Create Marketing Campaigns using SMS

Overview

Use the SMS Marketing Campaigns feature to send your customers marketing text messages. For example, you can send a discount for any services booked in June or offer a seasonal maintenance special.

Things to know

• This article explains how to create an SMS campaign to send marketing messages. If you want to create a campaign for transactional messages, see these articles:        

  • Create Recurring Service Campaigns using SMS

  • Create Unsold Estimates Campaigns using SMS

  • Create Missed Calls Campaigns using SMS

• If you're unsure about which type of campaign to use, see Understand transactional versus marketing messages.

• Your Marketing Registration must be approved by The Campaign Registry (TCR) before you can send opt-in requests or marketing text messages to customers. For more, see Submit Marketing Registration.

• Customers must explicitly opt-in to receive your marketing text messages. For more, see Generate opt-in requests for marketing text messages.

• SMS Marketing campaigns are launched the next day, at the earliest. This allows ServiceTitan to process and queue up your text messages ahead of time, which ensures proper delivery.

• SMS Marketing messages are sent to the newest contact number on the customer profile that is opted in to receive marketing messages. If the message fails to send to this number, it will then attempt to send to any other non-landline phone numbers in the customer profile that are also opted in.

• SMS Marketing campaigns can be archived, unarchived, and cloned. For more information, see Manage Marketing Pro functions.

• To make sure your customers can receive your marketing SMS text messages, see Configure customer profiles for marketing campaigns.

Create a Marketing SMS campaign

You can create SMS marketing campaigns from the Marketing Overview, SMS, Email, Direct Mail, Dashboard, and Campaigns pages in Marketing Pro.

1. Go to Marketing > Pro Campaigns.

2. Click Create Campaign > Create a blank campaign.

3. Select SMS Text Message - Marketing Campaigns as the campaign category and click Next.        

   Note: The Activate Chat to Continue pop-up appears if you don't have the Chat feature activated and asks you to navigate to Settings. For more information on this, see Set up and enable Chat.

      

4. On the Create Campaign: SMS Marketing pop-up that opens, enter a unique brief, and descriptive Campaign Name for your SMS campaign with a maximum of 60 characters.

5. (Optional) Enter a description of the campaign.

6. To start building the SMS Marketing campaign, click Start Building. 

This opens the SMS draft campaign screen with all four steps:

• Step 1 Set Goal: Select the marketing goal for this SMS campaign.

• Step 2 Add Outbound Tracking Number: Add a unique outbound phone number to properly track revenue for this SMS campaign.

• Step 3 Add Audience: Set which of your customers will receive marketing content from this SMS campaign.

• Step 4 Create Automated Text Message Content: Add and create the content sent to customers as part of this SMS campaign.

Step 1: Set Goal

1. Click Select Goal.

2. Select the type of campaign that best matches your strategy then click Save. 

Step 2: Add outbound tracking number

You can add tracking phone numbers in two ways. You can either generate a new number or assign an existing number.

Generate new number

1. Click Add Number. 

2. Click Add Tracking Number and then Generate new number. 

3. On the Add New Number window that opens, select Local Number for a local campaign or Toll-Free Number for a regional or national campaign.

4. For Local Number only, enter the area code or ZIP Code you want the tracking number to correspond to.

5. (Optional) If you want your tracking number to include a particular set of digits, enter them in the Contains field. 

6. Click Search Numbers.

7. On the Search Results window that opens, select a tracking number and click Choose Number.

8. On the Set Forwarding Number window that opens, enter the phone number at which you want to receive incoming calls for this campaign, or select to use a default number and click Add Number.        

   Note: Adding new tracking numbers can differ depending on the phone integration you use. For more information, see Add or edit tracking numbers.

9. Click Save. 

Assign existing number

1. Click Add Number. 

2. Click Add Tracking Number and then Assign existing number. 

3. On the Select Existing Number window that opens, select an existing number from the list and then click Assign Number to add the selected number to your campaign. 

4. Click Save. 

Step 3: Add audience

You can add audiences that will receive your marketing text messages in two ways:

1. From your audience list, select one of your audiences to use for this campaign.        

   Note: When choosing an audience for your campaign, you can see the Potential Reach breakdown. This shows the number of contacts in the audience who can receive marketing content via text message based on their opt-in status.

      

2. To create a new audience, click Create new, enter the Audience Name, and click Begin. For more, see Create audiences. 

Step 4: Create Automated Text Message Content

After you add an audience, create your automated text message content.

