25 July 202612 min read

How to Send Bulk SMS with Laravel and the DataFlows API

A practical guide for Laravel developers to send transactional and bulk SMS from a Laravel app using the DataFlows API, including queued jobs and delivery receipts.

If you run a Laravel application for an Australian business — an online store, a booking platform, or an internal tool — sooner or later you need to send SMS messages. Order confirmations, appointment reminders, one-time passwords, and promotional campaigns all perform better over SMS than email, because people read their text messages within minutes. Building this from scratch inside Laravel means handling API calls, retries, rate limits, and delivery tracking on top of everything else your application already does.

This guide walks Laravel developers through connecting a Laravel app to the DataFlows SMS API, so you can send single messages and bulk campaigns from queued jobs, track delivery status, and add SMS to any workflow already running in your codebase. By the end, you will have a working SMS service class and a queued job ready for production use.

What Is Laravel SMS Integration

Laravel SMS integration is the process of connecting a Laravel application to an SMS gateway so the app can send and receive text messages programmatically, rather than through a separate dashboard. In practice, this means calling an SMS provider's REST API from Laravel code — typically from a controller, a queued job, or a notification channel — using an API token to authenticate each request. A typical integration covers sending single transactional messages such as order confirmations and OTPs, sending bulk campaigns to a contact list, and receiving delivery receipts or inbound replies through a webhook endpoint. Laravel's built-in HTTP client, queue system, and notification framework make this straightforward: the HTTP client handles the API calls, queued jobs handle bulk sending without blocking requests, and webhooks handle delivery status updates. Done well, SMS becomes just another notification channel alongside email, sitting inside the same Laravel codebase developers already work in daily.

Why It Matters for Australian Businesses

Australian customers expect fast, direct communication, and SMS still gets read within minutes for most recipients, unlike email, which can sit unread for hours or days. For businesses running on Laravel — a common choice for Australian e-commerce sites, booking systems, and internal tools — adding SMS directly into the codebase means notifications can be triggered from the same events that already drive the rest of the application: a new order, a completed booking, a failed payment, or a support ticket update.

This avoids the need for someone to manually export contact lists into a separate marketing tool every time a campaign goes out. It also matters for compliance. Australian businesses sending SMS must handle consent, sender ID, and opt-outs correctly, and building this into application code, rather than a spreadsheet-driven process, makes it easier to log consent and honour opt-outs consistently across every campaign and every transactional message you send.

Key Benefits

Direct integration with your data — trigger SMS from Eloquent model events, controllers, or queued jobs without exporting contacts to a third-party tool.

Reliable bulk sending — use Laravel's queue system to send large batches without blocking web requests or hitting request timeouts.

Delivery visibility — receive delivery receipts through a webhook and store the status against the original message or order record.

Two-way messaging — receive inbound replies, such as STOP requests, booking confirmations, or customer questions, back into your application through a webhook endpoint.

Consistent compliance — manage consent, opt-outs, and sender ID in one place, inside the same codebase that already handles the rest of your business logic.

Step-by-Step Guide: Sending SMS from Laravel with DataFlows

Step 1: Get Your API Token

Sign up for a DataFlows account, then open the Developer section in your DataFlows dashboard to generate an API token. Keep this token private — treat it the same way you would treat a database password.

DATAFLOWS_API_KEY=your_api_token_here

Add that line to your Laravel project's .env file, and reference it from config/services.php:

'dataflows' => ['key' => env('DATAFLOWS_API_KEY')],

Step 2: Build a Simple SMS Service Class

Laravel's built-in Http facade is enough to talk to the DataFlows SMS API without installing an extra package. Create an app/Services/DataflowsSmsService.php class with a single send method that posts the recipient number and message text, authenticated with your bearer token.

Http::withToken(config('services.dataflows.key'))->post('https://api.dataflows.com.au/v1/sms/send', ['to' => $number, 'message' => $text]);

Wrapping this in a service class means every part of your application — controllers, jobs, Artisan commands — sends SMS the same way, with one place to change if the API ever needs updating.

