SMS: Doing a production run

This task pertains to using Unica Campaign to send SMS text messages from IBM Engage.

Before you begin

Be sure to do a test run before doing a production run! See SMS: Doing a test run.

If the flowchart includes multiple channels, do not do a production run of the entire flowchart until you complete test runs for all of the channels (SMS, Push, Email).

About this task

A production run uploads a contact list from Unica Campaign to IBM Engage. If you configured the SMS process to Send SMS to all contacts immediately, the text messages are sent to all contacts in the list. If you did not select that option, SMS texts are not sent, so you must schedule the SMS in IBM Engage.

A production run sends text messages to the audience segments that you selected in the IBM Unica Campaign flowchart.

Procedure

  1. In Unica Campaign, open the flowchart (in Edit mode) that contains the configured SMS process.
  2. Make a final determination as to whether you want to deliver email immediately to all selected contacts: Double-click the SMS process to open the configuration dialog. Select the Content customization tab and make your choice:
    • If you want to deliver the text messages as soon as the flowchart runs in production mode, check Send SMS to all contacts immediately.
    • If you prefer to schedule the send in IBM Engage, clear Send SMS to all contacts immediately. The contact list will be sent to IBM Engage but text messages will not be sent.
  3. Save the flowchart.
  4. Open the Run menu and select one of the Save and run options to do a production run of the selected process, branch, or flowchart. Or use the Unica Marketing Platform Scheduler to schedule the flowchart.

Results

Unica Campaign sends the contact list to IBM Engage. If Send SMS to all contacts immediately was selected, the text messages are sent immediately to all recipients in the contact list.

When the contact list is uploaded to Engage, the values in the Unica Campaign fields are used to update the corresponding fields in the Engage database, based on the Field mappings defined in the SMS process box. For example, if you mapped the FirstName field (in Unica Campaign) to the CustomerFirstName field in IBM Engage, Engage will use the newly updated CustomerFirstName field when populating the SMS template.

Unica Campaign can send Mobile SMS with Watson Unica Campaign Automation (WCA), using the SMS process box. In the 11.0 release Unica Campaign can track the SMS replies to the SMS sent from Unica Campaign using Watson Campaign Automation. SMS Reply messages are captured in a new column MessageBody that is added to the the UA_InteractedSMS table.

Multiple replies will result in multiple entries in the UA_InteractedSMS table, one for each reply. The table column Source is null for these SMS reply records.

For an SMS sent from Unica Campaign, there will be a record present in UA_InteractedSMS table with the Source table column containing the value ‘campaign’.

To send an SMS with WCA, the user must have the Text to Join program available and attached to the SMS templates. The Text to Join program contains a list of Keywords that must be used for WCA receive replies. SMS replies my use only these keywords. SMS replies with any other text or without these keywords are discarded by MGAGE (underlying service provider for WCA).

What to do next

If you checked Send SMS to all contacts immediately in the SMS process box, go to IBM Engage and confirm that the text messages were sent correctly.

If you did not check Send SMS to all contacts immediately, the contact list was updated in IBM Engage but the text messages were not sent. You must use IBM Engage to schedule or send the text messages.