1. Click Add Content. 

2. Select how the campaign content should be delivered to customers. Options include:        

   • Automated: Deliver campaign content to customers as they join the audience. This option is ideal for ongoing campaigns like birthday or membership anniversary promotions.

   • One-Time: Deliver campaign content once on the selected launch date. This option is ideal for time-sensitive campaigns such as limited-time offers or a new service launch.

3. Confirm you agree to the Terms of Use and click Continue. 

4. For One-Time campaigns only, select a Launch Date for the campaign.

5. In Text Message 1, enter the SMS text message you want to send to your customers.        

   Note: ServiceTitan automatically shortens any URLs or merge tag links you include in your message, giving you more space for your content. The message preview shows the shortened links, so you can see how it will look when sent to customers.

      

6. Click Add Merge Tag to add merge tags to your message. Merge tags automatically populate information like the customer's first name. Options include:        

   • Customer First Name: First name of the customer.

   • Customer Last Name: Last name of the customer.

   • Company Name: Your company's name.

   • Tracking Phone Number: The unique tracking number you selected when building the campaign.

   • Schedule Appointment Link: A link that allows recipients to schedule an appointment through the legacy web scheduler. The legacy web scheduler is only compatible with open capacity planning, not Adjustable Capacity Planning (ACP).                

     Note: If you don't want to use the legacy web scheduler, you can add your preferred scheduler to the message instead of using this merge tag.

   • Unsold Estimates Link: A unique link that allows recipients to see their most recent open estimate, including their estimate options.

7. Click Send Time and select the time of day to send your message. 

8. To add another SMS text message to the campaign, click + Add Text Message then repeat the steps above. You can include up to four SMS text messages.

9. If you have more than one text message in your sequence, click Send texts until and select a condition to stop sending SMS text messages to a specific customer once that customer has met the selected criteria. Options include:

   • Call Created: A customer calls a phone number associated with this campaign.

   • Job Booked: A customer books a job where the SMS campaign is assigned as the job campaign.

   • No Trigger: The campaign will continue sending each SMS text message in the campaign sequence until the customer no longer qualifies for the audience or unsubscribes. For more information on audience inclusion criteria, see Create audiences.

10. (Optional) Select Stop sending texts when a recipient leaves the audience if the system should stop sending customers marketing content when they leave the audience chosen for this campaign. This option is enabled by default. 

11. Click Save & Continue to save your content and return to the SMS draft campaign screen.

Review and schedule your campaign

You can review your campaign, send a test SMS text message, and schedule a launch date if all looks good.

Caution: After the campaign is scheduled to launch, you can't make changes to it.

1. Review each setup step of the campaign. If anything needs to be changed, go to that setup step and click Edit to make your changes.

2. Review the Estimated Spend of the campaign on the right side of the screen. You get 7,500 messages for free each month. Each additional message costs $0.0018.        

   Note: The Estimated Spend is only an estimate. As customers are added or removed from your selected audience based on its criteria, the actual cost of the campaign may change.

      

3. Go to the Automated Text Message Content section and click Send Test. Then enter the phone number to send the text message for the test. 

4. If all looks good, click Schedule Campaign.        

   Note: If you're not ready to schedule the campaign, click Finish Later at the top right of the corner of the screen to save it and schedule it at a later time.

5. In the Schedule Campaign pop-up that opens, click Calendar to select a campaign launch date, or manually enter a launch date. SMS text messages will start sending on this date.        

   Note: You can launch the campaign with tomorrow's data at the earliest.

6. Click Schedule.

Your campaign is scheduled. Click View All Campaigns to see a list of all your campaigns.

Opt-out SMS text message

To stop receiving SMS campaigns, customers can send an SMS text message with the word Stop to the tracking phone number. After a customer opts out, they can no longer receive any SMS campaigns from you, regardless of whether the phone number used in the original SMS campaign is used again or a new phone number is used. Additionally, customers can't receive any messages sent to them by chat.

Note: The Stop request applies to all tracking phone numbers associated with your SMS campaigns, meaning they will subsequently stop receiving messages from any other campaigns.

Tip: If your customer turned off the job notifications they can still receive chat SMS from you.

Opt-in SMS text message

To start receiving SMS campaigns again, a customer can send an SMS text message with the word Start to one of the following three options:

• The same tracking number they opted out from

• Another tracking number from another campaign

• The default SMS number

This allows them to opt in again and receive SMS campaigns from you.

Want to learn more?

• See Understand transactional versus marketing messages

• See Generate opt-in requests for marketing text messages