Text Message Campaigns: Promotional vs. Transactional, Traditional vs. Dynamic

In this lesson, we dive into the fundamentals of text message campaigns, especially for businesses and organizations that are new to business texting. You’ll learn:

• The difference between promotional and transactional campaigns
• How to distinguish traditional vs. dynamic campaign types
• How to set up your first campaign using Chatavise

Let’s get started.

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📣 Promotional Text Campaigns

Promotional text campaigns are straightforward: they’re meant to make money by marketing your products, services, or events.

✅ Key Characteristics:

• Sent only to opted-in subscribers
• Must include clear SMS marketing consent language
• Examples: sales announcements, event promotions, discounts

If you’re ever unsure whether a message is promotional, assume it is. If you’re selling something or promoting anything—it’s promotional.

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📬 Transactional Text Campaigns

Transactional campaigns are more nuanced and should never contain promotional content.

🧾 Who receives them?

• Existing clients—those who’ve already engaged with your business (e.g., past buyers or event attendees)

💬 What can you send?

• Review or survey requests
• Service updates (e.g., delays, weather notices)
• Holiday greetings

⚠️ Do NOT promote or sell in a transactional message.
Asking for a call or meeting can be a gray area—consult legal counsel if unsure.

Real-World Examples:

• Home Services: Notify clients about weather delays
• Event Planning: Provide parking updates during an event

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⚖️ Legal Risks: Why Compliance Matters

Texting without proper consent can be costly. The FCC can fine between $500 to $1,500 per message per contact.

• Sending one message to 1,000 people? That’s up to $1.5 million in fines.

🛡️ Tip: Use Chatavise tools to build your subscriber list legally and ethically.

Don’t forget: you can refer others to Chatavise via your affiliate link. Don’t have one? Text “affiliate” to 470-375-988 to sign up.

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📤 Traditional vs. Dynamic Campaigns

📌 Traditional Campaigns

These campaigns send messages to the exact list of recipients selected at the time of scheduling.

Example: If you schedule a campaign today for next week using 571 selected contacts, it will still only send to those 571—even if your list grows later.

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🔄 Dynamic Campaigns

Available with Professional and Business plans, dynamic campaigns allow Chatavise to scan your contacts right before send time.

• Newly tagged contacts get included automatically.
• Ideal for future-scheduled campaigns where your list may grow.

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🛠️ Campaign Walkthrough: Step-by-Step

Let’s walk through setting up a campaign in Chatavise.

1. Go to Marketing > Campaigns

Click the blue “Add Campaign” button.

2. Name Your Campaign

Defaults to current date/time. Rename now or later—your choice.

3. Choose Campaign Purpose

Select Promotional or Transactional.

4. Choose Campaign Type

Select Traditional or Dynamic.

5. Select Recipients

• View total contacts (e.g., 707)
• Use filters to narrow by tag (e.g., “Ron’s networking relationships” → 571)
• Further refine with exclusion tags
• Final list reflects exact recipient count (e.g., 555)

6. Write Your Message

• Type manually or use Ask Kelly AI
• Insert emojis via the emoji keyboard
• Attach images if desired
• Use templates to save time

⚠️ Quick Reminder on Text Credits:

• SMS = 1 credit (160 chars, no media)
• MMS = 3 credits (1,600 chars, emojis, pictures)

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7. Schedule Your Campaign

• Pick a date from the calendar
• Set a time (e.g., 9:30 a.m.)

8. Run a Test

• Use “Test Campaign” to preview the message on your account
• Doesn’t use credits

Once you’re happy with the test, click “Run Campaign”. The message is sent!

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🔚 Final Thoughts

By now, you understand:

• The legal difference between promotional and transactional campaigns
• The logistical difference between traditional and dynamic sends
• How to create and schedule a campaign inside Chatavise

Text messaging has a 98% open rate—treat this powerful channel with care.

Use it to build trust, communicate transparently, and engage meaningfully. When used properly, text campaigns can transform how you connect with your audience.

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Stay compliant. Stay connected.
We’ll see you in the next lesson.

In this lesson, we are covering text message campaigns. We will discuss the difference between promotional and transactional campaigns and provide a little bit of a deeper discussion to help clarify this for businesses and organizations who are newer to business texting. We will then go over the two types of campaigns—traditional and dynamic—and then we’ll end this lesson by providing a walkthrough. So let’s get started.

The purpose of promotional text campaigns is easy to understand. The goal is to make money—to market your product, service, and/or event. If you have to guess if the text message is promotional in nature, it probably falls under promotional text campaigns. The only contacts that are eligible to receive promotional text messages are contacts that subscribed/opted in. They gave you their consent by texting in a keyword or submitting a form with compliant SMS marketing language. Here are some examples of promotional text messages from various industries.

Now let’s talk about transactional campaigns, the more difficult of the two. The first part to understand about transactional campaigns has to do with who is receiving these text messages from you. Transactional campaigns are usually sent to existing clients, which means it’s a contact that has done business with you in one way, shape, or form—for example, someone that attended your past event or purchased your product or service.

The second part to understand about transactional campaigns is what is being sent and communicated in the actual text message. Remember: you cannot sell or promote. So what can you send? You can ask them to leave you a review, fill out a survey, or even wish them Happy New Year or any other holiday. Asking a contact to schedule a call or meeting is kind of a gray area, and you should proceed with caution or with guidance from your own legal counsel.

In the home service industry, some of our clients send out a transactional campaign to clients with open jobs when a storm is expected to interrupt service or delay their appointments. In the event planning space, a transactional campaign was sent to attendees to let them know in real time when a parking lot was at capacity and to provide directions to an alternative parking lot. The thing to remember is: you cannot sell. As long as you keep that in mind, your business will more than likely be fine.

