Skip to main content
SMS reaches people on any phone, whether or not they read email. You send it from a sender ID, the name recipients see in place of a phone number. You pay for every message in credits from your wallet. SMS doesn’t need a subscription. The wallet is what pays for it, so a send is blocked when the wallet can’t cover it.

​
How the pieces fit together

A sender ID has to be approved before it can send, and approval happens country by country. The wallet is independent of approval: it only has to cover the send when you send.

​
Setup path

Top up your wallet

Turn SMS on

Get your documents accepted and register a sender ID

Sender IDs

Check where you can send

Countries and number formats

Write a message that fits

Writing SMS content

Send a campaign

Send your first SMS

​
Turn SMS on

There’s no SMS plan to buy, so the channel is open as soon as you have credits.
  1. Go to Billing & Plans > Credits and top up. You can pay by card or bank transfer, or buy a credit pack. Bonus credits from a pack can pay for SMS.
  2. Turn on auto top-up. It refills the wallet when the balance drops below a threshold you set, up to a daily limit. Without it, a campaign that runs out of credits stops partway through.
  3. In Channels > SMS, open the Documents tab and upload your Operating License and Company Registration Document. Approval takes the longest of all the SMS setup steps, so start it now. See Sender IDs.
If the page says SMS has been disabled, the product has been turned off for your organization. You can still see what you set up, but you can’t add to it. Email support@brudcast.com. See Credits and wallet.

​
The SMS page

Go to Channels > SMS. It has three tabs:
  • Setup: the checklist for this channel. “Get your business documents accepted”, “Register an SMS sender ID” and “Get your sender ID approved”.
  • Sender IDs: every sender ID you’ve registered, its status, and the countries it can send to.
  • Documents: your business documents, reviewed once and reused for every sender ID.
The counters at the top show Approved Sender IDs (approved by at least one carrier), Awaiting Approval, and how many Setup steps are done.

​
How SMS differs from email

​
Who a campaign reaches

An SMS campaign reaches only contacts with an SMS identity: a phone number and its country. Contacts without one aren’t reached and aren’t charged. Numbers that replied STOP are skipped. When you build a campaign, Brudcast shows the reach for each channel, so you can see the gap before you send. See Write content for each channel.

​
Countries and number formats

Brudcast sends SMS to countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. To ask about a country that isn’t listed, email support@brudcast.com before you plan a campaign around it. Coverage has two layers, and both have to line up: A sender ID approved only in Ghana can’t send to a Kenyan number, even though Brudcast covers Kenya. That message isn’t sent, and it counts as a bounce in the campaign results. Every number is converted to international E.164 format before it’s sent: a +, the country code, then the subscriber number, with no spaces. Carriers need the international form to deliver a message, and an opt-out is matched against the converted number, so a number left in national form would never match the STOP reply that came from it. A phone number on a contact must be 10 to 20 characters long.
Store numbers in E.164 when you can, and always set the contact’s country. Brudcast uses the country to price the message as well as to read the number.

​
What a send costs

Destination countries are grouped into tiers, and the rate depends on the tier of the recipient’s number, so an audience spread across several countries costs more than the same audience in one cheap tier. The rates in force for your organization are shown when you estimate a campaign. Only contacts with an SMS identity are billed. A contact with an email address and no phone number is skipped and costs nothing. A single emoji switches the whole message to unicode and more than halves your character budget, which is the most common reason a campaign costs twice what someone expected. See Writing SMS content. When a campaign starts, Brudcast holds the credits the estimate calls for. As messages go out, the hold is settled against actual usage, and anything unused is released back to the wallet. That’s why a campaign whose estimate exceeds your balance is blocked before any message is sent, rather than halfway through. See Credits and wallet.

​
Rules and limits

You need consent on record before you text anyone. Opt-out keywords stop messages to people who change their mind, but they don’t replace consent. Each contact holds a consent record. See Add and edit contacts and Opt-out keywords.

Sender IDs

Register one, upload your documents, and get it approved per country.

Writing SMS content

Segments, the 4-segment limit, and the opt-out keywords.

Send your first SMS

Put an approved sender ID into a campaign.

Credits and wallet

How credits are held, spent and topped up.