Twilio Now Supports Message Scheduling for SMS and MMS

When we first released fmSMS one of our favourite features was the ability to submit an SMS to a Gateway and have them deliver the message at a future date and time. This was great if you wanted a message to be delivered to the recipient at a specified date and time, not at the time you sent the message to the Gateway.

For example you might want send appointment reminders the evening before the appointment to remind the customer about the appointment tomorrow. For appointment reminders for a Monday appointment you would have to send the messages on a Sunday or have some server schedule setup to create and send these messages. Message Scheduling allows you to introduce more sophistication to your messages based on business requirements, such as scheduling them to be sent before, during or after business hours depending on the nature of your messages to promote customer engagement. It also eliminates the need for complex server schedules to be running each day.

Twilio, one of our recommended Gateways that we have partnered with for many years, has never supported message scheduling for SMS and MMS as well as WhatsApp messages. Based on developer feedback over the years they introduced Message Scheduling as a Public Beta earlier this year and as of August 24, 2022 Message Scheduling is now globally available.

We’ve just released updates to both fmSMS and fmMMS to support messaging scheduling when using the Twilio Gateway for both regular SMS/MMS messages as well as WhatsApp messages. fmSMS v4.2.11 and fmMMS v 1.18 now support scheduling messages. If you’re not already using Messaging Services with your Twilio account you will first need to create a new Messaging Service as you need to include a Messaging Service SID when sending a request which includes the message scheduling parameters.

You can get all the details on the fmSMS Twilio Gateway page and the fmMMS Twilio Gateway page. Scheduling a new message is a simple as selecting the required date and time you wish to send a message: