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Mass Communication - Texting (SMS) & Email

Send a mass text or email message to your clients directly within Shepherd.

Updated over 3 weeks ago

Use Shepherd’s mass communication feature to send a text message or email to all clients or a specific segment. This is helpful for:

  • Unexpected closures

  • Adjustments to hours

  • Monthly promotions or educational messages

You can create and send messages directly from the Message Center in just a few steps.

Create a New Message

  1. Navigate to Message Center -> Mass Communication

  2. Click +New Mass SMS/Email

  3. Select whether you want to create an SMS or Email Template and click Choose

  4. Enter a Template Name and click Done

All outbound SMS messages use message credits. These credits are sold in bundles of 5,000 units for $99. To review your current credit usage or purchase additional SMS credits visit your Message Overview dashboard (in your Admin settings).

Content

For SMS, you can:

  • Type your message directly

  • Or select from existing SMS templates in your account

  • When you're done, click Next Step to continue

Messages over 160 characters use extra message credits. You can include up to 320 characters per outbound message, but 2 message credits will be utilized in the sending. Special characters may reduce character limits further.

For Email, you’ll:

  • Enter a Subject

  • Write the Body of the email

  • When you're done, click Next Step to continue.

Audience

Within the audience tab, you will be able to manually select clients or apply one or more filters to select a specific group of clients and patients. Once you have the appropriate clients selected, you will select "Next Step".

Review & Send

Once the message is complete and the audience is selected, you will be able to either send the message immediately or schedule a date and time for it to be sent.

From this section, you can also see the number of clients the message is being sent to under the total number of recipients.

Once a message has been sent, you will be able to select the recipient list for reference of which clients specifically received the message.

Opt-out and Opt-in of Texting

By industry standards, if a client replies to text messages with any of the following keywords, it will automatically opt clients out of SMS.

  • STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, END, CANCEL, QUIT, STOPALL, ARRETT, ARRET, and ARRETE

Clients must resubscribe to receive text messages by replying with the following keywords.

  • START, YES, and UNSTOP


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