Texting 101: How to Send & Manage Text Messages

Hello everybody. My name is Drew and thank you for joining me for this live training. We're going to be talking about texting 101. So, the goal of this uh of this live training is going to be just to help familiarize you with the very basics of being a texting user in Viploud. Um, so we're going to be talking about all things texting, but certain elements we might not be going into great detail because an overview is the primary goal here. Also note that this video assumes that you already have an existing texting subscription in your account. So, if you don't have a texting subscription in your VipCloud account, please get that squared away first. Um, then you'll be able to actually text in your account. We have a separate video that talks all about um how to get your texting subscription started, in particular the uh campaign registry. And also note that doing that can take a few days uh or importing a number it can actually take even a couple of weeks to get your number ported from an external system.

So if you have something that you are trying to be if you're on a timeline to get texting started then getting it started sooner is best. All right. So, uh, we are going to be talking about I'm going to share my screen. We're going to be talking about pages that are found here under communication in that left sidebar. And then up here you see email. Down here you see text in that communication sidebar. And so we're going to be running through pretty much all of these tabs here like conversations, keywords, mass like mass texts, scheduled text templates, and then contacts and contact lists. Um, so uh before we do that though, a question that one might have is just how do I send a quick message? Like I I need to send a text to a given person. And how do I go about doing that? Well, there are two ways you can do it. One of my favorite ways is with this plus button up here in the upper right corner of the uh navigation.

You click on that. There's all sorts of quick actions that you'll find here. And one of those is including text. So, you just click on that text button. And now you're ready to send a message to any contact that is in your system that also has an active mobile number. You can grab a text template if you need to. You don't need to though. Um you can actually make this a mass text by sending it to a contact list. Just so you know, you put in the person's uh you choose your contact. You can search for them by name and then you can just draft a quick message. Down here below that message uh section, you'll see a whole bunch of options if you want to put in emojis or images or videos or anything like that. And then at the very bottom here, you can send the text now. You can schedule it. You can preview it. And um you can also cancel, which is what I'm going to do right now.

The other way that you can send a quick individual message to a contact is actually from this page that we are on right now. So that just brings us naturally to the conversations page. So you click on conversations in that left sidebar and it's going to show you all the active conversations that you have going. Uh in this particular demo account, I actually only have one conversation going because it's a relatively new account. But if I had conversations going with dozens of people in this little middle section here, this is going to look like your typical um web messenger uh software. Like most systems do something like this where you can choose from the different conversations that you have going on. You click on it and then you'll see that back and forth you've had with that contact. Uh, but if I would just want to quickly send a message to somebody, I can hit on that hit that that plus button, that the green plus button at the bottom section here. And lo and behold, it loads up exactly that same little modal uh drawer on the right side that we were looking at before.

So, I'm not going to run through that again. Now, in this conversation section, we'll see in this uh the right section here, the back and forth texting conversation that's going on with somebody. At the top of the page, I have a I can see their their contact information. If I click on their name, it'll take me to their contact record. If I click on that quick view icon, it'll load up their their contact uh their contact card. I can edit them. I can quickly draft an email and we've got this text button here as well. So, um, also I want to show you another thing here too really quickly. So, when we're looking at this start text conversation modal, I just load up somebody right here. And let's just actually load up a quick text as well. Just one thing I want to show you is like how that preview text button works. So what this preview text does, it's main goal is just to help you see what will be loaded in these merge tags here.

So it lets you preview your merge tags. And the merge tags being these little um variables is what some people call them, too. What'll put in that person's information. So I hit preview text. Now compare this with the message that we were looking at. It is it has pulled in my name where it says hey first name. And then under your company it's pulled in Vivecloud. And if I wanted to choose a different contact to see what it would pull for their information like maybe this person that I'm messaging. There we go. Now it has pulled in um this person's first name and then it's pulled in BCloud again because it says your company. So that's my company, not the contacts. So there there we go. That's how preview text works. All right, so uh moving right along. Uh, we're not going to talk too much about keywords because there's a separate video that goes all in depth on text and keywords, but the 30,000 foot view of what keywords are is if you want to be able to tell people, hey, a text back I'm interested, like the words I'm interested to be enrolled in some kind of promotional communications.

And then if you want that to do stuff like put them into a separate contact list where you'll then send those promotional messages, keywords are how you can do that. Also, as you can see here, all of the stuff like stop and quit and basically and help all of these uh standardized keywords as well. You can kind of see what all of these opt out words are and stuff like that. Okay. Now, mass texts, uh, mass texts are very much like, um, they're very much like mass emails. The at the core when you're sending these, it is going to be sending a message to a group of people all at once. And like with emails too, there's just two components really to it. You need your message that's going to be sent and you need the contact list to whom it's going to be sent. And when we are sending messages like this, we just need to uh we go right up here to new mass text. You choose your template. And we'll be talking about uh templates and contact lists in more detail in a in a little bit, but we just say this is the message that we want to send.

And we're going to be sending it to our customer list. You know, right here we're choosing our different c a different uh contact list here. And then you can hit send text now or you can schedule it for later. And then when you send these a row will appear here in the uh in the mass text page be a row for each different message that is sent. And then each of these columns here will break down how it has performed, you know, how many uh messages were delivered, how many replies you got, things like that. All right. Then under scheduled, well, here I'm going to schedule a message right now. So, let's go over here to like mass texts. Let's schedule this for tomorrow. And there we go. So, we're able to see the message that is scheduled. Um, so, you know, whether you're sending an individual message or a mass message, you can choose to have it go in the future. And then when you hover over your your scheduled messages, you can click on this left column here to go to the contact list to which it's being sent.

