Managing Mobile Audience within MobileConnect

When it comes to executing SMS Campaigns from Marketing Cloud, you can either make use of Journeys or send out SMS’s to a Mobile Audience from with MobileConnect. Today, I am going to talk about how you can add audience/contacts to the MobileConnect Studio, so that you can send them Text messages from Marketing Cloud.
MobileConnect lets you add mobile audience either manually (i.e. one by one) or via an Import File. In the Marketing Cloud June 2018 Release, Salesforce has released the capability to Send messages to a Data Extension (this was earlier limited to Lists only)

Preparing the Mobile Audience List

When preparing your Mobile Contact List, you need to have the following fields in your file:

1. Mobile Number (of course!)
2. The 2-letter Country Code (will explain this in a bit)
3. A Unique Contact Key (which is this case will most likely be the Mobile number)

These are the bare-bones of your Mobile Audience list and are also a must-have. You can also add other columns like First Name, Last Name etc., depending upon how personalized you want your message to be.

Adding Contacts manually to the MobileConnect Studio

You can add Contacts one-by-one in the MobileConnect Studio by clicking on Add Contacts à Add Manually and clicking on the “Add Address” button

Importing Contacts to the MobileConnect Studio

You may also import Contacts by selecting the Add Contacts à Import File option. Do take note that your file should not exceed 20MB and should be in CSV format. Also ensure that you have the “Locale Code” as one of the columns, as it is a mandatory value for your target List or Data Extension (besides the Mobile Number field of course!). Locale Code helps Marketing Cloud determine where the message needs to be delivered, hence it is important not to skip this value in your import file. As part of the Import file upload, you will also be asked to certify that all Contacts within your import file have opted-in to receive text messages from you, so you need to check the “I agree” checkbox to proceed

As part of the wizard, you will also be asked to choose the Short/Long Code and related Keyword that you want to use to send out your text message, followed by defining the mapping between the CSV columns and the target List where you are importing the data. Once done, you can finally review & import your Mobile Contacts into the target CSV file. Do note that for imported Contacts, since you have consented that they have opted in for text messages and you have also assigned them a keyword, their Subscription gets created automatically.

Creating Mobile Subscriber Lists and List Attributes

MobileConnect studio lets you create your Mobile Subscriber Lists and their underlying attributes, depending upon the data that you would like to capture for your mobile audience. You can access this menu by clicking on Manage –> Contacts option

Creating Mobile List Attributes

You can create new Mobile List Attributes by clicking the “Create Attribute” button. You can select the data type (Text, Date & Numeric) and can specify whether the attribute should be Required or Read Only, along with a default value, if any

All your Mobile Lists are available under the List Tab, where you also have the option to create a new List, by specifying the List type (Standard, Filtered, Standard Suppression and Filtered Suppression List)

That’s all I had on the Mobile Contact management topic. My next chapter will cover specifics on how to create Mobile messages, whether you want to trigger them from within the MobileStudio or if you want to use them in a Journey. So, watch this space for more!