Quick answer: a first SMS campaign on Devotel Orbit is eight ordered steps — create the free account, complete identity verification (KYC), buy a number, register it for US A2P traffic if you send there, import opted-in contacts only, send a test campaign to a handful of real numbers, watch the delivery receipts arrive on your webhook, then scale. US SMS is published at $0.0075 per segment with no monthly platform fee, and the whole run is dashboard tasks plus one webhook endpoint — no sales call and no integration project between signup and the first delivered message.
This walkthrough is for engineering and ops teams standing up their first sends. Every step names the console path or the API surface you actually touch, the order you touch it in, and the check that tells you the step is done before you move on.
How to run your first SMS campaign in eight steps
Step 1: Create the account and keep the balance honest upfront
Signup is free with no card. New accounts start at a zero balance — pre-pay credits from the Billing page when you are ready to send, and a test campaign costs a few cents at published rates. Complete identity verification (KYC) early rather than when volume forces it: KYC starts as pending_review and unlocks higher sending limits and voice origination when it is approved, and there is no fixed wall-clock SLA on that review. A team that skips KYC and hits the sending ceiling mid-campaign created its own bottleneck.
Step 2: Buy and assign a number
In the Numbers section, buy a number in the country your recipients live in — the number's country drives which carrier registrations apply, not your company's address. Assign it to your messaging profile so sends from it inherit the profile's routing and webhook. Keep the traffic's geography consistent: a US number sending to UK recipients is a deliverability problem you manufactured, not a carrier fault.
Step 3: Register for US A2P traffic if you send there
US carrier traffic over long codes runs on 10DLC, and unregistered traffic is filtered or blocked outright. Registration is two filings with The Campaign Registry — a Brand (your legal entity) and a Campaign (what you will send, with sample messages copied from real sends) — and first filings pass when the Brand's legal name and EIN match the tax record character for character. The step-by-step filing, including the vetting tiers that set your daily per-number cap, is in How to Register for 10DLC: The Step-by-Step TCR Walkthrough; the re-submission playbook when a filing comes back rejected is Why 10DLC Campaigns Get Rejected. Skip this step only if none of your recipients are on US carriers.
Step 4: Import opted-in recipients only
The first campaign's deliverability is decided by the list it goes to before any carrier sees it. Import contacts who consented to receive your texts — the import surfaces a suppression check against your own do-not-contact list, and US destination numbers are screened against do-not-call registers on the send path. A list with no provable opt-in is how a first campaign turns into a fraud-screen flag on a brand-new account. Consent language belongs in the import record, so the "where did they say yes" question has an answer months later. The pre-import checklist is in The Consent-Proof Checklist for Your First Messaging List.
Step 5: Send a small test campaign to real numbers first
Create the campaign with a short body (under 160 GSM-7 characters keeps it to one segment), send it to a handful of real numbers — your team, on at least two carriers — and read the receipts before you touch the full list. The API path is one authenticated request per send: the X-API-Key header, a destination number, and a body, and the response is a trackable message id. The first test answers three questions at once: the sender renders correctly on a real handset, the carriers you will actually use accept the traffic, and your webhook receives the receipt.
Step 6: Watch delivery receipts, not just the send response
A 200 on the send means queued, not delivered. Delivery status — queued, sent, delivered, failed — arrives asynchronously on the webhook you configured, and the same events land in the inbox against the contact. Read the delivered/failed split on the test batch; a pattern of failures on one carrier at this size is the cheapest carrier-registration or routing diagnosis you will ever get. The full lifecycle and what each status actually guarantees is on the SMS API page.
Step 7: Scale with pacing and the cost model in hand
Move from the test batch to the list in paced batches — US long-code traffic has per-number daily caps set by your 10DLC vetting tier, and a full-list blast on day one is how campaigns get throttled at the carrier. Cost the run from the published numbers, not a spreadsheet of quotes: US SMS is $0.0075 per segment, every other destination is published per country on /pricing/sms, and the API call's 160-character segment math (70 for Unicode) decides how many segments a body costs. Recipients past the first base should be triggered by segment or schedule, and every send should respond to delivered/failed events — the receipts are how you learn the list's real quality.
Step 8: Turn delivery into a governed loop, not a one-off
The first send's receipts are the baseline every later campaign is judged against. Keep the webhook subscription durable (a missed receipt re-polls the message id), monitor the per-carrier delivered split, and retire numbers and use cases that no longer carry traffic rather than letting them drift. When the second and third campaigns start, the levers stay the same: list quality, registration accuracy, and the delivered/failed read — the SMS API page stays the reference surface for each checklist.
What this buys you
Run the steps in order and the first campaign is a day of dashboard work, not an integration project: the account is free to open, the registration is one wizard, the test batch costs single-digit cents, and the receipt webhook answers "did it land" with events rather than log-diving. Every later campaign inherits the same spine — the number, the registration, the consent record, and the receipt feed — so the runbook runs once and then only the list and the copy change.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need 10DLC registration for my first campaign?
Only when recipients are on US carriers. US A2P traffic over long codes requires a registered Brand and Campaign; unregistered traffic is filtered or blocked. Non-US destinations follow the destination country's sender rules instead — the country-by-country matrix is on /pricing/sms.
How long from signup to a delivered message?
Same day when US registration is not on the critical path. Account creation is immediate, numbers activate in minutes, and a test campaign is one authenticated API call. US 10DLC adds 24–48 hours of Brand vetting and 1–5 business days of campaign review, so file it first when the US is in scope — the filing walkthrough is How to Register for 10DLC.
What does a first campaign actually cost?
The account and the tooling are free; you pay per message. US SMS is $0.0075 per segment, so a 100-recipient single-segment test costs $0.75. A body over 160 GSM-7 characters splits into multiple segments and multiplies the cost — the per-country published rates are at /pricing/sms, and the seller-tier comparison across providers is in top SMS APIs ranked for 2026.
How do I know whether messages were delivered?
The send response means queued. Delivery status arrives asynchronously: queued → sent → delivered or failed events post to your webhook and land in the inbox against the same contact, and a missed receipt can be re-read by message id. Read the delivered/failed split per carrier on the test batch — that is the campaign's delivery report, not the send log.
Can I run the same steps for WhatsApp or voice?
The spine is identical — account, number, consent-clean list, test batch, receipt subscription — and the specifics move: WhatsApp Business adds Meta's template and quality-rating gates, and voice adds origination behind the same KYC. The channels share contacts, campaigns, and the webhook model on Orbit, so the second channel is a routing change on the same account rather than a second integration. The WhatsApp half of the runbook is the WhatsApp Business API guide.