Welcome to the Twilio Programmable Messaging Onboarding Guide. This guide contains milestones that will help you:
Each implementation team's needs are different. Although these milestones present a sequential process, we encourage you to choose your ideal starting place and skip around if appropriate for your team.
At certain points along the way, you will notice divergent onboarding paths depending on if you are sending to North America or to countries outside of North America. Significant differences in regulatory requirements exist between countries. At any point, you can refer to Twilio's SMS Regulatory Guidelines to view specific geographical and country regulations and considerations.
The "SMS Foundations" section of this onboarding guide will help you understand how SMS works, so you can make the best decisions possible when building your messaging program. By the end of this milestone, you will understand fundamental concepts of messaging and what to expect during the onboarding process.
The "Prepare Your Sender Strategy" section of this onboarding guide will help your team choose the ideal phone number or sender types so that you can reach your audience effectively wherever they are in the world. It will also guide you through how to provision your chosen number or sender types and how to complete the relevant regulatory requirements. By the end of this milestone, you will have a fully configured parent account, at least one chosen sender, and you'll be on your way toward provisioning that sender compliantly.
The "Build Your Account" section of this onboarding guide will help your team to design an account structure that leverages Subaccounts and Messaging Services to optimize your messaging use cases. You'll also learn how to set up data configurations so that your team can track and store campaign delivery data. By the end of this milestone, you'll be able to create your ideal account architecture, a Subaccount, a Messaging Service, and a data configuration.
The "Monitor Your Application" section of this onboarding guide will show you how to monitor your program once it's in production. You'll learn how to leverage Messaging Insights to gauge real-time, aggregate delivery and engagement performance. You'll also be ready to set up Alarms so that your team knows as soon as your application is experiencing delivery or compliance issues. Finally, you'll find a curated list of deliverability and compliance resources so that your team has the knowledge to operationalize your messaging program long term.