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Here I am on my mobile phone. Wow, what a prop. Now let's talk about why this feature matters. We know that not everyone checks their emails, and sometimes you want to quickly deliver a message to your contacts. In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to create a text campaign. Import additional contacts, draft your text message, and schedule your campaign. So let's get into it.

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To create a new text campaign, we'll head to texts. To get started, click the new SMS campaign button and you will be guided into the campaign steps. Now give your campaign a name and select who you want to send your text campaign to. There are two options and we're going to run through both of them. Firstly, you can send your campaign to a list you've already created in the SwiftFox List Builder.

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To do this, select Mailing Lists and click next. Now type the name of your saved list and select it. Selecting the edit button will show you all the people in this list who will receive your message, and you can easily add more SwiftFox contacts by typing their name in the Add People section. Note only contact SwiftFox with mobile numbers will appear in this table, regardless of whether they were included in the mailing list you created.

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You can also import a list of mobile numbers from an external spreadsheet, rather than using a SwiftFox list. We have enabled this feature because we know that sometimes you want to send a quick SMS blast to people who are not contacts in SwiftFox, so we have made it easy for you to do this whilst keeping your SwiftFox data clean.

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Firstly, it's a good idea to download our CSV sample file, which you can do by clicking on download. Here you can see the three columns of data that you can import. If you would like to personalise your text, add a first name, add the mobile number and you can optionally add the time you want the text to be sent.

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If all your texts are going at the same time, you can leave this column empty. However, you can also add different send times for different contacts and these will be remembered by SwiftFox. Once you are done, upload the file into SwiftFox and click next. Now that you have uploaded your file, you will need to tell SwiftFox which column in your file contains the phone numbers and which column contains the send dates if you've included them.

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This ensures that SwiftFox is writing the right data from your file, and the column names are taken from the first row of the columns you have imported. Once you have mapped to your columns, click next.

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Next step is the all important drafting of your message. If your organisation uses more than one phone number to send texts, select the one you wish to use for this campaign. Now type your message. You can personalise your message through merge fields. There are several options based on your data in SwiftFox, or the data that you imported.

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To insert a merge field, click on the Merge field icon and select the field you want inserted. The most popular field is First Name. As you draft your message, SwiftFox will tell you how many characters you are using and also how many texts this will take to send. Each text message is 160 characters. Now, although most phones display your words as one message, regardless of its character length, it is important to keep character length in mind, as going over 160 characters adds an additional cost.

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When sending a text, it is important to be aware of your obligations to allow recipients to unsubscribe. SwiftFox provides three options. Reply unsub to opt out, add a custom message which may contain a link, or no unsubscribe method. Now that you have drafted your message and selected your unsubscribe method, it's time to send.

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Sending your message is really easy. If you want all your messages to go out at the same time, select the date and time. As a quick tip, make sure you select the current time zone you are in during this step. This ensures that your recipients will get the message at the time you set in the time zone they are in.

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You are now taken back to the SwiftFox Texts home page, where you can view your campaign by clicking campaigns. All done.