SMS for Sequences

With the ability to reach customers quickly and conveniently, text messaging is an effective way to start conversations, nurture leads, and turn those conversations into sales. By leveraging the power of text messaging, B2B sales reps can make meaningful connections with potential customers and drive more successful sales results.

Formatting Phone Numbers for E.164

For both SMS (via Twilio) or Voicemail drops, your recipient's mobile phone number must be in an E.164 format. The E.164 format consists of +[country code][area code][phone number]. You can import your mobile numbers in this format and execute SMS outreach or Voicemail drops without any modification.

1. Using the [country] custom data field property in your Contact database for each contact record, you can include the country name or country code (i.e. United States or US, France or FR, etc). When there is a valid country in this data field property, Leadfwd will append the appropriate prefix (+ and country code) to the phone number value as it is called upon for Twilio or Voicemail drops. You will still need to have the mobile phone number saved with the local area code and number.
2. If you have a value saved in the [country] field and your contact's mobile phone number already includes the country code, we'll recognize the presence of the country code and we will not append the country code to the phone number again.
3. If no + prefix exists in your mobile phone number entry, we'll always add it automatically. 

Add Text Message outreach to a Sequence

• Click Add Step
• Select Send SMS (this option will only appear once the Twilio Connector is enabled)
• Select a sending phone number (Available SMS-enabled Twilio phone numbers will display)
  • If an SMS-enabled phone number is missing from the list, check the permissions for the user that created the Sequence and ensure they have access to the missing phone number in their user permissions (Settings / Team / Manage user)
• Select the data field property that contains a contacts mobile phone number
  • The recipient/contact phone number should be in an E.164 format, which includes the country code, area code and phone number. 
• Define your message body. You can utilize personalization from data field properties contained in your Contact database. These will personalization tokens will be automatically filled for each recipient.
• For compliance you must also include instructions for how a contact can opt-out of future messaging. It can be as simple as: If you would prefer we stick to email instead of text, just reply 'stop.'

Configure your Sequence to End when a contact replies to an SMS

Much like an email response can end a Sequence, so too can a response via text message. Individual Sequences can be set up to automatically end a Sequence for a contact on-reply via SMS and this is managed through the Sequence configuration options: