle conversations and replies after you send your Announcement. The fields have a default setting, so feel free to skip this page. If you want to read more about these advanced settings, head here.
Step 4
This is the step where you decide when you would like to send your Announcement. Your options are to Send Now or Send Later. Note once the Announcement is sent, you cannot pause or stop the Announcement from sending.
Preview
The final page is a preview of your Announcement. It shows you a summary of the settings you selected in the previous screens (minus the advanced settings in Step 3). It also has edit buttons so you can easily change those selections.
If the preview looks good, click the Send button to send or schedule your Announcement.
Once you've sent your first Announcement, you can find that Announcement and duplicate it to copy its contents and settings and reuse it for a new Announcement.More on Announcement Duplication can be found here.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Sending mass messages over SMS is highly regulated, and there are legal restrictions around sending text messages for marketing purposes. The Announcements feature is intended to send messages to contacts you have an established relationship with, and they have provided consent to receive text messages from your business.
Due to the level of regulation, Textline will need to approve your first Announcement before it is sent to your customers. Once you've created and selected Send on your first Announcement, we will review the message and determine whether or not it has been approved. You will receive a notification in Textline when the message has been approved and sent.
Things we look for to ensure the Announcement is compliant (this is on top of your organization and number being registered):
The message is referencing the contact by name
The message states who is messaging the contact and why
The message invites a response from the contact , or has a clear call to action, including how to opt-out if they no longer wish to receive messages.
Keep in mind that each message can take about 2-3 seconds to send. If you are sending a message to a large number of contacts, the time it takes to reach the last contact could be up to several hours. To ensure the Announcement is delivered at an appropriate time, consider the number of messages you plan to send and when you schedule the Announcement.
If you want to speed up your Announcements, the Smart SMS department is a great option. You can read more on Smart SMS and its effects on Announcement speeds here.