Five things to check before your first campaign

The first campaign a new business sends is the one most likely to go wrong in a small, avoidable way — not because the platform is confusing, but because five quick checks get skipped in the excitement of hitting send. Here's the list worth running through every time, especially the first.

1. Is your sender ID actually approved?

A sender ID under review isn't the same as one that's live. Check its status before scheduling a send — a pending Corporate Bind approval will either fall back to a shared ID or block the send entirely, and neither is what you want mid-campaign.

2. How many numbers are flagged as invalid — and does that match your expectations?

The audience preview shows this before you pay for anything. If the invalid-number count looks unusually high or low compared to your typical list, it's worth a second look before sending — it can flag anything from a stale phonebook import to a list that's cleaner than you expected.

3. Does your wallet balance actually cover the campaign?

The cost estimate accounts for recipients and message parts, but it's still worth confirming the balance before a scheduled send — especially for a first campaign, where the temptation is to send to the full list rather than a smaller test batch first.

4. Do your personalisation tags actually have data behind them?

A message that reads "Hi ," instead of "Hi Ngozi," because a first-name field was empty in the import is one of the most common first-campaign mistakes. Luma only inserts a tag where the phonebook has that field populated — but it's still worth spot-checking your contact import before relying on it.

5. The one setting most new accounts forget: message parts

It's easy to write a message, feel like it reads well, and not notice it's crossed the 160-character single-SMS limit — which quietly doubles the cost per recipient. The character counter shown while drafting exists specifically to catch this before it becomes an expensive surprise across a 5,000-contact send.

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