What are SMS campaigns?
In Klaviyo, SMS campaigns are one-time sends to a selected audience by method of text message.
Sending SMS campaigns is crucial for building relationships with your subscribers. You can use SMS campaigns to notify your subscribers of urgent updates, sales and events, product launches, and more.
You can choose to send campaigns immediately, or schedule them to deliver at a later date.
Campaigns vs. flows
It’s important to distinguish SMS campaigns from SMS flows in Klaviyo. Campaigns and flows are both features that allow you to deliver text messages to your recipients, but with some key differences.
Campaigns
Campaigns are one-time sends that you send to a specific list or targeted segment.
Campaigns are created and scheduled manually, and can be sent either immediately or at a specified date and time in the future.
Some examples of common SMS campaigns include a sale announcement, a product launch, or an exclusive discount.
Flows
Flows, or automations, are set up in advance to send personalized messages triggered by a customer's actions.
Once set, customers move through the flow based on the criteria you set.
Some examples of common SMS flow messages include a welcome message when someone subscribes to your SMS marketing list, or an abandoned cart message when someone places an item in their cart but doesn’t complete a checkout.
Differentiate SMS and MMS messages
In addition to sending SMS messages in Klaviyo, you can also send MMS messages.
MMS stands for multimedia messages, and are texts that contain an image, GIF, or video. For example, if you are sending a text messages to subscribers about a new product launch, you can include an image of the new product to catch subscribers’ attention and encourage them to convert. Sending an MMS message also provides you with a higher character count for your message; the character count for SMS is 160, while the character count for MMS is 1600.
However, there are a few important callouts about the limitations of sending MMS messages:
- MMS is not available in every region. You can only send MMS to recipients in the US, Canada, and Australia. For some additional region-specific limitations, check out this help article: MMS throughput in the US, Canada, and Australia.
- Sending an MMS message costs more credits to send.
- For accounts in Klaviyo, we’ve seen that plain-text SMS often either performs similarly or better than MMS messages.
You should perform A/B tests to understand which types of messages resonate best with your audiences.