New Service: Campaign Solo Released for Public Beta Testing

– Briefing Note

The Melrose Labs Campaign Solo tool for SMS text marketing has been released for public beta testing. There are a number of features that we have not yet enabled and development work is ongoing in these and other areas at the present time. This is public beta testing and so we're looking to identify any issues and correct them prior to the v1 release.

Service Purpose

SMS is an ideal marketing channel for reaching customers as is has an open rate of 98% and SMS are on average responded to within 90 seconds. ^GSMA Marketing campaigns using other digital channels, such as email and PPC adverts, do not perform as well as SMS text marketing. SMS text messaging is so effective due to it being such a direct, immediate and personal means of communicating with customers.

Campaign Solo from Melrose Labs is a free-to-use tool that enables marketers to very quickly and easily create, execute and monitor effective SMS text marketing campaigns that are compliant with local regulations.

Target Users

Campaign Solo is for use by organisations ranging in size from small local businesses to large multi-nationals.

Key Service Points

Fast Campaign Creation – Creating a campaign by a new user involves entering a name for the campaign, the URL of the webpage to where people are to be sent and the message they are to receive that prompts them to click through to the webpage. Once the audience has been drag'n'dropped into the campaign and the SMS account added, the campaign is ready to send. This can all happen in under 3 minutes.

Capacity – Small sends of a handful of recipients, all the way up to extremely large numbers of recipients (maximum 25 million recipients), will be supported by Campaign Solo.

Controlled Engagement – To avoid websites being overloaded and engagements being lost, the sending of messages to an audience can be controlled. When the number of engagements exceeds the higher threshold, the sending of SMS text messages will be suspended until the level of engagement drops below the lower threshold.

Status and Reporting – The status of the campaign, its performance and engagement are all displayed in realtime as messages are sent and customers engage by clicking on the link in SMS text message they have received. Graphs clearly show the status of the sending of messages (e.g. how many are still to send, are in-flight, delivered or otherwise) and the level of messages sent and engagements by time. Overall engagement rate and level is also shown along with the number of engagements in the last hour and last 24 hours.

SMS Account – SMPP (Short Message Peer-to-Peer) SMS accounts are supported by the service. When SMS account details are entered on the Campaign Page, the service automatically checks to see if the SMPP account details are valid by using them to connect to the SMS gateway / SMSC to which they relate. Once the details have been verified in this way, a test SMS can be sent to a mobile number to confirm the account can be used as expected for sending SMS from Campaign Solo. Delivery receipts are requested for every SMS sent in order to confirm delivery of the message to the recipient.

Use the Service

The service has been released in beta form and is available for use, subject to limitations and restrictions.

Take a look and let us know what you think: https://melroselabs.com/services/campaign/

Restrictions - important

At present, Campaign Solo is temporarily restricted as follows:

• users must request to make live use of the service (contact support@melroselabs.com)

• when live use is requested (i.e. actual sending of SMS to real mobiles), the service can at present only be used with the SMSCarrier SMS service

• the Melrose Labs SMSC Simulator service can only be used unless live use is requested

Development Pipeline

The following are some of the items in our development pipeline for Campaign Solo:

• Support for REST SMS Accounts
• SMS send rate limit
• Personalizing messages (e.g. name of recipient)
• Portal language support (French, Spanish, German, Portuguese)
• Non-latin character support in messages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
• Pruning of audiences based on non-engagement
• Audience file upload formats extended and flexibility improved
• Audience management and export
• Audience data connector (import/export)
• Audience data collection using upcoming Collect service
• Report export
• Schedule campaign start and end
• Duplicate campaign for quick creation of new campaign
• Single sign-on (SSO) for access

We welcome feature requests and all feedback to product-team@melroselabs.com.

Pricing

Campaign Solo will be free to use during testing and when launched.

The use of a third-party SMS account as part of the service will separately incur charges from that SMS account provider.

At a later date, no sooner than the end of 2020, it is possible that a monthly subscription charge, or a charge related to the size of campaigns, will be introduced.

Future

Campaign Solo is part of the upcoming Campaign marketing technology platform from Melrose Labs that will cover voice, chat, email, social, rich messaging and text messaging.

Later in 2020, the Melrose Labs Tyr SMS Gateway will be an option available to users for sending SMS at competitive rates.

This briefing note will be updated throughout the public beta testing period.

Last updated 3 Feb 2020.