With a very high open rate, SMS has become a highly powerful channel for actively engaging and connecting with your customers, right where they are. Quickly create and send SMS messages and use the rich customer and event data you have in Intercom for powerful SMS targeting, orchestration, message personalization, optimizations, robust reporting, and more.

First, go to Outbound from the main menu and click + New message in the top right corner.

Then select SMS as the content type to choose from a range of SMS templates or start from scratch.

Use the simple SMS editor to type your message:

SMS messages can be sent in multiple segments depending on their length. These segments are then stitched back together to be viewed as a single message on the customer’s phone.

Below the SMS editor you can see how many segments your message will be and you’ll be shown the number of segments again before you set your message live.

As messages will be coming from a local number, such as '+4477777111222' if it’s for a UK activated country, it’s best practice to identify in the message who it’s coming from. By default, your workspace name will be appended to the start of the message.

Teammates can turn this off if they want to insert their company name elsewhere in the message.

You’ll also need permission from your customers to contact them by SMS. For any marketing related message, it’s legally required to include opt-out instructions inside your message.

Now you can send your SMS. Use date or event based rules to trigger the message automatically, and choose your target audience.

For example, if we wanted to send an SMS to any customer who has started the checkout process but didn’t complete it, and give them an introductory discount, we could use an event rule to trigger the message based on “Checkout start” and then target an audience of Users where “Checkout-start last occurred exactly 2 days ago” and “checkout completed count is 0”.

Outbound message audiences are automatically filtered to only include customers who have phone numbers in countries that you have activated. For example, if you only have US activated, then any non +1 numbers that do not originate from the US will be filtered out.

Even with automation and message triggers, it’s best practice to send non-urgent messages (such as generic marketing or promotional messages) to customers during their waking hours. Always consider your customer’s experience and whether a message could potentially interrupt their sleep.

Quiet Hours will be turned on by default in your message Frequency and scheduling. When enabled, it pauses an SMS from being sent to a customer during quiet hours in their local timezone, and sends it only during their waking hours.

SMS is also available in Series as a message block type. Create powerful campaigns which contain multiple sequential SMS messages, or combine SMS with other content types such as in-app messages to reach customers even when they’re offline.

After a customer sends their first message, you can trigger a Custom Bot to deflect, triage and route inbound SMS conversations more efficiently.