Step 3: Send a Single Transactional Message

For a one-time password or an order confirmation, call the service directly from the controller or model event that triggers it. Because this is a single message and needs to reach the customer immediately, it can run synchronously rather than through the queue.

app(DataflowsSmsService::class)->send($order->customer_phone, "Your order #{$order->id} has shipped.");

Step 4: Queue Bulk Campaigns

Bulk sends, such as a promotion going out to a segment of your contact list, should never run inside a web request. Create a queued job that accepts a contact list and a message template, then dispatch it from an Artisan command or an admin action.

php artisan make:job SendBulkSms

Inside the job's handle method, loop through the contact list in chunks and call your SMS service for each recipient, or pass the full list to DataFlows' Bulk SMS endpoint in a single request if your batch size supports it. Chunking keeps memory usage predictable for very large lists and lets Laravel's queue retry logic handle any individual failures without resending the entire batch.

Step 5: Handle Delivery Receipts

Add a route and controller to receive delivery status webhooks from DataFlows. When a receipt arrives, match it back to the original message record by its message ID and update the status column, for example from sent to delivered or failed.

Route::post('/webhooks/dataflows/dlr', [DataflowsWebhookController::class, 'handle']);

This gives you a queryable delivery history for every message the application has sent, which is useful both for customer support and for auditing marketing campaigns.

It is worth logging the raw webhook payload as well as the parsed status, at least while you are first setting the integration up. If a delivery receipt ever looks wrong, having the original payload saved means you can check it without waiting for the message to be sent again.

Step 6: Test End to End

Before sending to a real contact list, send a handful of test messages to your own phone from a local or staging environment, and confirm both the outbound message and the delivery receipt webhook are working. Only then schedule or trigger the first live campaign.

How DataFlows Helps

DataFlows gives Laravel developers a straightforward SMS API for single and bulk sending, so you are not building queueing, retries, or delivery tracking from nothing. The Bulk SMS product is built for exactly the batch-sending pattern described above, and Contact Lists let you manage segments and opt-outs centrally instead of maintaining your own subscriber tables from scratch.

If your application also needs one-time passwords, DataFlows' OTP Verification product handles code generation and verification alongside your existing SMS sending, using the same API token. And if part of your SMS workflow is better handled outside your codebase — for example, triggering a text from a spreadsheet update or a form submission — DataFlows' Zapier integration covers that without extra development work, using the same DataFlows account and sender configuration.

Because everything runs through the same DataFlows account, an Australian business can mix approaches: transactional messages fired directly from Laravel jobs, marketing segments managed in Contact Lists, and the occasional ad-hoc campaign triggered through Zapier by someone on the team who does not touch the codebase at all. The API token from your Developer section works the same way across all of these paths, so there is one place to rotate credentials and one dashboard to check sending activity and account balance.

Best Practices

Store your API token in .env — never commit it to your repository or hardcode it in a controller.

Queue everything in bulk — use Laravel jobs for any send touching more than a handful of recipients, never a synchronous loop inside a web request.

Respect the character limit — long messages split into multiple segments and cost more to send; check your message length before sending at scale.

Filter opt-outs before every batch — re-check your contact list against unsubscribe status immediately before dispatching a campaign, not just when the contact was added.

Log delivery receipts against real records — store the DataFlows message ID on the order, booking, or campaign row it belongs to, so support staff can look up delivery status without leaving your admin panel.

Stagger very large batches — split extremely large sends across multiple queue jobs so you stay comfortably within API rate limits rather than firing everything in one burst.

Conclusion

Adding SMS to a Laravel application does not need to be a large project. A small service class, a queued job for bulk sends, and a webhook route for delivery receipts cover most of what an Australian business needs, from order updates to marketing campaigns.

Sign up at dataflows.com.au to get your API token from the Developer section and start sending your first messages from Laravel today.