Overview
Maximize engagement and boost bookings with Boulevard’s text marketing. Blast campaigns allow you to send a custom, personalizable message to an audience segment of your choosing. Use the campaign builder in your Marketing tab to get started.
A dedicated phone number is required to enable Text Blasts. Clients can reply to Text Blasts, creating a deeply personalized and elevated client communication experience.
Create a Text Blast
In your Marketing tab > Blast campaigns, Select Create Campaign > Text.
Choose your Text Blast audience
Select the audience you’d like to send your Text Blast to.
Here, you can exclude a particular audience if you’d like, and can also exclude clients who’ve recently received text marketing.
As a guideline, we recommend that a client shouldn’t receive more than one Text Blast from your business per week.
To learn how to create an audience, check out Clients & Audiences.
Customize your Text Blast content
Customize your Text Blast with verbiage and imagery that suits your brand, and the promotion or announcement you’re sending.
To attach an image or GIF, click the picture icon at the bottom of the text input box. This will allow you to upload MMS (media files) to your Text Blast. For more guidance on using images and GIFs in Text Blasts, review Images & GIFs in Text Blasts: Setup & Best Practices.
Add text to the “write your message” input field.
If you have not attached an image, your Text Blast is considered an SMS (plain text) message, and you will have a limit of 480 total characters. An SMS of 160 characters uses 1 text segment. (480 characters would use 3 text segments).
If you have attached an image, your Text Blast becomes an MMS (multimedia message), and your character limit increases to 1600 characters plus your media file. One MMS uses 3 text segments.
Click the tag icon to use merge tags (like “client first name”) for personalization. Available merge tags include: business name, client first name, location phone number, location email
Toggle on “Include link to book appointment” to provide clients with a quick way to access your online booking overlay. This is the link that is tracked in the “Clicked” metric of your campaign reporting, and is a great practice to help keep bookings flowing. NOTE: custom / external links are not trackable in campaign metrics at this time.
The live preview will update in real time as you make changes. You’ll notice the opt-out language is not editable or removable – including this is a legal requirement for any business sending Text Marketing from their business line.
NOTE: If a recipient texts NO PROMOs in response, they will be opted out from text marketing communications only. This does not impact two-way texting or appointment notification texts. If a recipient replies “STOP”, they will be opted out of all text communications from your dedicated phone number.
Review & Send your Text Blast
Here, you can name your campaign, review campaign details prior to sending – such as audience, estimated recipient count, dedicated phone number from which the campaign will be sent, and estimated text segments for the Text Blast.
Click “Send test” to send a test message. Enter the number you wish to send to and select send. A test text will be sent from the business phone number to the number entered. Test messages do count toward text usage.
Click “Send”, and choose whether you’d like to send your campaign immediately, or schedule it for the future.
Click “Send now” now to send immediately.
Or, click “Schedule” to send at a future date and time. If you are scheduling a Text Blast, you can select any date and time between 8 am local time and 7pm local time. Click Save & Schedule to complete.
NOTE: Quiet hour laws restrict text messages from being sent between 7 pm - 8 am. For larger audiences, completion of send can take up to 30 minutes.
Blast campaigns dashboard & reporting
Once your campaign has been sent or scheduled, it will appear in your Blast campaigns dashboard. Here, you can reference all campaigns that have been drafted or sent.
See campaign status (draft, completed, or scheduled), send date, and core metrics like Sent, Clicked, and Unsubscribed.
Click the three-dot menu to edit, duplicate, rename, or delete a campaign.
To review performance metrics for a particular Text Blast, click into a completed campaign from the list, and a report card will show:
Sent - the count of text messages sent to recipients in the campaign.
Clicked - the count of distinct individuals clicking the booking link in a text campaign, measuring recipient engagement. For example, 1000 messages sent, 500 clicks, but only 300 unique recipients clicked.
Note: At this time, clicks on any custom links are not tracked – this metric solely displays engagement with the booking link, if one was included in your message.
Unsubscribed - the count of recipients who opted out of receiving further text messages following the campaign.
Failed - the count of text messages that failed to reach recipients, often due to invalid numbers or network issues.
View Text Usage
Access your text usage modal by clicking the underlined “Text usage” hyperlink in any individual Text Blast report, or from the Messages or Client Notifications tabs. Select your desired data range to view a summary of sent and received text segments for that time period.
For more on text usage and pricing, reference Text Usage Rates.
Client replies
Seeing as text marketing campaigns are sent from your dedicated phone number, clients can reply to your text blasts. Client replies will appear in the Messages tab inbox, as part of each client’s individual text thread.
Text marketing consent
Your eligible text marketing audience is dependent on a client’s marketing opt in status. You can only send text marketing campaigns to clients who have explicitly opted in to receive texts from your business. This opt in is captured at time of client’s booking, through the online self-booking overlay.
It’s mandatory to include opt-out language in every text campaign sent from your business. If a client replies “NO PROMOS” to any text from your dedicated number, they will no longer be eligible to receive text marketing campaigns from you. If a client replies “STOP” or “UNSUBSCRIBE” to any text from your dedicated number, they will no longer be eligible to receive any text communications, including appointment confirmations and reminders.
Note: If a client has previously unsubscribed, the opt-in text will no longer show in the booking overlay. They can opt back in through the client portal profile, communications preferences.
Pricing
Check out Text Marketing and Usage Rates for more details on pricing.