How to Integrate Google Contacts with Text Marketer’s SMS Platform
Many businesses and business applications now use Google Contacts as a central cloud-based contacts database. Used to store the contact details of all of your most valuable contacts storing email, phone, mobile and many other details. It is in ‘the cloud’ which means whenever a contact’s details change, your other systems will change too.
The benefits are clear, meaning that if you use Google Contacts as your central database and integrate it with your Text Marketer account then it will always be up to date with the latest information offering the ability to filter by the groupings that you have chosen to use for your contacts – this applies to any other applications which are synchronised with it too.
One of the great new features to Text Marketer’s system is our in-built Google Contacts synchronisation allowing you to instantly pull your Google Contacts into the Text Marketer system and through to your MessageBox contacts. From there you can simple send them an SMS as you would if you had chosen to upload contacts yourself – but, without the necessary costs of time.
Associated video links:
Create a CSV file to import into Google Contacts
Import CSV files into Google Contacts
Manage contact groups in Google Contacts for filtering
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How to synchronise your Google Contacts and your Text Marketer system
Log in to Message Box and go to ‘Manage Contacts’.
In the top panel go to ‘Import’ and click on the drop down arrow, and choose ‘Google’. You will be asked to synchronise your contacts, click Yes.
Initially this task requires you to confirm that we can synchronise your contacts (see next step). You need to do this only once but to keep your contacts up to date you’ll need to manually sync them every now and again. If you’re not logged into your Google account, you will need to do this with the Google username and password of the account you wish to synchronise with.
You will now be shown a success screen, showing how many contacts have been synchronised (we will only synchronise contacts with a valid mobile number field). The data will be stored in your Contacts. Additional contacts can also be added to your Contacts manually or by uploading additional data – i.e. data outside of your Google Contacts.
How to send an SMS to your Google Contacts and/or filter contacts
Go to ‘Send SMS‘ and click the ‘To’ button to access the Contacts Browser.
Filtering your contacts to send to
Often we have ‘groups’ of contacts, e.g. customers/prospects/staff/sales/etc. You can put contacts into groups in your Google Contacts account and our system pulls through the group name information. So, for example, you could type in “staff’ in the filter box and then only display/select the “staff” group to send a text message to.
Use the Filter field at the top of the Contacts Browser box to filter contacts by any of the fields. You can select/deselect all and/or manually select the contacts you wish to send an SMS to. This means for example you could have multiple groups of contacts set up and you could filter by the group name.
Simply complete the message details such as Sender ID, Date, Time and Message Text and then hit the Send button to send the text message to all the contacts you have selected.
Software Packages that use Google Contacts
Hundreds of cloud-based business applications can now synchronise with Google Contacts and are available at the Google Apps Marketplace. Mailchimp, Salesforce.com, Survey Monkey, Constant Contact and Capsule CRM to name but a few.
So, if you’re using Google Contacts as your central database, stand alone or via other software, you can now very quickly synchronise your contacts and send them all an SMS at the touch of a few buttons and benefit from our low, low SMS prices on send bulk text messages.