How to register users with a phone number and send notifications over SMS

At the moment, Prefinery is email-based. We need an email address from your users when signing up and all of our communication with them is over email.

However, we have had a number of customers use Prefinery for a SMS-only (no email) campaign. While Prefinery doesn't yet have native support for selecting SMS over email, there is a way to accomplish this.

This is how you can accomplish SMS-based signups and communication:

1. Instead of using the Prefinery Signup Form, design your own form, asking for mobile phone number and any other information that you would like to collect.
2. Submit the user data to Prefinery by using our API (docs here). Create the user with an email address in a format similar to: 55555555@inbound.yourdomain.com, where 55555555 is their mobile number.
3. Catch inbound emails at inbound.yourdomain.com and break out the recipient's mobile phone number from the email address and the email body as the text message. There are many companies that provide this service, such as Postmark and Mailgun.
4. Send the email body as a text message to the mobile phone number using a tool such as Twilio.
5. Create a new email layout in your Prefinery account called SMS and set the layout HTML to simply {{content}} . You can ignore the message about needing to include the unsubscribe URL.
6. Update all email message in your Prefinery account to use the new SMS layout. You can also disable click tracking and inlining the CSS.