SMS and MMS Campaigns

For better or for worse, our lives have depended on digital connectivity this past year. Amid brick-and-mortar closures, phones have transitioned from convenient distractions to cornerstones of our operations. In a similar trend, more marketers are incorporating SMS texting into their marketing tactics to reach users who are increasingly inclined to engage with mobile outreach. 

Messaging isn’t new, but it’s constantly changing. However, the ages-old SMS keeps being the new revolution in this new normal. One of the reasons is, this form of conversational messaging has been one of the most effective but most minor channels utilized in marketing to date. In 2022, as these text marketing trends are poised to continue, the Zeta Marketing Platform is excited to introduce its SMS and MMS Campaigning features.

Reach out to Support to enable native SMS/MMS support for your ZMP instance.

SMS and MMS Personalization

Texts can be personalized by using recipients' properties. Just select from the interface the attribute (e.g. name, email) that you want to incorporate in your message.

You may also use Zeta Markup Language to expand your personalization options and retrieve data from events, feeds, and other available system objects.

ZMP SMS Campaigns

Character Counters

The denominator of the counter represents 1 text message and it could change depending on the characters added by the user:

• 160 characters: This is the default limit for 1 text message.

• 140 characters: This is the limit if the message contains any of these characters: € [ ] \ { } ^ | ~, except when these characters are used in liquid or merge tags.

• 70 characters: This is the limit if the message contains a single character that is not in the ASCII charset. This includes symbols and characters from languages using non-English alphabets.

This is already an existing feature prior to the new interface. It allows users to use people’s properties and personalize the SMS per recipient.

Message Counters

The message counter field provides the count of text messages based on the actual character counts

• For messages with 160 characters limit for 1 text message:

  • Messages are split if they are more than 160 characters.

  • If the message length is > 160 characters, each segment is 152 characters to make room for the UDH header.

• For messages with 140 characters limit of 1 text message:

  • Messages are split if they are more than 140 characters.

  • If the message length is > 140 characters, each segment size is 133 characters to make room for the UDH header.

• For messages with 70 characters limit of 1 text message:

  • Messages are split if they are more than 70 characters.

  • If the message length is > 70 characters, each segment size is 66 characters to make room for the 7-byte UDH header.

NOTE: The above computation of message counts ONLY applies when the account is integrated with the Native SMS service of ZMP. Twilio has a different character encoding scheme and message counts may differ.

For an SMS campaign, make sure you are only using people or phone based segments, and not email segments.

Native MMS Campaigns

MMS Texts

Texts on an MMS allow up to 1000 characters. A text part may be included along with ONE media type. An MMS message must include a text part or a media part or both.

Supported Media Attachments

You can attach images, videos, or audio files to an MMS campaign.

Maximum file sizes supported may vary depending on the Carrier. For example, T-Mobile may support up to 1.2 MB attachments, while Verizon supports 1MB. For this reason, it is highly recommended that all MMS campaigns be tested on multiple devices from different carriers.

Image and Video quality may need to be reduced in order to compress media files to fit within the file size limit. Similarly, image and video resolutions should be optimized for mobile screens. Image and video resolutions should not exceed 176x144 dimensions, for example.

Sender Numbers

Reach out to Support to set up a new or change a sender number. You may request to set up more than one sender number and you can select which sender number to use depending on the nature of the SMS/MMS campaign that you want to send.

SMS and MMS Preview

The preview shows the actual content of the SMS or MMS message to be sent to an applicable user.