Author: Akase Ebirigor

Ozioma SMS Newsletters enables users to put phone numbers into groups like customers, members, friends, family, colleagues etc for easy access as well as support uploading contact list directly from your phone.

Types of SMS Newsletter in Ozioma

There are 2 types of SMS Newsletters in ozioma which are.

How to create a Free SMS Newsletter

STEP 1

• log in to your Ozioma account at https://app.ozioma.net using your username and password.

STEP 2

• On the left of your dashboard you will see a list of options, click on SMS Newsletter. (if you are using a mobile phone, click on the icon to the top left of your dashboard to see the list of options then select the SMS Newsletter).

STEP 3

• At the bottom of your SMS Newsletter to the right, click on the pink colored icon.

STEP 4

• Write the name of the newsletter (like family, customers, employees etc).
• Describe the newsletter and click on create.

STEP 5

• On your newsletter list you will see the name of your newsletter and your the SUBCODE. Click on the name of the newsletter you just created.

STEP 6

• Once in your newsletter group, click on the third icon at the top right side of it and click on Add subscriber. if you want to export it from your files then click on import from files.

STEP 7

• Type the name and phone number and click on add.

STEP 8

• To type the follow up message, click on follow up. Then click on the first icon on the top right.

STEP 9

• Type the sender name and compose the message. Then choose the interval you want before the message is delivered to your subscriber (instant, hour, day, week , month and year). Here I chose 3 days. Once that is done, click on save message.

A newsletter is a report given information about an organization that is sent regularly to its members. Newsletters can be used to advertise or to simply communicate new ideas and events to subscribers. Businesses can easily connect with their stakeholders, including stockholders, customers, employees, and members of the society through SMS newsletters.

A newsletter is a publication that, if written well, not only disseminates information, but reminds, guides and instructs those who read it. Newsletters can be used by individuals, businesses, churches, nonprofit organizations, schools etc.

What is Newsletter Subscription?

This is an agreement that allows you to receive updates regularly via newsletters. Once you subscribe to a newsletter, you will start receiving updates until you unsubscribe to cancel the subscription.

Who Can Use SMS Newsletters and Why?

1. Businesses/Companies: they can use newsletters to keep employees up to date about new products, featured news and articles that promotes the business and employees and recently hired or retiring personnel. It can also be used for public relations and low key advertisement sent to customers.
2. Schools: Schools can use newsletters to keep both parents and students up to date about upcoming school events, like holidays, special educational projects, meetings etc.
3. NGO’S and Associations: They can use newsletters to send awareness messages about upcoming events etc.
4. Churches: Churches can use newsletters to send daily or weekly devotional/scriptural messages to members.
5. Individuals: individuals can use newsletters to send messages about a topic or specialized field. Example, tips on how to take care of your car, book keeping tips for small businesses etc.

With Oziomas’ SMS Collection, you can choose from an array of messages to send to people without the stress of composing a message yourself. This messages have already been grouped to give you a stress free messaging experience. so whether is a romantic message, congratulatory message, birthday message, anniversary message and so on, you have full access to it.

Continuation from Simple scheduling

1.  Schedule SMS that will deliver at different dates and times.
2. Schedule SMS that will deliver in a recurring manner like every Monday or particular day of the month/year or first/last day of the month.
3. Schedule SMS that will pick one message at a time from a particular SMS Collection (e.g Love, Well-being, Romance) and deliver at a future recurring days and random times.

Step 1

• Still continuing from step 6 above. Click on SMS collection and select the type you want. Here I chose Romance. If you want it to be delivered at a particular time and not randomly then make sure you turn off send at random time. After that click on complete schedule. But if you want it to be sent randomly then you will go to step 2.

Step 2

• Click on send at random time to turn it on, then choose the time range you want the message to be delivered. Here I chose 8:30am to 3:00pm. That means that the messages will be delivered randomly between 8:30am and 3:00pm from Monday to Friday.

Step 3

• Next is to select how you want your composed message to appear on the SMS collection when it’s delivered. Your composed message will appear either as a prefix (it will come before the SMS collection message) or as a suffix (it will come after the SMS collection message)

• Note: if you don’t want your SMS collection message to have a prefix or suffix in it, then that means you should not compose any message (just type the sender name and phone number(s) or select newsletter then click on schedule for later)

Step 4

• Once that’s done, click on complete schedule to schedule your message.

