Text (SMS & MMS) Campaigns let you reach customers instantly with time-sensitive messages that consistently outperform email in open rates. By delivering content directly to mobile devices where recipients typically respond within minutes, this channel is especially powerful for promotions, alerts, and urgent communications.
With the right compliance settings in place, text campaigns help you stay on the right side of regulations while driving meaningful engagement. It's a direct, personal channel that enables real-time interaction and makes it easy to reach your audience with targeted, trackable messages.
Building a text campaign in Marketing Cloud is straightforward in just two steps. In those steps, you'll compose your message, verify compliance settings, select your contact lists, and schedule the campaign.
For more information on SMS & MMS compliance, enabling the text campaign feature in Maropost, and managing your campaigns, see Introduction to SMS Campaigns.
Before You Begin
Before creating a text campaign, make sure you have the following ready:
- A contact list to send the campaign to. For instructions on creating one, see SMS Contact Lists.
- Correctly configured compliance information. For more information, see SMS Campaign Compliance Settings. You can also update the compliance information while creating the campaign.
Steps to Create a Text (SMS/MMS) Campaign
To create a new text (SMS/MMS) message, perform the following steps:
- To access this feature, visit the navigation panel, click on Marketing > Campaigns, and select Text Campaigns from the expanded menu.
- From the text campaigns index page, click on the Compose Your Message button.
- In step 1, draft your campaign message and validate its compliance with SMS/MMS guidelines. For details, see Step 1: Compose.
- In step 2, select your audience and schedule or send the campaign. For details, see Step 2: Send.
Step 1: Compose
In step 1, you write your text (SMS/MMS) message and, if needed, edit the compliance-related content.
MESSAGE Tab
Utilize this region to enter the text (SMS/MMS) details, such as the campaign name and message, along with the mobile number from which the campaign will be sent. The “SMS/MMS Preview” panel on the right shows how your message will appear to recipients. You can also send a test message to a phone number of your choice.
The Message tab consists of the following fields:
- Text Campaign Name: Provide a name to identify your text (SMS/MMS) campaign.
- From Number: Select or enter the number that will appear as the sender of the text (SMS/MMS) campaign.
- Message: Craft your message within a 160-character limit. You can include mobile keywords to prompt contacts to text back, which triggers specific actions, and contact tags to personalize the content. Note that using special characters (UCS-2) will reduce the character limit to 70.
- Images/GIFs: Upload images/GIFs for multimedia messages (MMS) with a 1000-character limit.
- MMS Campaign Subject: Insert a subject line describing the multimedia content. The maximum supported character count is 20.
- Test Phone Number: Enter a mobile number to send yourself a preview of the message before it goes out to your contacts.
- Click Tracking: Leave this toggle ON to monitor link clicks within your SMS/MMS communications. Enabled by default, this feature automatically converts all URLs into short, unique links, saving character space while making every link trackable.
- MMS campaign delivery is currently only available in the United States, Canada, and Australian territories. Inbound MMS messages cannot be sent if the sender’s & receiver's mobile numbers are not from the above-mentioned countries.
- MMS campaign supports PNG, JPG, and JPEG image formats.
- The uploaded image or GIF shouldn’t exceed 450KB.
- The shortened links use the domain mpt1.co with an 8-character hash, making each link 16 characters long.
- All links in the message body are shortened, including any links in the compliance text.
- Links are not shortened in test messages.
- The original URL must include the protocol (http:// or https://).
To view click reports, visit the Campaign Dashboard. For more information, see the SMS Campaign Dashboard article.
COMPLIANCE Tab
Use this tab to manage the compliance-related content included in your message. By default, Marketing Cloud pre-populates your campaigns with the information required to meet various SMS/MMS regulations. On this tab, you can edit this pre-populated content and control how it appears by enabling, disabling, or reordering the compliance settings.
Important: If you turn off any compliance settings, ensure the corresponding information remains in your message body to meet compliance guidelines.
While the message will still be sent even if it does not meet compliance requirements, doing so may negatively affect your deliverability and could result in legal issues in certain jurisdictions.
The total character count of the message includes all compliance-related content.
This tab contains the following fields:
- Organization Name: The name of your organization.
- Message Content: The body of your SMS/MMS message. You can reorder this element to change its position within the message. To edit the elements within the text, switch over to the "Message" tab.
- Company Information Link: A link to a webpage containing your company information.
- Opt-out Text: Instructions that tell recipients how to opt out of receiving your SMS/MMS messages.
The Organization Name and Company Information Link fields are automatically populated from your account-wide SMS/MMS compliance settings.
Note: Any edits you make on the Compliance tab apply to the current campaign only and do not affect your account-wide compliance settings.
Step 2: Send
In step 2, you add your contact list/segment, timezone, and schedule the SMS/MMS campaign.
- It is mandatory to select at least one contact list or segment before proceeding. If neither is selected, an inline validation error is displayed under both fields, indicating that at least one contact list or segment is required. Additionally, your selected list(s) or segment(s) shouldn’t contain zero contacts; otherwise, the system displays an error, prompting you to choose a list(s) or segment(s) featuring at least one contact in it.
- Users can select both contact lists and segments simultaneously. The campaign will be sent to the union of the selected audiences, and duplicate contacts appearing in both will receive the notification only once. Optionally, you can select the contact list or segments for whom you want to suppress the campaigns. To know more about suppressing contact lists and their workings, check out and read our Suppression (Do Not Mail) Lists article.
- If “Campaign timezone based” is enabled on the Permitted SMS Sending Hours settings page, a Recipient Timezone field is displayed above the schedule toggle. By default, the timezone configured in your user profile is automatically selected.
- If the scheduled delivery falls within non-permitted hours, an alert is shown with options to Pause delivery (default) or Send Anyway (with a compliance warning). If messages are paused, the dashboard displays, "Delivery will resume after non-permitted hours.” Once you have finished configuring your campaign, click on Schedule. The SMS/MMS campaign will be sent to the audience group.
Note:Journey SMS and transactional messages are sent regardless of permitted time restrictions. - Furthermore, if you wish to either make changes to the campaign or send the SMS/MMS message right away, both the “Save As Draft” & “Send Now” buttons are available at your disposal.
