Video tutorial

Walkthrough

When you first click on ‘Echo’ after logging in, you’ll be on our Simple Send page. This is the quickest way to get up and running with your account and send a message. To make it easy to navigate, we’ve made the page resemble sending a message on your phone but with some minor additional options.

The ‘From’ field allows you to change who the message appears from on the recipient’s handset. Your Sender ID can be up to 11 characters long and can contain letters and numbers, but it’s best to avoid punctuation. Here’s a guide to setting your Sender ID.

If you have a virtual mobile number and you want recipients to reply to your message, leave the ‘From’ field set to your virtual mobile number. If you’ve changed it, you can easily reset it using the ‘Reset to virtual number’ button.

Using Simple Send, you can use the ‘To’ field to either type in numbers, type in a group name, or you can click the green ‘Contacts’ button to select pre-saved contacts to message.

Your message needs to be typed into the ‘Message’ field which has a limit of 612 characters.* You can also choose to send this message as an SMS or Voice (text-to-speech) message by clicking the radio buttons.

‘Schedule message’ allows you to set a later date and time to send the message.

Scheduled messages can’t be edited once you’ve pressed the green ‘Send’ button, but they can be cancelled by finding the message batch and clicking the red ‘Cancel’ button. To help find the right batch, you need to find the message(s) in your Sent items and use the last updated time to find the batch.

Once you have everything set up as you would like it, you can then send the message by clicking the green ‘Send’ button.

*A note on character limits

As you are writing your message, you will see the character count change, and at the point at which you go over 160 characters, you’ll also see the number of message parts increase.

Each message part uses one message credit, so while your customer will receive one text, if it is over 160 characters your account will be debited with 2 or more message credits.

It is also worth remembering that if you use unicode (such as emojis, symbols or characters with accents), these can take up more characters than standard text. Learn more about using emojis.