Contacts are an essential part of TextUs, allowing you to easily save and access user information for smart, targeted messaging. In this short guide, we’ll walk through how to create your first contact and introduce you to important features such as tags, notes, and conversations. Once you’ve completed all the steps outlined here, you’ll be all set to start messaging!

First, click Contacts on your top navigation bar. This will bring you to your contacts page, where all your contacts are shown as a list. Since we’re just getting started, we don’t have any contacts yet. To create a new one, click the Add Contact button that sits on the top left corner of the page.

After clicking the Add Contact button, a New contact form will appear where you can input the First name, Last name, Business, and Phone number for your contact. There is also a field called Type where you can specify the type of phone number for your contact, such as a mobile phone or landline. This information is useful later when determining whether or not their number can receive text messages.

After adding your contact’s information to the New contact form, you can choose to add a tag (or several tags) to that contact. Tags are a useful feature that allow you to group multiple contacts under a specific label. In this example, we’re going to add the tag “Restaurants” in order to label this contact as a business within the restaurant industry.

To add a tag, type the name of the tag in the Tag box. If the tag already exists within your organization, select it from the list. If you’re creating a new tag, you will have the option to select Add “Tag Name”.

In the future, we will be able to easily find all contacts with this label by searching tags: “restaurants” on our Contacts page.

Now that we’re done filling out the information for our new contact, we’re ready to save it. Click the Save button on the bottom right corner of the New contact form, and you’ll be brought to the Contact details page for your new contact. Look over this page in order to ensure all information for this contact is correct. You can edit their information at any time by clicking the edit icon to the right of the contact’s name.

Notes allow you to capture short details about the contact, which you and other users in your organization can use as reminders or to store important information about the contact. To add a note, click the Notes dropdown menu, then click Create Note. After you’ve entered your note, click Submit to save it.

After saving your contact, you can send your first message right from the Contact details page. In addition to displaying all information associated with your contact, the page will also show your Conversation with that contact. Within TextUs, a Conversation is your message thread with an individual contact. Any messages sent to or from that contact will appear in your Conversation with them.

Since we just added this contact, our Conversation with them is currently empty. To send a message to them, type your message in the box at the bottom of the Conversation window.

Since we’re sending this message primarily as a test to one of our own numbers, we’ll keep it simple. For future messages, you can learn more about the different types of customizations such as attachments, emojis, and signatures from our Create a new conversation article.

When you’re ready to send your message, hit the Send icon.

You’ve now finished creating your first TextUs contact and sending your first message! Whew, that’s a lot of firsts. Congratulations! We hope this step-by-step guide was helpful in showing you around the different contacts-related features we offer and how to utilize them. Of course, this is just the beginning — for more in-depth information on our contacts features, see our Contacts & Groups articles and don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions here.