Sending follow up messages or SMS reminders are so stressful…… But with the Scheduled recurring function in Ozioma you can now relax knowing that the messages will always get to its recipient on time.

Steps to create scheduled recurring SMS messages

Continuation from Simple scheduling

1.  Schedule SMS that will deliver at different dates and times.
2. Schedule SMS that will deliver in a recurring manner like every Monday or particular day of the month/year or first/last day of the month.
3. Schedule SMS that will pick one message at a time from a particular SMS Collection (e.g Love, Well-being, Romance) and deliver at a future recurring days and random times.

Step 1

• Continuing from step 6 above. Click on recurrence (optional) to select the type of recurrence you want. It includes daily, weekly, monthly, yearly which are all in variety. Here I chose weekly (every Monday –Friday)

Step 2

• If you want it to keep recurring continually without end, make sure the stop date is turned off then You can click on complete schedule, but if you want to end the recurrence at a future date then let’s go to step 3.

Step 3

• If you want the recurrence message to stop at a future date then turn on the stop date and select the date you want it to stop. This functionality is good when sending SMS reminders to people about a program or event so that after the event they will stop receiving the messages.

With Ozioma app, you can now program SMS messages to be delivered at different dates and time without stress.

Continuation from Simple scheduling

1.  Schedule SMS that will deliver at different dates and times.
2. Schedule SMS that will deliver in a recurring manner like every Monday or particular day of the month/year or first/last day of the month.
3. Schedule SMS that will pick one message at a time from a particular SMS Collection (e.g Love, Well-being, Romance) and deliver at a future recurring days and random times.

Steps to create scheduled SMS to deliver at different dates and times

Step 1

• Continuing from step 6 above, click on the green cross icon on the right side of your date and time to create other columns. Following the same procedure, choose the date and time for the other created columns. Here for the second column I chose June 10^th, 2020 at 7:30 am and on the third column I chose June 14^th, 2020 at 2:30pm.

Step 2

• After that, click on complete schedule to schedule your message.

Sending birthday wishes to people has always been something that’s expected by everyone to do at some point. Whether its sending birthday messages to your family, friends, loved ones, colleagues, clients/customer etc. it’s always hard keeping track of peoples birthday dates with all the hustling and bustling in this present world. Sometimes, you end up forgetting your spouse’s or loved one’s birthday meanwhile he/she was busy waiting for a birthday message from you.

However, with Ozioma you can now automate your birthday messages and be the first to wish your loved ones a happy birthday without even typing or sending it yourself.

Benefits of Birthday Messaging With Ozioma

1. You can group your birthday contacts (like family, clients etc).
2. You can select the exact time you want the message to be delivered.
3. You don’t need to type the message yourself because you can select from our SMS collection templates.
4. You don’t need to be online before the message is delivered.

Steps to Automate Your Birthday Messages

Step 1

• log in to your Ozioma account at https://app.ozioma.net using your username and password.

Step 2

• On the left of your dashboard you will see a list of options, click on Birthday Messenger. (if you are using a mobile phone, click on the icon to the top left of your dashboard to see the list of options then select the Birthday Messenger).

Step 3

• At the bottom of your birthday messenger to the right, click on the pink colored icon.

Step 4

• Type the birthday group name and description.
• Choose the Time zone. If your recipient(s) is in Nigeria then choose West Africa Standard Time (+1.00). Choose the time zone based on the country in which the phone number(s) is used.

Step 5

• Choose the time you want the message to be delivered.

Step 6

• Click on Select template group and choose Birthday, then click on create. If you don’t want your messages to be sent from the template group and prefer to compose your own messages then after choosing the time click on create to create your birthday group.
• After that, click on the back icon.

Step 7

• Click on the name of the birthday group that you just formed.

Step 8

• Once in your birthday group, click on the first icon at the top right side of it and click on Add contact. if you want to export it from your files then click on import from files

Step 9

• Add the recipient name, phone number and the date of birth then click on add.

Step 10

• If you did not choose a collection from the template group and want to compose the messages yourself then click on messages and then click on the first icon on the top right.\

Step 11

• Enter the sender name and type your message. After that click on save message.

