Step 1:
- Immediately begin building your subscriber base. Any customer contact provides an opportunity to build it.
- Familiarize yourself with our terms and conditions. The document includes many points on how to follow best practices. Our FAQ section also offers valuable information on many text marketing topics, i.e. we discourage purchasing of existing subscriber lists.
- Decide how you want to organize your data within the application. With both categories and campaign features, our customers have a powerful tool they can use to organize data and measure results. Most companies utilize categories for customers, employees, suppliers and campaigns for specific marketing initiatives or events. They can also be used as zip codes, multiple trivia game questions or addresses for property that is for sale.
Step 2:
- Login with the user name and password we emailed you.
- Go to My Account and change your password to suit your preference.
- While in "My Account", familiarize yourself with the other features, in particular the use and management of key words. Our system generates default keywords for signup and confirmation. You should create new ones that better suit your business.
If a word such as "yyy" is already in use by another MESSAGEbuzz customer, you will receive the following error message (in red) as noted in the screen shot below.
Please note: your account can have unlimited categories and original key words. This is addressed in greater detail in the Secondary Functionality and the Application FAQ.
Unsubscribe keywords (QUIT, END, STOP, CANCEL or UNSUBSCRIBE) are the only key words that cannot be changed. These are universal words dictated by the terms and conditions of all the carriers that subscribers use to opt-out of any mobile marketing service.
Step 3:
Create your categories. All accounts have a default category called General Interest. You can have an unlimited number of categories per account.
At this point you may also decide to create various campaigns for upcoming initiatives or events. Creating a campaign is an identical process to creating a category. You can create an unlimited number of campaigns per account.
Step 4
Enter your subscribers. There are three ways to opt-in:
First, by asking your subscribers to text your unique key word to 35350 from their mobile phone;
Second, by logging into your MESSAGEbuzz account and entering a subscriber's mobile number manually;
Third, by logging into your MESSAGEbuzz account and uploading all your contacts with our upload wizard. Our contact upload wizard is a great time-saving tool in those instances where you have 10+ subscribers to enter manually.
If you collect your subscriber information manually, there are two essential fields to complete: a mobile number with area code (entered without a hyphen) and the subscriber carrier name (Cingular, Sprint, etc.)
Once entered, select the categories you would like to associate with this subscriber and Save.
When the small check box titled "Add to Quick Links" is selected, the subscriber name is placed directly on the main menu of your application as shown in the example below on the left-hand side (Favorites: Customer One). This feature saves time when you regularly send messages to the same contact(s).
NOTE: When your subscribers opt-in from their mobile phones, their names will not be captured. If additional information besides their mobile numbers is critical for your business, then enter it manually or ask MESSAGEbuzz to create a web page for them to use to sign-up online. If subscribers are entered in any other way than through their mobile phones, you will need to send them a confirmation message, which they will need to reply to.
Step 5
If a subscriber's information has been entered manually (such as for Customer One in the screen below), click on the link "Send verification text message to unconfirmed subscribers".
This will send out a message to those subscribers that are unconfirmed. The next screen allows you to select the individual unconfirmed subscribers to send the confirmation message to, or send it to all of them.
The drop down menu "Change View" on the right-hand side of the screen allows you to sort and view the subscribers by their status in the database (All, Unconfirmed, Confirmed, Subscribed, Unsubscribed).
As shown below, you can select to send a predefined message or create a custom one. Please allow 24 hours for review and approval of a custom message.
