SMS Basics
What SMS Marketing is for
Texting your customers from Gorilla Dash: what it does, what it costs, and what it cannot do.
Last updated September 2, 2026
SMS Marketing sends text messages to a group of your contacts. You pick an audience, write a message, and send it now or schedule it. Delivery is tracked back against each recipient.
Text is not email
IT COSTS MONEY AND IT INTERRUPTS PEOPLE
Every message is billed, and it arrives on a phone in somebody's pocket. A text campaign should be short, timely and worth the interruption — an offer that expires, a reminder, something genuinely useful. Weekly newsletters belong in email.
What you get
- Campaigns to a customer bucket, sent now or scheduled.
- Images attached as MMS, with a fallback for phones that cannot receive them.
- Merge fields so each message uses the person's name and their tribe.
- Delivery reporting — sent, delivered, failed, opted out.
- Automatic opt-out handling — a reply of STOP unsubscribes that person for good.
- Tribe campaigns — one message pushed out to every tribe, sent from each one's own number at their local time.
What it does not do
YOU WILL NOT SEE REPLIES
There is no inbox and no conversation view. If somebody replies to your campaign, nobody in your organisation sees it. The only reply that is acted on is STOP, which unsubscribes them automatically. Never send a text that asks a question expecting an answer — give people a phone number to call or a link to follow instead.
- No link shortening and no click tracking — a link in a text is just a link.
- No quiet hours. A campaign scheduled for 2am sends at 2am.
- No cancel once a campaign is sent, and no preview of exactly who is in the audience before you send.
Before your first campaign
- Get a sending number — a Gorilla Dash number, or connect your own Twilio account.
- If you are sending in the United States, complete carrier registration and wait for approval.
- Build a customer bucket for the audience.
- Read the guide on consent — the default may not be what you expect.