Note:

If you want to edit, pause, copy or delete a particular contact or message, simply click on the icon at the opposite of the contact or message.

Schedule SMS text messages, this feature is perfect for when you know you will not be at your desk, or knowing you might forget when an SMS message needs to go out. You can schedule your SMS text messages to be sent at a future date and time. Instances for scheduling SMS messages are as follows.

1. For sending SMS reminders.
2. For sending motivational messages or encouragements to your employees
3. For event planning
4. For sending birthday, new month, New Year messages e.t.c, without typing or sending the messages yourself and so much more.

You can now schedule your messages in various ways with Ozioma app. There are 2 types of scheduled messages in Ozioma, which are

1. Simple scheduled messages
2. Advanced scheduled messages

Simple Scheduled Messages

This are scheduled SMS messages that will deliver at a future date and time

Steps to create simple scheduled messages

Step 1

• log in to your Ozioma account at https://app.ozioma.net using your username and password.

Step 2

• On the left of your dashboard you will see a list of options, click on message box. (if you are using a mobile phone, click on the icon to the top left of your dashboard to see the list of options then select the message box).

Step 3

• Once in the message box, at the bottom click on the pink colored message icon on the right.

Step 4

• Type the sender name, the recipient phone number(s) or select newsletter (if you have a saved contact group) and the message, then click on schedule for later.

Step 5

• Choose the Time zone. If your recipient(s) is in Nigeria then choose West Africa Standard Time (+1.00). Choose the time zone based on the country in which the phone number(s) is used.

Step 6

• Choose the date and time you want to schedule the message to. Here I chose, May 8^th, 2020 at 8:30am.

Step 7

• Click on complete schedule to schedule your message.

Composing and sending your bulk SMS on Ozioma is actually quite simple. once your account have been successfully funded, you can start sending your bulk SMS by following this steps:

Step 1:

• log in to your Ozioma account at https://app.ozioma.net using your username and password

Step 2:

• On the left of your dashboard you will see a list of options, click on message box. (if you are using a mobile phone, click on the icon to the top left of your dashboard to see the list of options then select the message box).

Step3:

• Once in the message box, click on single/bulk sms.

Step 4:

• This is where you will compose and send your SMS. Here you will input the sender name, country, select newsletter (that is if you had already grouped your contacts) if not, then just type/ paste the phone numbers but separate each with commas or on a new line.

Step 5:

• Next is to compose your message. Remember that 1 SMS page consist of 160 characters including space and you will be charged per page and number of recipients. If you want to use corporate route for DND it will cost you 2 units instead of 1 unit per SMS page.

Step 6:

• Once all that has been done, make sure you cross check everything to make sure there are no errors.

Step 7:

• Click on send now to send your message

Once you have successfully created and activated your ozioma account, the next thing you should do is to fund your account by buying units so as to enable you to start making use of our bulk SMS platform.

Steps on How to Fund Your Ozioma Account

Step 1:

• Visit our website at https://app.ozioma.net and log in to your account using your username and password, then click on login.

Step 2:

• Once you have logged in to your account, you’ll see your dashboard. On the top right corner of your dashboard, you’ll see your profile icon. Click on it and select Ozi Units.

Step 3:

• In here you have 2 choices, either to buy online or make bank payment.

To Buy Units Online

• If you want to buy your units online, you have to update your profile with your email address and your full name as this details are required for online transactions.
• Click on your profile icon and select General Settings.
• Fill in your full name and email address and click on update profile. Your profile will be automatically updated.

• Once that’s done, click on your profile icon and select Ozi units.
• You can now select the amount of units you want to buy ranging from 100 units at N250 to 10000 units at N25000.

• After selecting the amount of units you want, you’ll be asked to make payment. Click on make payment.
• You’ll need your debit card number and your CVV to complete your payment.

To Make Bank Payments

1. Click on bank payments. Our account details are there already. Here you have 3 options of making bank payment which are:

• Bank Cash Deposit– use your username as depositor name.
• Mobile banking app transfer– use your username as transaction description/remark/narration.
• ATM/USSD Transfer– send your payment details to 2347034672749 or 2348065766234.