Help centre
Everything you need, from opening an account to reading a delivery report.
51 straight answers about Bulk SMS, WhatsApp, Email, OTP and USSD in Nigeria — what things cost, how sender IDs get approved, and what to do when a message does not arrive.
Start here
Your first campaign, in five steps
This is the whole path from signing up to proving the message landed. Most accounts complete it the same day.
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1
Create your account
Free, instant, no card. Sign up and you are inside the dashboard.
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2
Request your sender ID
The brand name recipients will see. We submit it to the networks — usually approved the same day.
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3
Load units
Prepaid and non-expiring, from ₦6.50 per unit. Check your figure on the calculator.
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4
Upload contacts & send
Import a spreadsheet, personalise with merge fields, send now or schedule it for the right hour.
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5
Read the delivery report
Per-recipient status with the raw network response — so “did it arrive?” has an actual answer.
51 answers
Browse by topic
Getting started
From landing on this page to your first message going out.
e-Gab is a business messaging platform for Nigeria. One account gives you Bulk SMS across all four networks, WhatsApp Business API, Email Marketing, OTP and transactional SMS, USSD and 2-way messaging — sharing a single contact book and a single view of what was delivered.
Create a free account with your name, email and phone number. There is no setup fee and no contract. You can explore the dashboard, build your contact lists and prepare a campaign before you spend anything — you only pay when you load units or subscribe to an Email plan.
You can open an account as an individual. A registered business name does become relevant when you request a branded sender ID, because the networks want to see that the name you send from is a name you are entitled to use. Our team will tell you exactly what is needed for your specific sender ID.
Most accounts send the same day. The account itself is instant; the step that takes the longest is sender ID approval, which is submitted to the networks on your behalf as soon as you request it.
No. e-Gab runs in the browser and is built mobile-first, so you can load units, upload contacts and launch a campaign from a phone. If you would rather send from your own system, the HTTP API is available on every account.
Yes. The account is free to open and there is no minimum spend or notice period. Load a small number of units, send a real campaign to a small list, and check the delivery report before you scale up.
Sender IDs & approval
The name your customers see when your message lands.
It is the name that appears where a phone number would normally show — your brand instead of a string of digits. An alphanumeric sender ID can be up to 11 characters, and it is what makes the difference between a message that looks like your school or your bank and one that looks like spam.
Request it from the dashboard once your account is open. We submit it to the networks for you and track the status. Most requests are approved the same day, and you can send from a shared default sender while yours is pending.
Usually because it impersonates another brand, uses a name the account holder cannot show a claim to, or resembles a bank or regulator. Choosing a sender ID that matches your registered or trading name is the fastest route through approval.
Yes. Many customers run one for transactional traffic and another for marketing, or a separate ID per brand or campus. Each one is requested and approved individually.
Alphanumeric sender IDs are one-way by design — a phone cannot reply to a name. If you need replies, that is what 2-way messaging is for, and it runs over a channel built to carry a conversation.
Sending your first campaign
Contacts, message length, scheduling and everything in between.
Upload a spreadsheet, paste numbers in directly, or push them through the API from your own system. Contacts live in groups you can reuse across every channel, so a list you build for SMS is immediately available for email or WhatsApp.
Either the local 0803… form or the international 234803… form works. The platform normalises what you upload, so a list assembled from three different sources still sends cleanly.
A single Bulk SMS request can carry up to 10,000 recipients, and you can queue as many requests as your unit balance allows. There is no practical ceiling on list size.
One unit is 160 characters using standard GSM-7 encoding. Add emoji or accented characters and the message switches to Unicode, where the limit drops to 70 characters per unit. Longer messages are split automatically and the platform shows you the segment count and the true cost before you send.
Yes. Merge fields let you drop a first name, an amount, a due date or a reference into the body, so a fee reminder reads as though it was written for that one parent.
Yes. Compose it now and set the date and time it should go out — useful for fee deadlines, service reminders and anything that has to land at a specific hour rather than whenever you happened to be at your desk.
Pricing, units & billing
What things cost, how units work, and what happens to money you do not spend.
Promotional Bulk SMS starts at ₦6.50 per unit and falls to ₦4.50 per unit at our highest volume tier, across 6 published tiers. There is no monthly fee and no setup charge — you pay for the units you send. Work out your exact figure with the pricing calculator.
A unit is one message segment to one recipient. Sending a 160-character message to 500 people costs 500 units. Sending a 300-character message to the same 500 people costs 1,000, because the message occupies two segments.
You do not negotiate for it — your tier is applied automatically from your monthly volume, so the rate falls on its own as you grow. Above 2,000,000 units a month we also negotiate custom rates and a written SLA: talk to our team.
No. Bulk SMS runs on a prepaid balance that does not expire. Top up when it suits you, send when you are ready, and anything left over stays in your account indefinitely.
Transactional SMS starts at ₦7.20 per unit and runs on its own dedicated unit balance. Keeping the two balances apart means a promotional blast can never drain the pool your customers' login codes depend on.
