Bulk SMS Australia - Business Messaging With Replies

Yes, when the campaign is sent from one of your Australian virtual mobile numbers. Replies arrive as threads in the SMS tab of the portal, grouped by the customer's number, and they appear alongside every other conversation your team is already watching. A campaign sent from an alphanumeric sender ID cannot take replies, because an alphanumeric sender cannot receive messages.

You send from your own numbers. Campaigns go out from a virtual mobile number on your account, and broadcast sending is available on numbers that have been capacity checked for it, so we will confirm with you which of your numbers can be used for campaigns. One to one conversations in the SMS tab are not restricted that way. A single virtual mobile number can be watched by several Ozetel Phone users, so a shared business number does not end up as one person's private inbox.

An alphanumeric sender ID shows your business name in place of a phone number when the message arrives. It suits announcements and notices where the brand name matters more than a reply, because the recipient cannot answer it. Sender IDs are registered with the ACMA, and the portal shows you when one is expiring soon. If you expect people to answer, send from a virtual mobile number instead.

Australian marketing messages must carry a functional way to unsubscribe. In practice that means telling recipients they can reply STOP when you send from a virtual mobile number, or linking the hosted opt out page when you send from an alphanumeric sender ID, since a STOP reply cannot reach an alphanumeric sender. Ozetel handles both, but the wording in the message body is yours to include.

Inbound STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, OPTOUT, OPT OUT, OPT-OUT, CANCEL, END and QUIT are matched as whole words, whatever the case, and recorded automatically. Opt outs are scoped per sender ID rather than blanket across the account, so somebody who opts out of one brand you send as has not asked to stop hearing from another. The opt out list is checked again at dispatch, so anyone who opts out during the five minute hold window is skipped rather than messaged.

One SMS is 160 characters in the standard GSM alphabet. A single character outside that alphabet, an emoji or a curly quote pasted out of Word, drops the whole message to 70 characters. Messages longer than a single part carry a header, so the per part limit falls to 153 characters, or 67 for a non GSM message. The composer counts this as you type, so you can see a short message become a three part message before you send it to a large list.

Yes. Choose send now or pick a date and time, and either way the campaign passes through a five minute hold window before dispatch. You can cancel it during that window from the Scheduled tab. The recipient set and every merged message are frozen when the campaign is scheduled, so what you reviewed is what goes out.

Yes, through mail merge. Placeholders such as {{first_name}} are replaced with each recipient's own details from your contact book, across the full contact field set. A live phone preview shows the finished message exactly as the recipient will see it, and you can step through the first five recipients to check the merge. The review step before scheduling re merges every recipient on the server, so the preview cannot disagree with what is actually sent.

Your account has one contact book covering name, company, job title, email, address and tags. You can import a CSV and map its columns to those fields, organise people into groups, which are static lists, or into segments, which are saved rules such as "city is Sydney and tags contain VIP". A segment is resolved against the contact book each time it is used, so newly added contacts are picked up without anybody rebuilding the list. You can also send a campaign from an uploaded file whose rows are messaged without ever becoming contacts.

Rates are set per number and billed on your Ozetel account, on the same invoice as the rest of your services, so there is no separate bill from a separate vendor. The composer shows a live cost estimate as you build a campaign. That figure is an estimate: the billed amount is calculated by the billing system and can differ for multipart or non GSM messages. Prepaid accounts are balance checked before scheduling and again at dispatch. Talk to us and we will quote against the numbers you actually send from.

You need an Ozetel account with at least one virtual mobile number to send from, and Bulk Messaging is enabled per account by our team rather than being switched on for everybody by default. You do not have to move your phone system across to use it, although it shares one portal, one contact book and one bill with the rest of your Ozetel services if you do.

Marketing messages in Australia are regulated under the Spam Act 2003, which requires consent from the recipient, clear identification of the sender, and a functional unsubscribe. Bulk Messaging is built to help you meet those obligations, with automatic STOP handling, per sender opt out scoping and a hosted opt out page for alphanumeric sends. This is general information rather than legal advice, so check your own obligations if you are unsure.