DLT and ECI compliance, done first
Every promotional SMS in India must go through DLT registration: entity registration, sender ID (header) approval, and content template approval per message. Approvals take 3–10 working days. Political content also needs MCMC pre-certification under ECI rules once the model code of conduct is in force. We start this at onboarding, not at blast time — campaigns that skip it end up sending from a random header at 2% delivery, or not sending at all.
Voter data, segmented properly
A single blast to the whole constituency is wasted money. We segment by booth cluster, age band, gender, community and voter status (first-time voter, migrated, senior citizen) and write different copy for each. A first-time voter in an urban ward and a 62-year-old in a rural booth do not respond to the same 160 characters.
Regional language and Unicode
Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Hindi and Bengali SMS go out as Unicode, which cuts the character limit to 70 per segment. We write to that limit rather than letting a message split into four billed segments. Transliteration into Roman script is often the better call for younger voters — we test both in the first week and let the click data decide.
Delivery reporting that is actually checked
You get per-campaign delivery reports: submitted, delivered, failed, and failure reason by operator. Numbers that fail three times are quarantined. We report real delivery percentage, not submission percentage — the gap between those two is where most SMS vendors hide.