How To Create a SMS Bot for Free in 2024 (4 Steps)

Step 1: Create a free Manychat account

The first step to creating your SMS chatbot is deciding on the chatbot platform you are going to use.

In general, I recommend going with no-code platforms, because these platforms allow you to create chatbots without using any code.

This is great if you want to get started quickly and don’t want to be reliant on developers.

For this tutorial, I will be using two platforms: Manychat and Twilio.

Manychat will be the “brain” of our SMS chatbot, taking care of the chat flows we are going to create.

I use Manychat because it is:

• Easy to use, you can get started even if you have zero experience with chatbots
• No-code platform, you can create chatbots without writing any code
• Cheap, they offer a free plan and their paid plan already starts at $15 a month

Twilio is used for sending and receiving text messages.

So, the first thing you need to is create a free Manychat account (click below to get my 100% discount code):

Create Free Manychat Account

Then, click on Get Started Free:

And Continue with Facebook to sign up for your free Manychat account:

Step 2: Connect your Twilio number to Manychat

The next step is to get a number from Twilio and connect it to Manychat.

Twilio is a software company that allows you to send and receive text messages all over the world.

And they are really good at this while keeping very low prices.

You can just click the button below to create your free Twilio account:

Create Free Twilio Account

Here, you can click on Start for free in the top-right corner:

And fill in the details for your new account:

When you sign up for Twilio, you get a trial account with a $15 balance to test it. If you’re satisfied, you can upgrade to a paid account later.

Once you are signed up to Twilio, the next step is to get a phone number.

Click on Get a trial phone number to get your free number:

Once you get your number, you need to scroll down and copy the Account SID, Auth token and Twilio phone number:

Then in Manychat, go to Settings, select SMS and click on Connect:

Click on Connect again:

And paste the Twilio information to Manychat and click on Connect:

Now, your Twilio is connected to Manychat and you should see the following screen:

Step 3: Add your number as a verified phone number

If you have a trial account number, only specific phone numbers can text it. These are known as verified phone numbers.

To text your Twilio number, you must add your phone number to the list of verified numbers.

To add your number, click on the verified phone numbers link under “Account Info”:

Click on Add a new Caller ID:

And fill in your own phone number:

Now, Twilio will send a verification code to your phone number. You can just fill in the verification code in Twilio and your phone number is verified!

Step 4: Create the Chat Automation in Manychat

Once you have connected your Twilio number to Manychat, you can get started with creating the chat automation flow.

Let’s say we are a productivity coach and we are giving a free 5-day challenge.

So they can sign up for the 5-day challenge in our SMS chatbot.

And once they are signed up, we are going to send them one message per day over 5 days, with tips on how they can improve their productivity.

First, we are going to create a registration flow so people can register for the challenge.

In Manychat, select Automation and click on New Automation:

And as a starting step, we are going to add a trigger.

A trigger is an event that activates this flow. And in this case, we want to activate the flow when someone messages us a phrase with the word “challenge” in it.

To create a new trigger, click on New Trigger:

Now click on SMS and choose Contact sends a message with a keyword:

Then we can set it to the message contains “challenge” and click on Create:

Now, every time someone messages us a phrase with the word “challenge” in it, we automatically reply with this automation.

Next, we need to add a message to our automation. So you can just click on SMS.

And before we let them participate in our challenge, we first want to know their first name and email.

So in the first message, you can remove the first text block and add the User Input element:

By using the User Input, we can ask a question and store the answer in a Manychat field.

And then we can also use the Manychat field in our automations.

To get their first name, we can ask:

Hey there! Thank you for requesting our 5-Day Challenge. To let you participate, we need some information from you. What is your first name?

And you must set the Reply Type to First Name:

Then, we can connect this message block to the next one. And it’s important to understand that if someone doesn’t reply to this question, they will never get the next message.

In the next message, we will ask for the email of the person.

So we will add the User Input element and set the Reply Type to Email:

Now, Manychat will automatically validate the email. So if it’s not a valid email, it will send a Retry message.

To change the retry message, scroll down below. Also, remove the Skip keyword so people cannot skip this question:

Lastly, we will connect this block to the next block with a confirmation message:

Now you are successfully registered for the challenge!

In about 30 seconds, you will get your first productivity tip.

Once you have created your chat automation in Manychat, you can set it live by clicking on Set Live (top-right corner):

And then you can preview your automation by clicking on Preview and selecting In Messengers:

If you click on Preview again, it opens up a pop-up where you can fill in your phone number:

And Manychat automatically sends the chat automation flow to your phone number!

Now, you can test it and check whether it is working correctly