Product Release — SMS Campaign

This release introduces SMS Campaigns to Lumi Business, giving merchants a faster way to reach customers with targeted messages for payments, promotions, retention, and loyalty.

With SMS Campaigns, businesses can top up SMS credits, choose from recommended campaign templates, create custom campaigns, define audiences, personalise messages, schedule delivery, and review campaign costs before sending. Lumi also supports multiple sender IDs and built-in credit checks to prevent failed sends.

Below are the latest SMS Campaign capabilities now available on Lumi.

1. SMS Credit Wallet

Businesses can now fund and manage SMS sending directly from Lumi using a dedicated credit system. Merchants can view available credit, total usage, and top up when needed, with a simple conversion model of ₦1 = 1 credit.

2. Recommended SMS Campaigns

Lumi now provides ready-made campaign templates that merchants can review, edit, and send quickly. Each recommended campaign includes a campaign title, a pre-written message, and a suggested audience group. Lumi supports at least 20 pre-defined recommended campaigns for easy one-click sending.

Examples include:

• Collect Outstanding Payments

• Payment Due Soon

• Payment Due Today

• Move Slow Stock Faster

• Boost Sales from Slow Stock

• Appreciate Your Regulars

• Product Back in Stock

• Seasonal Demand Alert

The campaign can still be edited before activation. Once review, it is set up to be sent out immediately or scheduled (one-off or recurring).

3. Custom Campaign Creation

Businesses can also create custom SMS campaigns from scratch. Merchants can define campaign title, description, sender ID, message body, recipients, and delivery timing through a guided workflow.

Why this matters

Not every message fits a template. Custom campaigns give merchants flexibility to run business-specific promotions, announcements, reminders, and direct customer communication.

How it works

Step 1: Campaign Context
Enter campaign title and short description. Recommended campaigns come pre-filled, while custom campaigns are filled manually. Merchants can assign a campaign type such as Marketing, Transactional, Retention, or Credit Reminder.

Step 2: Sender & Message
Select an existing Sender ID or create a new one, then define the message body.

Step 3: Audience
Choose recipients using automated segments, phone book selection, or copy-and-paste entry.

Step 4: Schedule
Choose whether to send immediately, schedule for later, or send recurrently.

Step 5: Review
Preview message details, recipients, and campaign cost before activation.

4. Flexible Audience Selection

Lumi now supports multiple ways to define the audience for an SMS campaign. Merchants can send to automated segments, choose contacts from the phone book, or paste phone numbers for one-off sends.

Why this matters

Different campaigns require different targeting approaches. This gives merchants flexibility to use Lumi’s built-in audience intelligence or manually control who receives a message.

What’s included

• Automated Customer Segments for pre-built audience groups

• Phone Book for full customer list selection

• Copy & Paste for quick manual recipient entry

Before final recipient totals are shown, Lumi removes unsubscribed contacts, blacklisted numbers, and invalid numbers, while also preventing duplicate recipients.

5. Smart Segments for High-Value Use Cases

SMS Campaigns are powered by pre-defined audience segments that support key merchant workflows across cashflow protection, revenue growth, churn prevention, loyalty, and relationship-building. Lumi defines these audience groups centrally in the backend.

Available segments include use cases such as:

• Payment Due Soon

• Payment Due Today

• Outstanding Payments

• Product Back in Stock

• Slow-Moving Stock Alert

• Haven’t Visited Recently

• Long-Time No Visit

• VIP Customers

• Your Regular Customers

• Birthday Celebration

Why this matters

This makes SMS more than a broadcast tool. Merchants can act on meaningful customer moments that affect cashflow, sales conversion, repeat visits, and customer retention.

6. Sender ID Management

Businesses can now create and manage multiple sender IDs inside Lumi, and a sender ID must be selected before an SMS campaign can be sent.

Why this matters

Sender IDs give businesses more control over how their SMS communication appears to recipients and help keep outbound messaging aligned with their store or operational identity.

Key points

• Merchants can create new sender IDs (required to wait: < 24 hours for ID approval) or they can use the Lumi default sender ID.

• Sender ID selection is required before send

7. Personalised Message Content

Messages can be personalized using dynamic variables that are replaced for each recipient at send time. Examples shown across Lumi’s campaign templates include variables like {{first_name}}, {{amount}}, {{due_date}}, {{store_name}}, {{product_name}}, {{category_name}}, and {{store_link}}.

Why this matters

Personalised messages feel more relevant and improve clarity for the customer. They also help merchants send reminder, promotional, and loyalty campaigns that are more contextual and actionable.

Lumi also shows live message composition indicators such as character count, SMS segmentation, and per-recipient cost impact, including a warning when messages exceed 160 characters and increase cost.

8. Delivery Scheduling Controls

Merchants can now control exactly when a campaign should be sent. Lumi supports immediate sending, scheduled sends for a specific date and time, and recurring campaign delivery on daily, weekly, or monthly patterns.

Why this matters

Timing matters. Businesses can align messages to repayment cycles, store activity, promotions, recurring reminders, and operational windows instead of sending everything immediately.

How it works

• Send Immediately

• Schedule for a specific date and time

• Send Recurrently with frequency and duration controls

For queued or scheduled campaigns, Lumi also supports a credit reservation notice before dispatch.

9. Cost Review Before Send

Before activation, Lumi shows merchants the expected cost of a campaign and validates whether enough credits are available. The review state includes message length, SMS segmentation, per-recipient cost, total recipients, total campaign cost, and available balance.

Why this matters

Merchants should know the cost of a campaign before committing. This improves transparency and reduces failed sends caused by insufficient credit.

What Lumi checks before send

• Required credits

• SMS segment multiplier for longer messages

• Available credit balance

• Final campaign cost

If the merchant does not have enough credit, Lumi prompts them to top up before proceeding.

10. Safer Campaign Activation

Campaigns are only queued once credit requirements are satisfied. When balance is sufficient, Lumi reserves the required credits, queues the campaign, and creates delivery logs for processing.

Why this matters

This reduces operational failures and ensures merchants do not unknowingly launch campaigns that cannot be completed.