And then when you hover over it on the right side of the row, you'll see edit schedule. So if you want to change the timing, you'll see edit text if you want to change the message. And then you can click on delete to cancel it all together. And so that's what I'm going to do right now. Also note that when you're sending mass messages, you definitely want to make usage of the um of the merge tags like first name for instance, so that you can personally greet people on mass um based on the contact information that you have for them. Okay, now we're going to Well, first of all, I'm going to cancel this and then we're going to go to templates. So, text templates, unlike email templates, are just super super simple. Um, we can click here on the create button to make a new template. give it a quick name and we can put in a text message. So, um this really is just plain text that you can throw in there.

And then you can choose to uh down here at the bottom of this text editor, you can add attachments, videos, images, merge tags, email templates. What that'll be is a link to an email template landing page that you have, which actually could be like how you would maybe text a newsletter to people. And then emojis, of course. And you can hit create template. And there we go. Now we have a text template that can be chosen any time that we are drafting a new text message. So as an example, when I click on that plus button in the upper right corner, go to text. We're going to be looking for this one that's called example template. Choose text template. There we go. The one that we just made is at the top. One click. And now we've got that message loaded up. Now, moving down here in the left sidebar, we're going to look at contacts. We're not going to go into too much detail here, but um contacts, this is going to be just like a a master list of every single contact that we have in the system.

You'll see on the right side here, we got mobile phone numbers for them. Now, what I want to show you really quickly looking at one of these contacts, what's important to be able to send text messages to somebody is they must have a working number under the mobile phone uh contact field. So, this is distinct from other types of phone fields. You can see we got work phone, we got direct phone, we got just the one plain old vanilla phone. mobile phone is the only one that can send and receive texts. So that's why we're able to send a text message. So uh if this actually here I'm going to get rid of this really quickly because you'll see looking at this contact record, we can see the the text button that is clickable. If I remove that, look at this. Now that text button is grayed out. So, that's a quick and easy way to know that this person does not have a an available texting um number in the system. So, when I re-edit, I put in the phone number again.

Now, that is clickable again. So, if you are wondering why, hey, hey, why can't I send text to this particular contact? I think I have their phone number. That's the first thing to check. Is it is it actually a mobile phone number? And while we're here and talking about troubleshooting why we might not be able to send a text to a contact, the other thing to check is, are they text opted out? Generally, if it says yes here next to text opt out, it's going to be because they responded to a text with the word stop, and that will automatically opt them out and prevent you from sending texts to them. Um, so, uh, now also on a related note, you can manually opt them out. So, if they just send you like an in a sentence like, "Hey, can you please stop sending me texts?" I would recommend going to the contact record and changing the text opt out status from no to text opt out yes. And then of course also if you're wondering why you can't send text to somebody and you see text out equals yes, that'll be your uh your answer right there.

I'm going to turn that back off. All right. So that just about does the contacts. Now contact lists. These are just groups of contacts and it's quite simple to create and manage them. You can just hit the create button to make a new contact list. You can import a CSV of contacts by clicking on import contacts. You can click create empty list to just make a list. That's a blank slate. And then also we've got create signup form because signup forms are basically technically also contact lists. So we're going to create an empty one. Give it the name example list. Hit create contact list. And then now we can go in here and hit add contacts where we have import contacts. Search contacts where we can grab existing contacts in our system. And then also the create contact button to make a brand new contact in our system. So I'm just going to choose a couple of random contacts here. And then there we go.

Now we've got our contact list in here. And also note that when you're looking in a contact list, there's that little drop down that says active for emailing. You can click it and have it say all contacts. Since we're talking about texting, at the very bottom here, you'll see active for texting. That means that these are people who have active uh mobile phone numbers who have not opted out. So, if you are wondering why, hey, why is this contact list? It has 100 contacts in if I can only text 50 of them, it might be because of uh how many phone mobile phone numbers they have on the contact records and also how um if some of them have have opted out. Lastly, text settings. very very bottom here of the communication sidebar is a place that has um helpful information. So for instance, you can customize your voicemail. This is going to be just like a little uh like a little robot voice that'll leave the message or or that'll that'll say the message that you want it to say when people or if people call your text number.

So, you can update your voicemail message to something custom. If somebody calls your texting number, they'll hear that. And what's great is that they can actually leave you a voicemail and you'll see that voicemail uh and be able to listen to it on their contact record. So, it's not a dead end if somebody calls you back. Note that these do cost one credit per voicemail that is left. And then down here at the bottom of your text settings, you'll see your credits. So, here if you're wondering, hey, how many text credits do I have left? Well, you can see your text credit balance here. You can choose to receive an email when your credits drop below 100 if you want to then be able to go and add text credits. And then speaking of adding text credits, there's this green button right here which you can click on to add additional credits to your uh to your account if you're running a little bit low before your account will be automatically like renewing with more credits. And if you ever need to change your text subscription, assuming that you, the user, um, manage your text subscription, uh, many of our users have admins that manage this the subscription. So, this might appear differently for you, but you can click on this button right here to then change to different uh, automatic renewing text subscriptions in your account. Okay, awesome. I think that about does it for texting 101 Of course, as always let us know if you have any questions at all. We'll be more than happy to help. Thank you so much.