Email Marketing runs on monthly plans starting at ₦29, each with its own send allowance. The email page shows every plan with its cost per send worked out.
No. All published prices exclude VAT, which is applied at the prevailing statutory rate on your invoice.
Refunds are covered by our refund policy. If something was billed that should not have been, the delivery log gives us both the evidence to settle it quickly.
Delivery & troubleshooting
What happens after you press send — and how to find out why something did not arrive.
All four major Nigerian networks — MTN, Airtel, Glo and 9mobile — through one account and one API. International routes are available on request.
Every message carries a real delivery status, not just a "sent" confirmation. Status callbacks are logged with the raw provider payload, the previous status and the new one — so when a customer says they never received it, you can show exactly what happened and when.
A gateway call that fails on a temporary network blip is retried automatically before anything is marked failed. Your campaign is not held hostage by one bad second.
The usual causes are a handset switched off or out of coverage, a number that is no longer in service, a wrongly formatted number, or a subscriber who has opted out at network level. The delivery report names the reason per recipient rather than leaving you to guess.
Failures are visible in your delivery log with their reason, which is the record any billing question is settled against. If a charge looks wrong, send us the campaign reference and we will trace it against the raw provider response.
Transactional traffic such as OTP runs on a dedicated balance and pipeline so it is never queued behind a marketing blast. Actual delivery time depends on the receiving network and handset, which is exactly why every message gets a timestamped delivery report rather than an assurance.
WhatsApp, Email, USSD & 2-way
The channels beyond SMS, and when each one is the right tool.
Not per message — Meta bills WhatsApp in 24-hour conversations, and what a conversation costs depends on its category and on where the recipient is. Publishing one number would misprice it for most customers, so we quote against your real destination mix and volume instead. Replies you send inside a window the customer opened are free. See how it works.
SMS reaches every handset with no app and no data, which makes it the safest choice for anything that must arrive. WhatsApp is better when you want a two-way conversation, rich media or a thread the customer can scroll back through. Many customers use SMS as the fallback when a WhatsApp message goes unread.
Yes — that is the point of one contact book. Follow an unopened email with an SMS, or an SMS with a longer email, without exporting a single CSV.
USSD gives customers a menu they dial into with no smartphone, no app and no data — balance checks, registrations, field data collection. Pricing depends on short code and session volumes, so it is scoped per project: read more.
The inbox is part of your WhatsApp connection rather than a separate product — see how replies are handled. Conversation charges follow the same WhatsApp conversation model.
Yes, and they stay properly separated. OTP and transactional traffic run on their own unit balance and their own pipeline, on the same audited delivery log as everything else.
API & integrations
Sending from your own application instead of the dashboard.
Yes — an HTTP REST API with delivery webhooks, included on every account at no extra cost. Send, schedule and track messages from your own systems, and receive status callbacks as they happen.
No. The dashboard covers contact management, campaigns, scheduling and reporting without a line of code. The API is there for teams who want messaging triggered by their own application.
Yes. A school portal, a core banking system, an e-commerce checkout or a logistics tracker can all call the API when an event happens — a fee posted, a payment cleared, an order dispatched.
When a network reports back on a message, we post the status to a URL you control, so your own records stay in step with ours without you polling for updates.
Yes. Teams commonly separate the person who writes campaigns from the person who approves spend. Tell us how your team is structured and we will walk you through setting it up.
Consent, compliance & data
The rules that keep your sender ID healthy and your list legitimate.
No — and it is the fastest way to damage your own delivery. Send to people who gave you their number for this purpose: your parents, your customers, your members. Purchased lists produce complaints, and complaints put your sender ID at risk.
Give recipients a clear way to stop hearing from you and honour it promptly. Keeping your list clean protects your delivery rates and stops you paying to message people who do not want to hear from you.
Marketing traffic is best kept to reasonable hours; genuinely transactional messages such as OTP codes and transaction alerts are expected at any time because the customer triggered them. Sending marketing at 3am is legal in far more places than it is wise.
Your contacts are yours. We process them to deliver the messages you send — see the privacy policy for how data is handled and the terms of service for the agreement between us.
Delivery records are retained so you can answer a dispute long after the campaign is over — the raw provider payload is part of the log precisely because "we sent it" is not evidence and "here is the network's response at 14:32" is.
Account & support
When you need a person rather than a page.
By phone or email — our contact details are on one page, not buried in a ticket system. Tell us the campaign reference and we can look at the same delivery log you are looking at.
Yes. Book a walkthrough and we will show delivery tracking, campaign scheduling and API access live, using your actual volumes rather than a canned demo.
Email plans can be upgraded, downgraded or cancelled at any time with no penalty and no notice period. Bulk SMS is prepaid, so there is nothing to cancel — unused units simply stay in your account.
Yes. Bring your contact lists and your existing sender ID request and we will help you get set up. Tell us what you are running today and we will map it across.
No answer matches that yet — ask us directly and we will answer it, then add it here.
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