Salesforce and SMS integration guide
Send SMS alerts from Salesforce CRM
Integrating Salesforce with SMS is a great way to improve your response times to your customers’ or potential customers’ actions. For almost any business, the quicker you can respond to certain situations, the more likely you are to win new customers. A Lead Response Management Study claimed that the “odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times”
Unfortunately, most people running businesses can’t be sat waiting for leads to come in, this would often result in a lack of efficiency. If you carry your phone on you at all times, SMS is a great way to notify you when a new lead comes in. Having these alerts frees up your time to carry out other business duties.
Salesforce is one of the 750+ apps available on Zapier and it can now talk to the Esendex SMS platform. You are now able to send chosen recipients a text message every time a new leads comes in, an opportunity is created, a new contact is added, new outbound message received and much more.
Choose from pre-made templates and get sending in minutes
Create your zap here, without even leaving our site.
Integrating Salesforce with Esendex to send SMS
Using Zapier is the quickest and simplest way to enable the sending of SMS via your Salesforce CRM. It is also our recommended method of integration.
Things you’ll need:
- A Zapier account
- An Esendex account (free trial available if you don’t already have one)
- A Salesforce account.
Setting up a Zap is a very simple process, however, we have created step by step instructions to help you with your first one:
1. Once you have the above, you’ll need to log in to your Zapier account and select « Make a Zap! » which can be found at the top of the page.
2. You will then need to choose your « Trigger », which in this case will be Salesforce. You do this by searching for ‘Salesforce’ in the search box.
3. Choose the criteria for your Salesforce trigger. For this example we’ll pick ‘New Lead’. We want to know as soon as someone signs up for our service so that we can contact them as soon as possible
4. Connect your Salesforce account by following the instructions laid out by Zapier.
5. Salesforce will then test if there is currently a lead in your Salesforce account. If there isn’t, create one, even if it’s a dummy lead, and test again. Otherwise you can skip this step (not recommended).
6. Now it’s time to choose the « Action » app, which will be Esendex. Simply search for Esendex in the search box and select
7. You will have two options: ‘Send Scheduled SMS’ or ‘Send SMS’.
Send scheduled SMS – trigger an SMS to be scheduled for a delayed send, for example 10 minutes after the trigger is activated.
Send SMS – send an SMS as soon as the trigger is activated.
Make your choice and click ‘Save + Continue’. As we want to contact the customer immediately, ‘Send SMS’ would be more appropriate here. However, if you find it’s best for your business to leave the lead 30 minutes to try your service, then choose ‘Schedule SMS’ and choose a 30 minute delay.
8. Connect your Esendex Account to Zapier. Choose ‘Connect a New Account’ and follow the steps to add your Esendex account. The username and password are the same as that you use for logging into your Esendex Echo account. The username will be an email address.
9. Set up the message recipient and template to use. First enter the phone number you wish to send the SMS to. To send to multiple contacts, separate each phone number with a comma.
The message template can contain many different dynamic fields, including the lead’s name, number, company, email and much more. You can be make the SMS message as complex as you need it to be, but be wary, anything over 160 characters will start to cost more than one SMS.
Type out the body of the message and add dynamic fields by clicking on this symbol 
found in the top right of the text box. If you skipped the test, you won’t be able to find any dynamic fields.
For this example we’ll keep it simple. We just want to alert ourselves to a new lead being created. We will include the lead’s name, their company name and their phone number.
10. Click Continue and test that the message works.
11. ‘Name your Zap…’ and turn it on. Now every time a new lead is created in Salesforce, you will receive an SMS alert.
Zapier is a powerful tool and can connect many different apps. Check out some of our Zapier Integration guide or any of your other integration guides.