Campaigns / Bulk messaging
Use campaigns to send out bulk SMS or E-mail from any data source.
A campaign is a preset for a bulk mailing. You can use the Bulk wizard to start an ad-hoc mailing. Read on to learn more about setting up and using campaigns
A campaign can use the following data sources:
- MS Excel
- MS Access
- CSV files
- MS SQL Server or MySQL database
- Any ODBC enabled database
- LDAP or an LDAP enabled Active Directory database
Once connected to the data source the campaign can utilize any field as a part of the customized messages it generates.
Campaign View
To see the campaigns:
- Launch the SMS Server Manager application from the start menu
- Open the ‘Campaigns’ folder
SMS Server Manager – Campaigns
In this window you can create, edit and start campaigns. To start a campaign click on the green ‘Play’ icon on the left side of a campaign row. To edit or remove a campaign use the ‘Pencil’ or ‘Cross’ icon on the right side respectively.
Create a new campaign by clicking on ‘New Campaign’ below the campaign list.
Creating a new campaign
The first thing to do is specify an ID and a description for the campaign. You will need the ID of the campaign if you want to run the campaign from a trigger or from a script outside of the SMS Server.
New Campaign
Next you will need to specify on which channel the campaign is going to run. The channel can be either an SMS or an E-mail channel.
Campaign – Select target channel
The next wizard pages will guide you through selecting a data source for your campaign.
Campaign – Select data source
Specify a filter to select which records to use for your campaign.
Campaign – Specify filter
Creating a customized message
After setting up your data source you can define a custom message template according to the data in your data source.
Campaigns – Format SMS
In the final step the wizard will show a preview of the messages according to the data as it is currently available from the data source.
Campaign – SMS overview
Running a campaign from the manager
You can run the campaign from the manager by clicking on the green ‘Play’ icon left of the campaign description. This will run the campaign in ‘interactive’ mode. The campaign wizard will pop back up and show you a preview of the messages that would be sent out.
Campaign – Run
Click ‘Next’ and then ‘Yes’ to start sending out the messages.
The final screen will show the result of creating the campaign messages.
Campaign – Completed
Batch ID corresponds to the BatchID field in the message table. This way you can filter out all of the messages belonging to a specific campaign.