Markate makes sending SMS marketing campaigns as easy as starting a one-on-one conversation — and our powerful features take SMS marketing to the next level!

Here is the step-by-step setup guide: 

• Login to your account on Markate.com
• Go to Marketing and click SMS Blast
   

• Click '+Create SMS Blast'

• Next, enter a name to the campaign for your records. 
• Click 'Save as draft' to simply save it or 'continue' to go to the next tab.

• On 'Select Customers' tab, select which customers will receive this SMS:
  

1. All your customers with phone,
2. A specific customer group that you have set up or,
3. Only specific customers that you will need to select individually. 

If you do have customer groups set up, you can also choose which groups to exclude.

• Click 'Continue'

• It navigates to the 'Build SMS' section. 
• Now, you can draft the SMS message. You can use the "Placeholder Tags" to have the system insert that information automatically. 
• Click 'Continue' once the SMS is drafted.

• On the 'Preview' tab, you will preview all of your information before sending.

• You can choose a specific time and date to have it send out, 24 hours after creating. If you do not choose a date and time, it will go out as soon as it is reviewed in our system. 

• Click 'Continue'

• After everything has been reviewed, press "Purchase" to move forward with the payment and have them sent. 

• After the campaign has been purchased and completed, you can view the stats of the campaign by how many have Delivered, unsubscribed, and the total amount of recipients. 

• Delivered: SMSes delivered to the customers successfully. Unsubscribed users: Unsubscribed SMSes occur when recipients opt out of SMS. Removing these ensures your SMS reach only engaged users. Total Recipients: Total number of customers to whom the SMS was sent.
  
  

• Click 'SMS Log' tab to track the SMS status for every customer the SMS was sent to.

Important Note:

Using emojis or smart quotes in SMS reduces the character limit and may split messages into multiple segments, increasing your message cost.

• Standard SMS segment = 160 characters (using GSM-7 encoding, the most common character set).
• If your message exceeds 160 characters, it’s split into multiple segments.
• When a message is split, each segment uses 153 characters instead of 160, because 7 characters are used for metadata to reassemble the message.
• Let’s take below sample SMS:

[Your Business Name] here! You had services with us back in 2022, and we’d love to serve you again. Schedule within the next 2 weeks and get 10% OFF or more when you bundle services like [list a few service types]. Free estimates available!
Let us know how we can help.
Call/text: [Your Phone Number]
Thanks,
 [Your Name] 

That message is about 366 characters long.

• First segment: 153 characters
• Second segment: 153 characters
• Third segment: 60 characters
• Total: 3 segments

However, if Unicode characters (like emojis or special punctuation such as curly quotes or em dashes) are used, the message switches to UCS-2 encoding, where each segment is only 70 characters long (67 when concatenated).

So, if your message includes smart quotes (“ ”) or emojis, it could easily become 4 segments.

Here is a video showing how to do this: