How We Created An Easy Way For Anyone To Create Picture Message Marketing Campaigns

Trovebox is an online photo and video management service for businesses that is used by small businesses, non-profits and enterprises. We offer secure photo sharing, group photo collaboration features, multi-user accounts and whitelabeling. Learn more about Trovebox and see our pricing plans.


We’re preparing to exhibit at a few conferences and wanted a catchy way to engage attendees walking by our booth. We knew the engagement had to be quick, familiar and provide instant feedback. It made sense to employ text and picture messaging since it’s ubiquitous.

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Accepting photos from picture messages

The first step we needed to solve was a way to let people send a picture message and for us to fetch the photo. My first inclination was to use Twilio’s API. Turns out that Twilio only supports picture messaging for Canadian numbers and dedicated US shortcodes.

My continued search led me to an API from Mogreet. Mogreet supports shared shortcodes. This means one shortcode can be shared by multiple customers. They’re able to do this by parsing a keyword from the body of the message and linking that to a specific marketing campaign. For each marketing campaign in your account you can select an available keyword and most importantly a webhook.

Being able to accept picture messages from anyone with a mobile phone was a solved problem.

Collecting and storing photos from picture messages

Mogreet sends a payload to the callback URL as raw post data. In the response you’ll find an array of URLs to the photos which were sent. If you’re familiar with how we build products you’ll know we rely entirely on our own API to build out features. This was no exception.

There are two features of the Trovebox upload API which made this step a breeze.

  1. The photo parameter can be passed in as a URL – which we already have.
  2. An upload token can be passed in to bypass OAuth and cookie authentication. See Trovebox’s anonymous uploading featured (named Trovebox Collect) for more information.

This means a single API call and the photos in the picture message are saved into the specified album.

You can see what we built on our picture message marketing campaign page.

What’s next for picture message marketing campaigns?

That’s a good question. What started off as a quick prototype for conference exhibits turned into a really slick feature that’s already scalable to all of our customers. We’re not sure if we’ll formally offer it or not but if you’ve got a use for picture message marketing campaigns then now’s your chance to let us know by emailing support@trovebox.com.

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