Cold SMS
Iron has a native cold-SMS acquisition engine. It enrolls pool leads into campaigns, drips messages within business hours, classifies replies, and promotes hot replies into the CRM.
The pipeline
Section titled “The pipeline”- Enroll — the enroller (an hourly beat) selects pool leads that match a campaign’s targeting and are mobile + US, not on the DNC list, and not already enrolled. It creates the enrollment and the first scheduled send, filling toward the campaign’s daily target (idempotent within a day, so running hourly never overshoots).
- Dispatch — a 60-second beat drains the send queue: it checks the guards (business hours, budget, DNC, sender, dedup), sends, and schedules the next step.
- Classify — inbound replies are scanned and classified. A hot reply is promoted to a
crm.contactsrecord, an SMS conversation is ensured in the inbox, and an Engaged-stage opportunity is created so the reply lands in the pipeline. - Alert — a hot reply posts a rich card to the team’s replies channel with a deep link into the CRM.
Key behaviors
Section titled “Key behaviors”- US-only filter. The data stores US leads as bare 10-digit numbers (telephony normalizes to
+1on send) and international contaminants as E.164 with+. The enroll filter accounts for this. - Warm-line carve-out. The org’s warm two-way line (used for booking confirms, the setter, and manual replies) is excluded from the cold rotation so cold volume never burns its reputation. Cold blasts rotate the other numbers.
- Dead-letter. A permanent rejection (for example, an international number rejected with
422) is dead-lettered on the first attempt rather than retried.
Reporting
Section titled “Reporting”Cold-SMS KPIs (reply rate, positive reply rate, abandon rate, the conversion gates, per-1K funnel, per-campaign) are reported per unique lead, not per message — the industry-standard convention. The outreach scorecard lives in the reports surface.