Sometimes you need to add just that little more content into your campaigns and iOS 10 has enabled you to do that by adding previews to their standard SMS messages.
If you’re sending out a link in your SMS campaign, we’ve found a handy little trick which will enhance your text messages simply by re-arranging the order of your content!
The below message shows the SMS with a link in the content, recipients can click on the link as normal and be taken to the video, if using the URL tracker every click will show in your click report.
Show the link
However, the updates also mean you can be a little more clever here. By simply moving the link to the end of the message content, iOS 10 will allow the recipients to preview the video content in the message as below. Don’t worry – we’ll still track clicks if you’re using the URL tracker, even when the customer clicks to play within the message!
Preview the content
This will also work if the link is at the beginning of the message – and when I say the end or the beginning of the message it must be the first or last thing in the message, including just one word after will mean that the link does not show a preview.
Another thing to consider is that any old link won’t do, it must start with either a http:// or https:// we tested many many links and regardless of the domain, the link would always show a preview as long as they started with http:// or https://
Lastly, iOS 10 will only show a preview if there is just one link in the message so using multiple links won’t work.
Give it a whirl! As always – we recommend sending yourself a test before every campaign – if you don’t have iOS 10 installed but want to see how it might look on a compatible handset – get in touch and let us create a preview for you 🙂