Preparing your contacts database for SMS – Ometria Help Centre

This page explains how to prepare your contacts database in order to begin sending SMS automation campaigns.

Before you begin

Collecting your contacts’ phone numbers

You can filter and export your contacts’ phone numbers in the Contacts tab of the Segment explorer.

Phone number collection methods:

Importer:
- If you are a Shopify user your contacts phone numbers are automatically passed to Ometria. This is not available for Magento users.
Via our Data API
Via CSV upload
Via the Ometria preference centre
Via HTML forms

You can build capabilities to collect your contacts’ phone numbers via Ometria forms, however it is very important that you include a strong validation method.

Note: You must ensure that your contact’s phone numbers that are entered in Ometria are passed in international format.

For more context on how Ometria validates phone numbers, see Google's GitHub library for parsing, formatting, and validating international phone numbers.

Collecting your contacts’ SMS marketing preferences

You can update your contacts’ SMS marketing preferences via CSV upload or our Contact API.

Ometria’s ecommerce data importers (e.g. Shopify, Magento) do not collect SMS marketing preferences.

Ometria subscription forms

You can request checkboxes to be added to your Ometria subscription form giving your contacts the choice to opt-in for SMS and email communications separately:

Screenshot_2021-07-15_at_09.56.03.png

To include these new checkboxes in your forms, raise a Support request.

Make sure that you use clear language for your checkboxes so that your contacts understand what they are agreeing to, e.g.:

Tick this box if you want to receive marketing messages via email
Tick this box if you want to receive marketing messages via SMS

Note: If you don’t have these checkbox options then your contacts are opted-in for email and SMS if they have provided a phone number in the correct format.

Updating your preference centre

Get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to talk about updating your preferences centre and unsubscribe page to include SMS opt-in.

Updating your contacts’ numbers and preferences via CSV

When you upload your contacts’ phone numbers and SMS marketing preferences as a CSV file, you must include the following headers:

Header	Example	Description
email	jane@fashion.com	Mandatory field for all CSV uploads.
phone_number	+447123456789	Use the international format. See further information on uploading phone numbers.
channel_sms_allow_marketing	TRUE FALSE	Whether or not a contact is opted into receiving SMS marketing.
channel_sms_dt_updated_marketing	YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss	Similar to the 'timestamp_subscribed' field, but for SMS marketing opt-ins. The date should be either: YYYY-MM-DD or; The exact date time in ISO 8601 format. If Ometria only receives the 'channel_sms_allow_marketing' preference for a contact and not the timestamp, the timestamp is set to now (i.e. the time of upload). If the contact already has an SMS preference set and changes it (i.e. unsubscribes from SMS marketing) the timestamp and preference are overwritten. If the contact already has an SMS preference set and does not change it, the timestamp is only updated if it is an earlier date than the one currently stored.

Be aware:

You can’t upload a duplicate phone number, i.e. a phone number which matches a number that already exists in your database. If you upload a contact with a phone number which already exists in your account (e.g. for someone else), all of that contact’s information will be uploaded (email, name, etc.) except for the phone number - this field will be left blank.

See: CSV contact upload: Uploading and merging phone numbers

We recommend that you uncheck the merge mode option ‘Only overwrite fields where a non-empty cell is provided’.

Next steps

Now your contact base is ready to receive SMS marketing, you can create a Twilio connection in Ometria.