SMS campaign planning
Plan SMS campaigns that land
Build a text-campaign blueprint per client — write the message against a live character and segment counter, set the audience, plan for opt-in, preview it in a real phone, then submit it as a brief. Sign in to open your workspace, or see how it works.
SMS campaign planning
A text message lands in a pocket within seconds, which is exactly why an SMS campaign deserves to be planned rather than fired off. Every character costs money, every send needs the right audience, and the wrong tone or a missed opt-in rule turns a high-intent channel into a complaint. SMS Planning in AI Marketing Dashboard makes the planning step deliberate and quick: a text-campaign blueprint per client where you choose the theme, name the campaign, write the message against a live counter, set who receives it, and preview it in a real phone before it ever goes out. It is the leanest planner in the console because SMS is the leanest channel — and getting a short message exactly right is the whole job.
An SMS campaign should never start as a stray line in a chat thread, so the builder opens on the few decisions that actually shape a text send. You choose the marketing theme the campaign belongs to, give it a name your team will recognize on the board, and set the audience it speaks to — all in a short, ordered flow rather than a blank message box. The plan that comes out is a tidy blueprint scoped to one client, not a one-off draft that lives in someone's phone.
Keeping each text campaign tied to a single client means your roster of SMS plans stays organized by account and by angle, so a promo blast for one client and a reminder sequence for another follow the same predictable shape. Anyone on the team can open a blueprint and immediately see who it is for, what it is about and where it sits, which is what turns a quick text send into reviewable, repeatable agency work.
SMS is priced and delivered in 160-character segments, so the composer shows a live character and segment count as you type — a message that quietly tips from one segment into two doubles the cost of the whole campaign, and the counter makes that visible while you can still trim a word. You see exactly how the carrier will split the text, so length is a deliberate choice instead of a billing surprise after the send.
When the campaign should reuse copy the team already wrote, you can pull a saved message straight from the client's marketing library rather than rewriting it from scratch, or generate a starting draft to react to. Either way the message ends up on-brand and within budget before it leaves the planner — the counter keeps the wording tight, and the library keeps it consistent with the rest of the client's voice.
A text reaches people instantly and personally, which makes the audience the most important decision in the plan. The builder captures who the campaign is for — the subscriber segment the message should go to — as part of the blueprint, so a VIP offer reaches the right list and a broad announcement is scoped on purpose rather than blasted at everyone by default.
Settling the audience while you plan, alongside the message and the preview, means a reviewer sees who will be texted before anything goes out. The recipient list lives with the plan, so when the campaign is handed to whoever sends it there is no guesswork about which segment it targets — the audience was agreed when the campaign was designed, not improvised at send time.
SMS is a permission channel, and the plan treats it that way. You design the message knowing it will only reach subscribers who opted in, so the wording and the audience are chosen for people who asked to hear from the brand rather than a cold list. Planning the send responsibly is part of building the blueprint, not an afterthought once the text is already drafted.
The wider registration work that legitimate text marketing requires — A2P 10DLC company and brand registration — is handled in the console's per-client data settings, so the campaign you plan here sits on top of a properly registered sending setup. That separation keeps the planner focused on the message and audience while the compliance groundwork lives where it belongs, and it means the SMS you plan can go out the right way.
A short message reads differently in a composer than it does on a phone, so the builder renders the campaign in an iMessage-style bubble — the real wrapping, the real line breaks, the real way the text lands on a screen. Stakeholders see the actual message a subscriber will receive instead of a row in a spreadsheet, which makes an approval decision immediate and obvious.
Because the preview reflects the plan, tightening a sentence or swapping a word updates the bubble as you edit, so an awkward break or a sentence that runs too long is caught at planning time when it is trivial to fix. What you approve in the preview is what arrives in the subscriber's thread — the planner closes the gap between the draft and the delivered text.
A text send commits things a display ad never does: how many segments each message bills at, which opt-in list receives it, and the window it is allowed to land in. So the closing step turns the blueprint into a brief that carries them — the named audience and its recipient count, the message with its character and segment count, the teammates who will run the send, and a description where the send window, a quiet-hours constraint or anything else the client insisted on is written down.
Ask for sign-off and the brief opens as a review task in the In Review column of Projects, addressed to the reviewer you picked; skip it and the campaign lands in To Do for the assignees. Either way the text that was counted, previewed and matched to an opt-in segment is the text attached to that task, so nobody retypes a message on the way to the send — which is exactly where a broken link or a phrase that trips carrier filtering tends to appear.
