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

With Staged Smoothing you set the number of recipients that the message should be sent to during particular hours of the day.

The number of recipients that you set for a particular hour will themselves be smoothed over the hour, rather than being sent in one batch at the beginning of the hour.

The number of recipients that you send the message to each hour 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).

As an example, if your SMS campaign file contains 25,000 recipients, you can tell TextCampaign that you would like 19% of the messages to be sent between 10:00 and 11:00, 20% between 11:00 and 12:00, 33% between 14:00 and 16:00, and 28% between 16:00 and 17:00 hours. TextCampaign will then send the appropriate number of messages in each hour slot, with messages smoothed over the hour slot.

An SMS campaign can only be smoothed over hours in a single day. If you are smoothing the campaign on the same day that you are sending it, then, naturally, the campaign can only be smoothed over the remaining hours of the day.

Staged 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 Staged Smoothing option:

1. In Step Four of TextCampaign, click on the STAGED SMOOTHING option.
2. Select the day when the campaign should be sent, from the DATE drop-down menu. The default is the current date.
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 AMOUNT field for the hours that you wish a batch to be sent during. The total of the amount values must equal the total number of actual message recipients or 100%, depending on the SMOOTHING TYPE you selected.
5. Click on the SEND CAMPAIGN button.

Once the SMS campaign has been submitted, the first batch of messages will be sent on the given date, during the first hour that contains an amount value, followed by further batches of messages during other hours that contain amount values.

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].