Learn more about SMS Campaign statuses and possible reasons for campaign delays.
Intro
To understand the SMS campaign statuses first, it is good to learn how the SMS messages are being sent to your subscribers in practice, as they go through a handful of companies before reaching the customer. Find a simplified explanation below about these steps.
Once you activate a message within Recart, it is sent to an aggregator. Aggregators are companies who send out SMS messages at mass, like billions of messages. In case of toll-free numbers - what Recart is using to send SMS messages - the aggregator will send the message to an exclusive aggregator. Aggregators can't send the messages directly to the carriers - because they don't know which numbers are operated by which carrier. That's when a registrar company comes in. Registrars will be able to channel the message to the right Carrier. Carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile will use spam filters to determine if the message is aligned with the spam rules and local laws. The spam filter is the last step before the message gets delivered to the subscriber. Please note that all of this usually happens in 1-2 seconds!
Campaign statuses
Next to each SMS One-off flow, aka Campaign, a status will be displayed. We can display four different statuses based on the actual state of the given message.
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Draft: The campaign has been saved but has not yet been activated. You can still edit the message at this status.
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Scheduled: The campaign has been scheduled and we will try to send it out on the given date and at the given time. Date and time are based on the store's timezone.
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Sending: We are going through the subscribers, checking if we can send them messages or not. This means we schedule the ones that are in Quiet Hours and discard the ones that are affected by Smart Sending. ( Learn more about Quiet hours and Smart sending here.) If none of these apply and we can send a message to the subscriber, then we are queueing the message to be sent to our aggregator that proceeds with the delivery.
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Sent: All messages that were suitable for sending have been queued and forwarded to our aggregator, furthermore our aggregator has sent out 80% of the messages. Sent status does not necessarily mean that all messages are delivered.
Draft: The campaign has been saved but has not yet been activated. You can still edit the message at this status.
Scheduled: The campaign has been scheduled and we will try to send it out on the given date and at the given time. Date and time are based on the store's timezone.
Sending: We are going through the subscribers, checking if we can send them messages or not. This means we schedule the ones that are in Quiet Hours and discard the ones that are affected by Smart Sending. ( Learn more about Quiet hours and Smart sending here.) If none of these apply and we can send a message to the subscriber, then we are queueing the message to be sent to our aggregator that proceeds with the delivery.
Sent: All messages that were suitable for sending have been queued and forwarded to our aggregator, furthermore our aggregator has sent out 80% of the messages. Sent status does not necessarily mean that all messages are delivered.
Delays in message delivery
You may see Sent status next to your campaign, but you have not received the message yet even though your number is on the subscribers list and was targeted.
Based on our metrics, on average we send the message to the aggregator within 0.5s. Once this happens we no longer have any effect on the timing of the delivery.
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One reason for the delay can be heavy network traffic on the carrier’s end.
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Another reason for the delay can be an issue on the aggregator’s end. You can check our aggregator’s status page to be up to date about delays.
One reason for the delay can be heavy network traffic on the carrier’s end.
Another reason for the delay can be an issue on the aggregator’s end. You can check our aggregator’s status page to be up to date about delays.
In case the message status is Sent but it never gets delivered, it most probably got filtered by spam filters. In order to avoid increasing spam rates, please check how to be compliant in the SMS compliance article.
In case you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the Customer Support team, we are happy to help. 😊