PlusThis + Twilio + Http Post call taking a long time

Hi all,

I’m working on some SMS broadcast campaigns and running into a bit of an issue. I’m using a combination of Twilio (to power the SMS), PlusThis (to create the campaign) and obviously Infusionsoft (Campaign Buildr with tags triggering http post calls to PlusThis)

The list for the campaign has roughly 4k contacts. When I apply the triggering tag to all of contacts, I’ve noticed that the http post calls can take hours to cycle through all of the contacts on the list.

This is an issue if I send in the afternoon, as I would hate for a contact to receive an SMS at 3am.

Does anyone know how to speed up the http post process or limit the time during which the calls can be made. (limiting the “start time” isn’t an option if the entire process still takes several hours which was Infusionsoft support’s suggestion)

I’ve spoken to Twilio too and they don’t have a way to limit.

Thoughts?

Each contact in a series like that, can take 2-3 seconds for the process to complete and return. 4000 times 3 seconds per = 12000 seconds to complete ON THE BEST DAY. 12000/60/60 = 3 1/3 hours to complete minimum. A number in Twilio can only send one sms per second meaning the others enqueue and wait.

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Gotcha! Thanks for the info. Is there a better way? Today’s SMS campaign has approx 17K contacts flowing through it and now I am getting FAILED errors on the Twilio side due to excessive queue times. Are short codes the only answer? Or just sending to much smaller list sizes over several days?

Yes, for FCC regulatory reasons, the shortcode option is the only way (that I’m aware of anyway)

Twilio also allows you to purchase multiple phone numbers and cycle texts through those numbers, so you may be able to do something along those lines. I haven’t tested Plusthis to see if it can text through the ‘cycle’ of numbers, but if it can’t you could set up a campaign that would split your lists in 10 parts, then have 10 sequences set up feeding into PlusThis and each sequence would have a different PlusThis tool configured, so you’d multiply the efforts listed by 10 since each tool would use a different phone number.

Jeff

Thank you for bringing this up. I just started a similar process but via Twilio > Success Engine > campaign in Keap.
@John_Borelli You mention short code. To what short code are you referring? (Success Engine and Plus This are very similar, so if the short code is via Plus This, then I have an analagous option in Success Engine.)

I am currently running smaller campaigns as a premium offer but am thinking of making this a regular feature for my free list. So will be looking at similar number of contacts to run through campaigns.

Short Codes, in the context of SMS numbers, is a short number that is capable of sending sms messages at much higher rates.

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