As we discussed in the Upload Contacts lesson, the fine that can be imposed by the Federal Communications Commission is between $500 to $1,500 per violation. “Per violation” means per text message sent to each contact. So if you send just one text message to 1,000 people, that could result in your business facing fines between $500,000 to $1.5 million. Only you can determine if the benefit outweighs the risk.

Remember, we have tools to help you build up your subscribers list. Now, in me doing this, I realize that there are other systems that are not communication-focused platforms, so we do find that sometimes they neglect this crucial step. So if you know someone who can use a communication platform like ours and you want to make sure that they stay compliant, send them your Chatavise affiliate link. You will more than likely save them money, but you will definitely save them a whole lot of pain if the FCC ever gets involved. If you don’t have your affiliate link, text the word “affiliate” to my number—which you should know by now—it’s 470-375-988, and I’ll send you a link to sign up for your affiliate link.

Traditional text campaigns are very straightforward. Basically, the recipients that you include at the time of setting up the campaign are the recipients who will be included in the text campaign—even if you schedule the campaign to be sent out in the future.

Here’s a quick example to demonstrate what I mean. If we go into my system here and we look at the contacts available, the number is 707. If we click on Ron’s networking relationships, we see there are 571. If I select these recipients and schedule a traditional campaign to be sent out two weeks from now, only these 571 people will be included in that campaign—even if the number of contacts increases from now until the time the campaign is scheduled to go out.

This is where dynamic campaigns become extremely useful. Scheduling a dynamic campaign in Chatavise means that the system will scan your Chatavise account about a minute before the campaign is scheduled to go out. When the system does this scan, it checks to see if there are any new contacts that now have that tag and should be a part of that campaign. This makes it easier and more accurate to schedule text campaigns further out and ensure that you are including every contact that needs to be included. Dynamic campaigns are available in the Professional and Business plans.

We have made it to the walkthrough section of this lesson. Let’s go into the system and set up our first text campaign.

Let’s go to the Marketing tab at the top and click on Campaigns. This will take us to the Campaign screen. We go to the top right and click on the blue “Add Campaign” button. It will take us to the campaign setup screen. Here we can see that the name of the campaign defaults to the day and time in which you are initiating the campaign. You can change the name right here, right now in this screen, but you can also change it after you schedule the text campaign and even after the campaign has been fully executed. Now I’m going to change it here—I’m going to call it “LMS Example.”

The next step is to choose the purpose of the campaign. We have two options: Promotional or Transactional. I’m going to choose Promotional.

The next step is to choose the type of campaign. We also have two options: Traditional and Dynamic. I’m going to choose Traditional.

The next step is to choose the recipients—who’s going to be included in this text campaign. By clicking the “Select Recipients” blue button, it takes us to this screen right here. As you can see, we have 707 contacts available for us to send a promotional text message to. I can select all like so and hit “Save Selected,” and all people have been selected there.

If you want to drill down, we’re going to hit the “Clear” button and clear out those 707 selected contacts and use these filter options on the left side to more selectively pick the audience for this particular text campaign. We can filter by location tags, which I’m going to use right now. I’m going to choose Ron’s networking relationships, and we can see the list went from 707 to 571.

The next option is to exclude people by the tags. So I’m going to go there and I’m going to choose the year and the month—this is just the way I have tags set up. Remember the Tags lesson. I’m going to choose these tags here, and that brought the list from 571 to 555. Then I’m going to hit “Select All” and “Save Selected,” and now the total has been adjusted to 555 people.

The next step is to write out your message. You can do this manually by typing like so. You can also use Chatavise’s AI, Ask Kelly, and use this prompt box to help you craft the perfect message. To close the prompt box, just press this “X” button over here and it will close it. You can also use a template, like we’re going to do here for this example to save some time.

The next button to the right of the template button is the emoji keyboard. If you click on it, the emoji keyboard will pop up and you can choose whatever emoji you want to include in your text message. To minimize this, click on the “X” right here. This template already had an image attached to it, but if you click there, you can see the image itself. You can remove it and you can add another one by clicking here. I’m going to minimize this now.

This last part in this section—we’re going to review this in a separate lesson—but this has to do with text credits. To give you a quick brief overview: an SMS message is text only—no emojis, no pictures, just text—and it’s 160 characters, which will count as one text credit. As you can see here, this message is an MMS message because it has emojis and it has a picture. The character limit goes up to 1,600, so I have way more room to write a lot more text if I like. MMS messages are worth three credits. Again, we will cover this in more depth in the next lesson, but for now, let’s keep going.

The next step is to schedule the text campaign. We can choose the day by clicking on the calendar and clicking over here to go to May 1st. Then we can choose a.m. or p.m. by clicking on it like so. We can use the arrows to change the time. We can also double-click on it and choose 9:30 a.m. as an example.

The next thing that we’re going to cover is this “Test Campaign” button here. If you click there, you can see which users are on your Chatavise account and actually send them a text message of the campaign so you kind of get a draft to see what it would look like before you send it to everyone. Let’s click on me here and click “Start Test.”

And just like that, Chatavise sent me a text message that doesn’t count towards my text credits but allows me to see what it looks like. And look—I just got it here. Everything looks good to me, so I can hit “Run Campaign,” and that will send the text message out to 555 people.

You now have a solid foundation of text campaigns—from the difference between promotional and transactional, to the difference between traditional and dynamic. You are also now sufficiently aware of the fines that can be imposed by the FCC if texting people out of compliance.

Texting contacts at scale is a powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility. No, but seriously—nurture your list and use this communication channel to build even more trust and rapport with your audience.

Remember: this isn’t email. Your contacts have a 98% chance of seeing your message, and there isn’t another communication channel that even comes close to that.

So with that said, I’ll see you in the next lesson.