SMS Marketing Overview
SMS Marketing integrates with the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform and third-party SMS platforms. You can send scheduled or instant promotional messages, notifications, and digital messages to audiences from User Insights that have a successful execution status:
Promotional message: A text-based message that supports inserting multiple short links. Short links can include short parameters. Only the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform supports short links and short parameters. These messages are suitable for scenarios such as new product announcements, customer care, birthday greetings, product promotions, and event invitations.
Notification: A text-based message that supports inserting multiple variables or short links. Short links can include short parameters. Only the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform supports short links and short parameters. Both the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform and third-party SMS platforms support variables. These messages are suitable for coupon usage notifications and marketing campaign notifications for holidays.
Digital message: A message that supports content such as text, images, audio, and video. These messages can be sent only through the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform.
Variable: Used to personalize messages by sending different content to different users. This content can be a field from the source data of the audience. For example, if you insert the variable ${name} and set its value to the name field from the source data of the audience, the user's name appears in the message where the variable is placed.
Short link: A compressed URL created from a long original URL. Short links save character space in the message, allowing for more content.
Short parameter: An 11-digit user mobile number is converted into a 6-digit short parameter. This parameter is appended to a short link to create a mobile number-based short link. This feature enables data collection based on the user's mobile number. The collected data is sent back to the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform.
The following table describes which platforms support variables, short links, and short parameters. Y indicates that the feature is supported. N indicates that the feature is not supported.
Promotional message | Notification | |||
Alibaba Cloud SMS platform | Third-party SMS platform | Alibaba Cloud SMS platform | Third-party SMS platform | |
Variable | Regular user: N | N | Y | Y |
Short parameter | Y | N | Y | N |
Short link | Y | N | Y | N |
You can specify an audience that you created, a public audience, or an audience from an uploaded file. The audience ID type must be a mobile number.
Before creating your first SMS task, you must configure an SMS API. You can add an Alibaba Cloud SMS API or a third-party SMS API. For more information about how to configure the Alibaba Cloud SMS API, see Configure Alibaba Cloud SMS API. For more information about how to configure a third-party SMS API, see Create Third-party SMS Platform API. Third-party SMS APIs must be developed in compliance with the Third-party SMS Platform API Specifications (V3).
Message Reply
After you enable and configure mobile originated message receiving in Alibaba Cloud SMS API Management, users can reply to messages sent through the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform. On the Message Reply tab, you can:
View user replies.
Reply to users.
Unsubscribing from messages
For SMS platforms that support unsubscribing, such as the Alibaba Cloud SMS platform, each promotional message sent from an SMS marketing task ends with 'Reply T to unsubscribe'. This text consumes four characters of the message.
If a user replies with 'T', the SMS platform blocks that user for the current SMS signature. Promotional messages that use the same signature will no longer be sent to that user from this platform.