What is the Sequential Smoothing feature of TextCampaign?

Smoothing is a feature of TextCampaign that enables you to send out your SMS campaign in batches of messages over the course of a day. We support two types of smoothing: Sequential Smoothing and Staged Smoothing.

With Sequential Smoothing, you tell TextCampaign how many messages you would like it to send every given period of time. With Staged Smoothing, you tell TextCampaign how many messages you would like to send in specific hours of the day.

With Sequential Smoothing the number of recipients that you send the message to each time period can either be the actual number of recipients (1,000 or 509 or 10,000, for example), or a percentage of the number of recipients in your uploaded file (10%, 7% or 30%, for example). The time period between each batch of messages being sent out can be set to 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1.5 hours or 2 hours.

As an example, if your SMS campaign file contains 25,000 recipients, you can set the Sequential Smoothing function to send 5,000 messages out every hour. If you schedule the campaign to begin at 10.00am, then 5,000 messages will be sent out in five batches at 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 13:00 and 14:00 hours. 

With Sequential Smoothing, the batches of messages are sent out at the beginning of each chosen time period. They are not smoothed between the time periods, as with Staged Smoothing.

Sequential Smoothing is highly effective with SMS campaigns where you are expecting the recipients to take an action and respond to you. The action might be to call you or visit your web site, and you want to ensure that the responses arrive in your organisation in a manageable flow, rather than all in one go, just after you send the SMS campaign to your full list of recipients.

To use the Sequential Smoothing option:

1. In Step Four of TextCampaign, click on the SEQUENTIAL SMOOTHING option.
2. Select when the campaign should begin to be sent, from the DATE and TIME drop-down menus. The default is the current date and time.
3. Select whether you wish to choose the number of recipients to be sent to by an actual number (by selecting ACTUAL NUMBER OF RECIPIENTS) or by a percentage of the uploaded recipients (by selecting PERCENTAGE OF RECIPIENTS).
4. Enter the number of recipients (actual or percentage) in the SEND field.
5. Choose the time period between campaign batches from the EVERY drop-down menu.
6. Click on the SEND CAMPAIGN button.

Once your SMS campaign has been submitted, the first batch of messages will be sent at the given date and time, followed by further batches of messages every given period of time.

If you would like any further information on the TextCampaign smoothing function, please contact our Customer Service team, either by phone on 08451 221 302, or by email at [email protected].