Promotional messaging campaigns are a great way to drive awareness and grow your customer base.

But sending promotional messages can be difficult to get right. In fact, many businesses just don't attempt to run campaigns for the fear of getting it wrong.

That's where MessageDesk comes in. By using our platform it's easy to create, run, and manage your promotional messaging campaigns.

In this article, I'll be going over the "Create and Keep Customers" portion of the above. This is where your marketing campaigns live.

Before we jump in though, you'll want to have familiarity with the following:

To send your first campaign, you'll use the Broadcast section of MessageDesk.

With Broadcasts, you'll be able to text-blast a message to multiple contacts at once without reply-all.

Here are some example messages that might make for a good campaign:

Now that you've created your message, it's time to Broadcast it out to your campaign audience.

By default, you can Broadcast to "All Contacts" - any contact uploaded to MessageDesk.

You can build a group of contacts or add specific contacts to your Broadcast. Check out the article below for more information on how to do so.

Now that your promotion is ready to go - you'll need a list of contacts to send it to. So how exactly do you get this list?

There are a few ways to accomplish this in MessageDesk.

The most common way is to create unique lists/groups is by uploading contacts from a spreadsheet directly into a group. Learn how to do that here

You can also automatically generate leads/lists by using features like Autoresponders or Forms.

With Autoresponders you can set up keyword campaigns that automatically sort contacts into a group based on their reply. Learn how to do that here

With Forms you can set up custom web forms that contacts can fill out. Once filled out, an automated message gets sent and the contact gets added to a list.

You can also create different groups based on the answers to a form question. I.e People who answer Yes vs No can be added to 2 separate marketing lists.

Once you build your list and configure your message you'll probably wonder how you can automate your campaign in MessageDesk.

Well, there's a couple of ways to do this. The most popular way is by creating a "text tree" workflow (see image below)

You can use Autoresponders to set up a multi-step workflow like the one pictured above.

To kick-off this workflow you would just need to schedule a Broadcast, get a form submission, or initial autoresponder submission. The message sent should then tell the contact what keywords/phrases to reply with to take the next step.

At this point, all the following replies will be automated for you.

Now that you're well equipped to create your first text messaging promotion you're ready to get started in MessageDesk.

But if you still want more here's a bunch of other resources so you can grow your texting strategy.