Twilio SMS - calling webhook without trigger

[Anonymous]

I was able to get a Twilio SMS webhook to work with a trigger (someone fills out form to opt in to SMS alerts, sent SMS confirmation) but I'm wondering if it's possible to then send those people that opted in additional SMSs without a trigger? I.e. smart list of people that have previously opted in, flow to call my webhook with new message, then run batch now.

Any ideas?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Of course. Two SCs: trigger on Request Campaign, then batch that calls Request Campaign.

[Veronica_Holme4]

While I don't disagree with the solution above and fully acknowledge if I were trying to do it this is how I would go about it, be careful with volume on that approach. It's simply not designed for this, and I've found that some SMS messages simply aren't sent when using this method if you send too many at once, particularly if you have an instance already really heavy on triggered campaigns. It can also bog down other campaigns and cause performance problems.

If you're looking for a long term solution to manage SMS sends using batch, I'd investigate some options that send using APIs rather than webhooks.

Then again, if you've got low volumes and you don't have an instance already borderline on performance issues, go right ahead, it works!

[Anonymous]

Thanks Veronica. I assume we'd be on the low end - our volume will probably be in the hundreds (<500) with anywhere from 0-5 messages/month. We would never send the same message twice.

I'm not familiar with APIs outside of what they do, any resources you'd recommend to get my feet wet if it's something we should consider?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Thanks Veronica. I assume we'd be on the low end - our volume will probably be in the hundreds (<500) with anywhere from 0-5 messages/month. We would never send the same message twice.

If you mean 500 direct Twilio calls per day, you have nothing at all to worry about.

Solutions using the API can pull from a Marketo list or program in bulk and then push to a remote provider, also in bulk.  So you can realize major efficiencies in processing, but with a huge tradeoff in complexity, especially when you attempt to use lead tokens to dynamically create messages (which is easy as pie with webhooks and the opposite-of-pie with the API).

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's simply not designed for this, and I've found that some SMS messages simply aren't sent when using this method if you send too many at once, particularly if you have an instance already really heavy on triggered campaigns.

If Twilio in particular can't handle at least 25K individual calls (at least) that's on them, not on Marketo. There's a lot of undue concern about the capacity of webhooks, when in reality people do lead enrichment in the hundreds of thousands that way.

Also, an individual webhook call doesn't necessarily equate to a synchronous connection all the way to the SMS provider (which wouldn't complete until the SMS service queues and acks the request).  Rather, a webhook can return instantly and asynchronously call Twilio in the background, or even batch multiple calls into one Twilio call.  (The SMS send is itself asynchronous, so there is little gained by making a synchronous webhook call.)

[Veronica_Holme4]

I'm 100% sure that you can speak to the complexities of this technically better than I can, but I can tell you one thing - in my 3 years as a Marketo consultant I experienced many times a hit to Marketo performance with the deployment of request campaign triggers sending bulk SMS that are deploying more than around 5000 at a time, and I did more than 50 of these kinds of deployments.

If the number is indeed more like 500, we are in 100% agreement, there's nothing to worry about. It was just a warning on high-volume that I'm sure even the product management team would back me up on - there is actually a reason in Marketo currently that webhooks are trigger-only.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, I was able to get this to work. Definitely a little tedious and need to make sure all pieces are in place but better than the alternative of using a trigger of added to list.

[Tyron_Pretorius]

https://theworkflowpro.com/marketo-sms-integration/

For anyone interested in Sanford's solution here I detailed this setup with pictures in the post above to show how to schedule a batch campaign to request a "requestable" campaign that will then use a webhook to send the lead an SMS.