SMS

SMS messaging is a cost-effective and efficient player engagement tool. Use SMS marketing to inform subscribed players about offers, new game releases, odds & more, directly to their mobile devices.

📲 SMS Message

We are increasingly dependant on our mobile phones for almost everything, including entertainment. As a result, the online gaming industry is flourishing as people choose to use their devices for gambling, betting, and lotteries.
SMS marketing is an increasingly popular marketing tool as SMS messages remain to be one of the most common forms of communication across the globe, with a much higher response rate than that of emails. They are triggered by any number of potential real-time events and are relevant at every stage of your customers' life stage.

⚙️ Setting Up

Using an SMS in your Activity or Lifecycle is quite straightforward. Here we will walk you through the steps and take a look at what each field in the action builder corresponds to. Please note that depending on your integration, your action builder may appear a little different.
Firstly, add an Action Group to your Activity or Lifecycle and select Add New Action. Select Send SMS from the list of Action Types.
Setting up an SMS Action
Setting up an SMS Action
Under the Action Data heading, you will find some pre-existing fields that require information or data.
Let's run through each required field:
  1. Text Message Content. Add the text content that you wish to send to your players.
  2. Send regardless of communication opt-in status. Tick this box if you wish to send your message to all players, irrespective of their marketing preferences. Please note this will override opt-out consents for SMS set by the player.
  3. Remove Stop Text. Select this if you wish to remove the Stop Text from the SMS.
SMS action data
SMS action data
Once you’ve set up your SMS message and it’s ready to go, you can test the Action Group using the Activity testing functionality, before you send it to your players. This can be done both at the development stage as well as during the QA stage.
SMS preview
SMS preview

​🛑‍ Stop Text

Due to regulations, you are often obliged to offer your players the option to unsubscribe from your SMS communications. As well, more information may be a requirement to be included in every SMS sendout.
To help you tackle this generic must-have text and make sure that it's included in every SMS send-out. we give you the option to set up a stop text, which would be a default ending text for every SMS you send.
Depending on the SMS provider integrated with FT CRM, the stop text set-up may look a little different. Most commonly, you simply provide Fast Track with the default text that you wish to use for the SMS messages, and we set that up for you. By default, this stop text will then be applied to every SMS you send. However, you can simply choose from inside the SMS action, during set-up, the option to exclude the stop text from that specific send-out.

📱 SMS Character Limit

The character limit for a single SMS message is 160 characters, more specifically letters and symbols that are a part of the GSM-7 default alphabet.
If you send a longer SMS message, with over 160 characters, the message will be split into two or more messages. Large messages are divided into 153 character segments and sent individually.
Example: A 161 character message will be sent as two messages, one with 153 characters and the second with 8 characters.
In the SMS Action builder, we have a counter functionality to help to minimise costs. You can find a character count and a confirmation of how many SMS's will be sent. In the below example, the SMS length is 207 characters and it will be sent in 2 SMS messages.
SMS character limit
SMS character limit

# - Variables

#-Variables pull information from the database. Using these types of variables in your SMS may increase the size or length of the final SMS character count due to the fact that you're pulling data with an unknown character length.
Example:
Using #Firstname# variable:
The SMS will pull data and grab the first name of the player receiving the message, replacing the variable with the name. Player A's first name is John = 4 characters Player B's first name is Samantha = 8 characters Please note that the #-Variables are counted as normal, meaning, #Firstname# would count as 11 characters in the counter, but would then be replaced with the number of characters that make up the players first name.

🈸 Non-Standard Characters

Using non-standard characters inside an SMS, such as a Japanese script, will reduce the number of available characters per message to 70.
Example: Inserting a non-standard character, such as±, will automatically reduce the size of the SMS message to 70 characters in length.
When using non-standard characters inside an SMS Action, you have the option to highlight the non-standard characters. This gives you and your team improved visibility of characters that could increase the number of characters and therefore your SMS costs.
Highlight non-standard characters in an SMS
Highlight non-standard characters in an SMS
It is possible to remove the highlight and your preference will be cached for the next time you set up an SMS.

🌐 Translations

As with all action types, you can add translations of your SMS message to target different Communication Profiles. Adding translations allows you to send translated content and/or market-specific content and offers from the same Activity.
You can read more about how to implement translations by reading our section about Communication Profiles here.

How To Get Started

FT CRM is integrated with multiple SMS providers. To read more about how to get started, check out our integration guide.
Custom Integration? Maybe you have some other, more unique, requirements and could benefit from a custom integration. Reach out to your Integration Manager to find out more.