Twilio and SendGrid activation

Prerequisites

Your Airship contract must include Email and/or SMS. Depending on purchase date, your contract may require an amendment. Contact your account manager for details.

To enable Twilio for your Airship SMS channel, you must have a Twilio account or Subaccount. While not required, we recommend using a separate Subaccount within your Twilio account to isolate Airship messaging campaigns and sender configurations from any existing campaigns.

You must also have the following prerequisites in place:

To enable SendGrid for your Airship Email channel, you must have a SendGrid account or subuser. While not required, we recommend using a separate subuser within your SendGrid account to isolate Airship messaging campaigns and sender configurations from any existing campaigns.

You must also have the following prerequisites in place:

Request Airship integration

Once your prerequisites are met, contact your Airship account manager or Support  and request integrating your Airship account with Twilio.

Then Airship will:

1. Prepare your account for the integration
2. Request that you provide details about your prerequisites
3. Assign a dedicated technical consultant, who will complete the necessary project configuration
4. (For Twilio SMS) Provide a unique Mobile Originated Callback URL to add to your Sender or Messaging Service configuration in Twilio

Importing your audience

There are several methods available to import your existing audience into Airship, and your Airship technical consultant will recommend the best method for your specific needs. A common method is SFTP upload. You can upload to Airship using this method after exporting from Segment Engage or another CRM/CDP. See Download your Audience as a CSV file  in Segment’s documentation.

You can also enable email and SMS audience syncing via Segment integration, which is our recommended method. Synchronization automatically associates audience members to Named UsersA customer-provided identifier used for mapping multiple devices and channels to a specific individual. based on your existing track events in Segment.

Our technical consulting team will work with you to import your mobile device IDs using our import API endpoint. See Register and associate in our Segment integration documentation.

Importing templates from Segment Engage

Email and SMS templates built in Engage use a scripting language called Liquid for personalization and dynamic content. Your Airship onboarding team will help with converting your templates to use HandlebarsHandlebars is Airship’s templating language for personalization. Handlebars expressions use double curly braces wrapped around a content template, ranging from a simple variable, e.g., {{first_name}}, to complex evaluations of personalization data. instead of Liquid.

First, export your templates from Segment Engage. Your Airship onboarding team will ask you to copy and paste your template content from Engage to a shared document. Airship will use a script to convert your templates and add them to your Airship projects for you to test and validate.

From there, you can use Airship’s WYSIWYG editor to create new templates or upload your own HTML templates personalized using Handlebars.

Migrating your Segment email campaigns

The method of migrating your email campaigns from Segment Engage to Airship will depend on the types of campaigns you have configured.

For triggered messaging, recreate the messages as Airship JourneysA continuous user experience of connected Sequences, Scenes, and/or In-App Automations.. You can use many of your existing events and properties already tracked in Segment via our pre-built integration. See Segment in our integration docs.

For ad hoc or recurring campaigns like newsletters, recreate the messages using the Message ComposerA tool for creating messages in the dashboard. Composers are defined by what you can include and control: message types, delivery, and automation. and configure delivery according to your preferred channels and schedule. See Create a message.

Optional: Syncing Opt-Outs or Unsubscribes from Twilio

If you are handling opt-out state outside of Airship, for instance, by using Twilio’s Advanced Opt-Out for Messaging Services, you’ll need to make sure that Airship remains in sync to avoid messaging users who have unsubscribed. This includes STOP messages and any other unsubscribe signals you receive from users.

For SMS, send these events to the Opt-out of SMS messages API endpoint. For email, send these events to the Update an email channel API endpoint, updating the commercial_opted_out channel property. This ensures that Airship has the latest opt-out state for each MSISDN or email address and can suppress messages accordingly.

If you are unable to automate this process through the API for email, you can manage opt-outs by manually uploading a CSV file through the Airship dashboard. This CSV should contain the email addresses of users who have opted out, based on your internal records. See Setting and removing Text, Number, and Date Attributes and follow the steps for the CSV method to provide a date for AttributeMetadata used for audience segmentation and personalization. They extend the concept of Tags by adding comparison operators and values to determine whether or not to target a user, helping you better evaluate your audience. ua_commercial_opted_out.

For individual channels, you can change opt-in status manually in the dashboard. See Viewing channel details in Contact Management.

Whether using automated or manual sync, it’s important to keep Airship’s records updated. Airship does not assume responsibility for enforcing opt-outs that have not been communicated through one of these methods.