How to send a FireText text message (SMS) from a Customer Journey D365Marketing

Hi guys,

Recently I have been looking into different options to send a text messages (SMS) as part of a customer journey. Tonight, I gave FireText a go and it was amazingly easy.

What you need

1. A verified account with FireText. https://app.firetext.co.uk/
2. Flow that uses the FireText OOOTB Connector
3. Custom Tile that calls the Flow
4. Basic customer journey with the custom tile

First things first (FireText Account)

The first thing I did was to register and get an account with FireText. https://app.firetext.co.uk/

When you do that you get a credit of 10 text messages for free. I won’t go over the registration process, because we all know how to sign up for an account. The only thing worth mentioning is you will have to wait for a few hours for a real person from FireText to get in touch and speak to you via email before they activate your account. For me, the whole end-to-end process took approx. 12 hours.

Once your account is all set up, it will look like this

To use it as part of your customer journey, you will need to generate an API key.

Click on Settings > API > Flick the switch on Generate (I have already done it, that’s why it’s saying regenerate) > Update details > The page refreshes and gives you a number you want to keep a note of. And that’s you done with the FireText side of things.

Flow that uses the FireText OOOTB Connector

Go to your Flow portal (for me its https://emea.flow.microsoft.com/) and create a new very simple flow as per the screenshot below. All it does is, it triggers on creation of an OOTB record called Custom Channel Activity in our Marketing environment. Once it fires, it will send a text message to the contact.

To get your FireText Node to look like below, you need to give your FireText Connection a name (could be anything) and paste the API key you copied earlier.

Custom Tile and a customer journey

We have already covered how to make a custom tile in the blog here -  have a look in case you have missed it.

The Microsoft documentation is pretty good too.  

And now let’s test

Running the simple customer journey below, produces a text message as expected.

Voilà

Cost indication

Just to give you an idea of what the cost might look like after you run out of your 10 free text messages, it might be something like this. They do have different numbers of credits available too.

Emojis

You can also add emoji-s to your texts. It is an on-off switch controlled at your FireText account level. You need to ask nicely your account manager to enable it for you and they can do it very quickly. They are also adding the switch to the account controls in 2020, so we should be able to control it ourselves soon.

 Our take on it

It is very nice, easy and simple to use. I used my UK number (+44) to test with and tested while I was travelling abroad, and it still worked. Brownie points, for international coverage, FireText! 

Any questions, do let me know - Twitter, LinkedIn.