With Engage Marketing, you can collect SMS marketing opt-ins and automatically engage those contacts based on their behavior with Marketing Automations.
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Setup
- Enable SMS Opt-In on Forms: Within the Engage Dashboard, navigate to Settings & Configuration > Host > Forms to edit or create Olo Reservation and Waitlist Forms. Click the option to enable "SMS Marketing Opt-in".
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Build or Edit SMS Templates - Within the Engage Dashboard, navigate to Marketing and SMS Templates to edit or create a new template. When creating or editing SMS templates, you can adjust the following fields:
- Name: the name of the SMS template (this is only visible to you)
- Description: the description of the SMS template (this is only visible to you)
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Message: the SMS message that your guest will receive, which can include tags
- Example Message: We miss you {{ first_name }}! Enjoy $5 towards your next order at {{ guest_selected_home_location_name }}
- Message Limits: Normal messages have a 160 character limit per message segment. Messages can be created over this limit, however, the SMS message will be charged as multiple SMS segments. Multiple segments will still appear as a single message on the guest’s handset.
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Emojis: Emoji requires UCS-2 encoding standards. In the event that a UCS-2 character is used, the message body will automatically format for that encoding standard. This will limit your characters per message segment to 67, as opposed to 160 with GSM-7.
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Merge Tags - enables you to include dynamic fields such as:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Phone
- Birthday
- Birth Month
- Anniversary Day
- Anniversary Month
- Postal Code
- Sparkfly Offer URL
- Guest Selected Home Location
- Build the Automation - Within the Engage Dashboard, navigate to Marketing and Automations to edit or create a new Automations to include SMS actions.
Features
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Collect Opt-Ins: SMS Opt-In language is now automatically included on any Engage-powered forms (e.g. Waitlist/Reservation, guest Wifi, email club sign-up, etc.).
- Note: After a guest opts in via a form, a second opt-in via SMS is required to confirm; this is called double opt-in and is required for SMS marketing
- Create SMS Campaigns: Build your SMS marketing messages directly within the Engage dashboard under ‘Marketing’ > ‘SMS Templates’
- Setup Automation Flows: Create a series of triggers that automate SMS and Email campaigns—or a combination of both. This feature is found within the Engage dashboard under ‘Marketing’ > ‘Automations’
Mass SMS
SMS is an incredibly powerful marketing channel - research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% for email. On average, it takes 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text and 90 minutes to respond to an email.
Mass SMS allows brands to send more time-specific messaging and drive sales around specific times, compared to more 'passive' channels like email or social media and allows for brands to send to user-defined segments of guests at a specific time or immediately.
How Do I set up an SMS Campaign?
You can find the SMS Campaigns builder under Marketing → Campaigns.*
*If you don't have access to Marketing and want to add this service, please contact support@getwisely.com to request it!
You can either select an existing template from the SMS template library OR create a new one.
You'll also need to select an existing Segment or create a new one.
The final step shows a campaign overview and the ability to Send Now or Schedule for Later.
SMS Keywords Tied to Home Location
Brands can now optionally assign an SMS opt-in keyword to a specific location when creating the keyword. This sets the Guest Selected Home location, which allows for more targeted SMS Automations and Campaigns or used in Segments.
Reach out to Engage Support to get this feature enabled with the following information:
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- Your name and the locations you want this activated for
- Your desired keyword
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MMS
51.1% of consumers would be more likely to make a purchase if they received a text that included a GIF, image, or video. Only 15.9% indicated they prefer plain text messages with no media. source
What?
- MMS is part of our existing SMS templates (including existing templates) and marketing message service
- MMS can be sent as part of either as a mass SMS or SMS action in Automations
- Files types supported are jpg, jpeg, gif, and png
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Important: There is a 5mb max file size for both the image and message combined - meaning, an image that is at or near 5mb may be rejected by the uploader if the underlying text message pushes it over the limit
Adding MMS Images to SMS Templates
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Images can be added:
- Go to Templates -> SMS
- within the SMS campaign flow
- within the Automations side panel for new SMS action
