SMS Campaigns

Overview

SMS campaigns are marketing or communication initiatives that use text messaging to engage customers, promote products, send updates, or drive conversions.
This guide explains how to create, manage, and optimize SMS campaigns in CommBox, including key considerations, setup instructions, and campaign performance tracking.

Key Considerations

• Set Realistic Audience Limits
  When an AI agent isn’t available to handle callbacks or follow-up interactions, plan your campaign audience based on your team’s capacity. Estimate how many responses your staff can handle within SLA targets, and adjust your audience size accordingly to maintain a smooth, timely customer experience.

• Monitor Campaign Performance
  Regularly review the Overview and Metrics dashboard to assess campaign results. Key metrics such as Sent, Replied, and Duration can reveal which campaigns resonate best with your customers to help refine future targeting and message content.

• Ensure Consent and Compliance
  In most regions, businesses must obtain explicit opt-in consent from customers before sending SMS messages. Contacts should provide their mobile number and confirm their willingness to receive future communications. Always ensure your contact lists comply with local data protection and communication regulations.
  
  Opt-out is detected automatically when the contact sends ‘Unsubscribe’ (or the translated equivalent) on any channel and in any conversation. Those contacts are skipped in future campaigns on the same channel. Regular messages can still be sent to opt-out customers.

• Personalization and Audience Accuracy
  Personalize messages using user properties that pull customer-specific data (e.g., name, order number, or tier level). Ensure that your audience file is accurate, up to date, and free of duplicate or invalid numbers to maintain deliverability and message relevance.
  

Creating a New Campaign

1. On the CommBox platform, click the Compose section (pencil icon) in the main sidebar, and select the SMS tab.

2. Select a channel that will be used for sending messages out.

3. Select the Campaigns option.
   

4. Enter the Campaign’s name.

5. Select the Audience that will receive this campaign. You can add customers by clicking Import Customers (optional – see below for details).
   Note:
   When selecting a Dynamic audience file, the final number of recipients is determined by the filter criteria at launch time.
   A limit box will appear to cap the number of outgoing messages. Enter the number that will help prevent an overload on your team’s capacity to handle responses.
   
   Use case example: Every morning, we send a campaign to customers who initiated a call after business hours the day before, inviting them to call us back. We limit the number of messages to the number of callbacks we can adequately manage.

6. Compose the message for the customers. You can use the user properties to personalize your message. The User properties draw data directly from the selected audience list or imported CSV columns.
   

7. In the Scheduling section, define the sending timeframe:
   

• Send

  • Select whether to limit campaign messages to go out only during business hours or have no limitation on the sending time.
  • When choosing the During business hours option, select the desired business hours profile.

• Starts

  • Select Now to launch the campaign immediately.

  • Select Custom time for starting the campaign.
    

  • Select Recurring to open a dialog box to set how often the campaign will be repeated.

  • Campaigns can repeat daily or every X number of days, ending on a specified date or after X number of launches.

  • Campaigns can repeat weekly or every X number of weeks, ending on a specified date or after X number of launches.
    

Note:

• Sending will fail if there is an internal contradiction with sending times. Example: Sending a campaign every Sunday at 7 AM (Recurring) when the selected business hours profile starts at 8 AM.
  > * Recurring campaigns will be treated as separate campaigns, and each launch will be listed separately in the Overview and metrics page.

• Ends

  • The campaign automatically ends 24 hours after all messages are sent, during which responses are considered part of the campaign.
  • Alternatively, choose a Custom Time to close the campaign earlier or later.

8. Optionally, select the Automation that will respond to customers who reply to the campaign. The selected AI Agent/Chatbot is applied only to customers whose responses are associated with the campaign while it is active.
   

9. Optionally, add a follow-up step to resend the campaign to customers who did not receive it or did not respond to the original campaign.
   Configure the following follow-up settings:
   a. Select the trigger for sending the follow-up: No reply or Failed.
   b. Specify when to send the follow-up, from 1 hour to 7 days after the original campaign is completed.
   c. Select the channel type (WhatsApp or SMS).
   d. Select the channel. For WhatsApp, choose the template to use (ensure the selected template is available for the chosen channel).
   e. Enter the SMS message. For WhatsApp, when no template is used, the follow-up message must be within the 24-hour customer service window following the customer's last interaction.

