Bulk SMS Campaigns
Reach opted-in contacts via SMS for reminders, promotions, and re-engagement.
What problem does this solve?
SMS has a 98% open rate and most messages are read within 3 minutes of receipt. For time-sensitive communications — payment reminders, appointment confirmations, OTPs — SMS outperforms every other channel. The limitation with most SMS tools is that campaigns run outside the CRM, meaning replies are never logged and campaign history is disconnected from the customer record. HelloGrowthCRM bulk SMS keeps everything linked.
For Indian businesses, DND (Do Not Disturb) compliance is non-negotiable. TRAI regulations impose significant penalties for sending promotional messages to DND-registered numbers. HelloGrowthCRM's bulk SMS automatically scrubs against the DND registry before every send — protecting your business from regulatory risk without requiring manual list management.
In practice, running a campaign takes four steps inside the CRM: pick the audience from a Smart List or saved filter, choose a DLT-approved template, personalise it with merge fields like name or amount due, and schedule the send. From there the CRM does the bookkeeping — delivery status, clicks, and replies land on each contact's record, and failed deliveries are flagged so you can clean bad numbers out of your database instead of paying to message them again next month.
Bulk SMS also works best as one channel in a wider follow-up system rather than a standalone blast tool. A typical small-business pattern: a service reminder goes out by SMS, interested customers reply, the reply creates a task for the owner, and contacts who do not respond roll into an Auto Follow-Up Sequence or a WhatsApp touch a few days later. Because every channel logs to the same timeline, nobody gets double-messaged and nothing silently falls through.
Use this feature when…
- Sending appointment reminders, payment due notices, or delivery confirmations
- Running a flash sale or time-sensitive offer to a specific city or segment
- Re-engaging contacts who haven't opened your last 3 emails
- Sending OTPs or verification codes as part of a customer onboarding flow
Key capabilities
Segment-Based SMS
Target any Smart List or filtered contact group — with automatic exclusion of opted-out contacts.
Dynamic Variables
Personalise messages with {lead_name}, {company}, {amount_due}, or any custom field.
Delivery & Click Analytics
Track delivered, failed, and clicked rates per campaign.
Reply Logging
Inbound SMS replies are logged to the contact timeline — reps can follow up on replies from the CRM.
Scheduled Sends
Schedule campaigns for the time your audience actually reads messages — morning payment reminders, afternoon offers — instead of whenever someone remembers to hit send.
Campaign History on Every Contact
Every SMS a contact has ever received is visible on their record, so reps never repeat an offer to someone who already declined it or message a customer mid-complaint.
How Indian teams use it
Microfinance institution sending EMI reminders
A microfinance institution in Odisha was sending EMI reminders via a separate SMS gateway with no CRM connection. When customers replied with questions, there was no way to link their reply to their loan record. After switching to HelloGrowthCRM bulk SMS, every reply is logged to the customer record. Delinquency rates in the pilot cohort dropped 12% — attributed to faster response to customer queries about payment difficulties.
Coaching institute filling last-minute batch seats
A Jaipur coaching institute had a new batch starting with seats still unfilled. Instead of spending on fresh ads, the counsellor built a Smart List of enquiries from the previous three months who had never enrolled and sent a short SMS about the batch start date. Replies landed on each enquiry's record, counsellors followed up the same afternoon with full context of the earlier conversation, and the remaining seats were filled from leads the institute had already paid to acquire.
How to get started
- 1Register your SMS sender ID with your telecom provider (required for promotional SMS in India).
- 2Connect your SMS gateway to HelloGrowthCRM in Settings → Integrations → SMS.
- 3Enable DND scrubbing — this should be on by default for any Indian business.
- 4Create your first template and get DLT approval (required for promotional SMS under TRAI regulations).
- 5Run a test campaign to a Smart List of 10 internal contacts before the first real send.
- 6After each campaign, review delivery failures and clean invalid numbers from your database so the next send costs less and lands better.
Best suited for these industries
Frequently asked questions
- Is DND (Do Not Disturb) filtering applied to SMS campaigns?
- Yes. HelloGrowthCRM applies TRAI DND registry scrubbing on all bulk SMS sends for Indian numbers to ensure regulatory compliance.
- Can I send bulk SMS to a filtered segment instead of my whole list?
- Yes — that is the recommended way to use it. Any Smart List or saved filter (city, lead stage, lead source, last activity date, custom field value) can be used as a campaign audience. Opted-out and DND-registered contacts are excluded automatically, so you can target precisely without maintaining separate spreadsheets.
- What happens when someone replies to a bulk SMS?
- The reply is logged on the contact's timeline and the record owner is notified, so a campaign reply becomes a live conversation instead of a message lost in a gateway dashboard. You can also use a reply as an automation trigger — for example, creating a follow-up task for the rep the moment a contact responds.
- How is bulk SMS different from bulk WhatsApp in HelloGrowthCRM?
- SMS reaches every mobile phone without requiring the contact to be active on WhatsApp, which makes it reliable for reminders, OTPs, and time-critical notices. WhatsApp supports richer media, documents, and two-way conversation. Most teams use both: SMS for urgent transactional messages and WhatsApp for conversational follow-up, with both channels logged to the same contact record.
- Do I need my own SMS gateway account?
- Yes. You connect your SMS gateway in Settings → Integrations → SMS, and for Indian promotional traffic you also need a registered sender ID and DLT-approved templates as required by TRAI. HelloGrowthCRM handles segmentation, personalisation, sending, and reply logging on top of your gateway.
- Can bulk SMS be triggered automatically instead of manually?
- Yes. Workflow Automation can send SMS based on CRM events — an invoice due date approaching, an appointment coming up tomorrow, or a lead going quiet for 30 days. This turns SMS from an occasional campaign tool into a running part of your follow-up system.