Overview
Text blasts help you boost bookings and maximize engagement, reaching clients instantly and directly. Build and send a custom text blast in minutes, engaging clients with promotions, announcements, and special offers. Include images & GIFs for extra glam, track results in your dashboard, and continue the conversation with two-way texting in Messages. View text blast pricing.
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.
Privileges
To access the Marketing tab, users must have at least one Marketing Privilege enabled.
Navigate to Manage Business settings > Privilege groups, then enable privileges in the Marketing section.
Create a Text Blast
In your Marketing tab > Blast campaigns, Select Create Campaign > Text.
Choose your Text Blast audience
Select the audience for your Text Blast.
You can exclude specific groups or clients who recently received text marketing. As a best practice, we recommend limiting Text Blasts to once per week per client. 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.
Text blast reporting
Once your text blast has been sent, you can review your results and campaign performance in the Blast campaigns dashboard.
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.
Images & GIFs in Text Blasts: Best Practices
You can include one image or GIF per text blast message.
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.
Supported media types
Boulevard supports the following media types in text blasts:
JPG, JPEG
PNG
GIF
PNG vs. JPEG
Both PNG and JPEGs have their own advantages and disadvantages. We recommend to use PNG when possible. If you have a larger-sized image that you need to make smaller, use a JPEG.
PNGs
Are never blurry or distorted.
Keep all data in the image, so always appear the same no matter how many times it’s edited.
Can have transparent backgrounds (although this is not recommended for MMS images).
JPEGs
Can be resized easily.
Lose data every time the image is made smaller, so can become blurry.
File size limit
All images and GIFs must be under 700KB to ensure clients see the image or GIF the way you want it to appear in the highest quality possible. If a message has an image or GIF exceeding this file size, the message may not be delivered.
To compress files, you may use photoshop or other editing tools. There are also third-party sites such as https://ezgif.com/optimize that allow you to compress files. Note: Boulevard is not affiliated with ezgif or any third-party compression tools and use of these sites is at your own discretion.
Tips for file size and image ratios
Images and GIFs should not be overly wide or tall, as phones adjust media to fit the width of the text message. A ratio exceeding 9:16 (or 16:9) can appear distorted. Portrait sized media typically looks best on most devices, followed by square, as they’re unlikely to get cropped. Generally, the following ratios and sizes should work well:
| Ratio | Example Sizes |
Square | 1:1 | 480 x 480, 600 x 600, etc. |
Portrait | 9:16 | 480 x 640, 1080 x 1930 px |
Landscape | 16:9 | 500 x 375, 1920 x 1080 |