Note the summary notation at the bottom of the screen.

11. Enable Add me as an agent in charge to assign all replies to your inbox automatically. (optional).
12. Click Create Campaign to finalize setup.
    
    
    

Launching the Campaign

Review the campaign’s details, provide an email address for notification when the campaign has been completed, and click Launch.

Once completed, the notification email will be sent to the designated recipient.

Importing Customers

1. To add additional customers to the campaign, click Import Customers in the Audience section.
   

2. In the dialog box, you may download a sample of a table that can be used for this purpose.

Note:
a) All tables must have a column heading for Phone1, and all customer phone numbers must be in international format (including the country code).
b) Additional columns used by your account can be added to the file as long as they match the custom field settings. When uploading the CSV file, you will need to write the titles of additional columns and add the customers’ information under them.
c) We recommend editing the file using Google Sheets.

3. Click Upload file to upload the contacts list and select the appropriate file.

4. Once uploaded, click the Import button in the lower right corner.
   
   Upon successful import, you can save the file as a new audience and name it.

5. The selected file will appear as an Audience ready for use. Click Continue.
   

Campaigns overview and metrics

The Campaign Overview and Metrics page provides a centralized view of all campaigns and their performance. Use this page to monitor key metrics, locate specific campaigns, and manage campaign activity.

Components

Navigate to Campaigns by clicking the megaphone icon at the main side toolbar.

Campaigns are organized into the following tabs based on their status:

• Active – Displays campaigns that are currently running.
• Scheduled – Displays campaigns that are scheduled to run at a future date or time.
• History – Displays completed, stopped, and expired campaigns.

Use the Search field and Filters to quickly locate specific campaigns.

Follow-Up campaigns are displayed directly beneath the original campaign in the campaign list. This allows you to easily track follow-up activity, including retry and fallback campaigns, from the overview page.

Each campaign includes the following information:

Name – The name assigned to the campaign. If no name was specified, the campaign's send date and time are used instead. The corresponding sending channel icon (WhatsApp or SMS) is displayed next to the name.

For Follow-Up campaigns, hover over the campaign to view its trigger condition.

Sent – The number of messages successfully sent out of the total number of recipients in the selected audience. The success rate is displayed in blue as both a percentage and a progress bar.

Replied – The number of recipients who replied to the campaign out of the total number of recipients. The reply rate is displayed in green as both a percentage and a progress bar.

Duration – For Active and Scheduled campaigns, displays the remaining time until the campaign expires. For campaigns in History, it displays the total time the campaign was active (from the first message sent until the expiration time).

Hover over the value to view the exact campaign start and expiration dates.

Audience – Displays the name of the saved audience (if applicable) and the number of recipients it contains. Hover over the value to view the complete audience list.

Channel – The channel through which the campaign was sent.

AI Agent – The AI Agent or chatbot (automation flow) assigned to handle campaign responses.

Status – The current state of the campaign:

• Scheduled – The campaign is scheduled to be sent at a future date and time.
• Sending – The campaign is currently sending messages.
• Complete – All campaign messages have been sent successfully.
• Done – The campaign finished sending, and its expiration time has passed. It is no longer active.
• Paused – Message sending is temporarily paused due to messaging or tier limits. Sending resumes automatically when the limits are reset.
• Stopped – The campaign was manually stopped before or during message delivery.

Exporting Reports

When clicking the 3-dot menu, you can export the information into an Excel file.

Permissions

Admins can limit the agents’ access to the Overview and Metrics page to view only campaigns associated with their teams, enabling each department to focus exclusively on its own campaign activities. This eliminates the need to review irrelevant data and ensures that departments retain full control over their campaign information.

To restrict agents’ access to only the channels they are permitted to view, admins must enable the Campaigns > View Overview and Metrics by channels permissions.