Choosing Email to SMS: The API Checklist

Email to SMS is a helpful little way of getting in touch with customers and employees. But it helps to do a little testing to ensure that you are making the right choice.

So you’ve heard a bit about using text as a super-duper method of communication and have now taken the next step: reading up on it. Congratulations. But as you may (or may not) know, there exist a range of API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow you to get in touch with your clients. So why should you choose email to SMS?

There’s one very important reason: email to SMS is a high-calibre API that can be used by, well, everyone.

Email to SMS, in technical terms, is known as the SMTP API and relies on the SMTP protocol to get the job done. Now while SMTP might perhaps sound like something technical and that you may not have heard of before, rest assured that you’re probably using it every day. Most mail clients (such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc.) rely on SMTP to deliver your email messages to the intended destination or recipient.

About Email to SMS

The SMTP API, or email to SMS, has its own range of attributes that make it suitable for certain types of
environment. These include:

• Ease of use: all it takes is a plain-text email
• One-way messaging: perfect for notifications, updates, alerts, system messages, etc.
• Bulk support: email to SMS can be used to send out a couple of messages, a couple of thousand, or even a couple of million. It’ll do this without blinking an eye.

Should You Use Email to SMS?

Now this is where the checking starts. Whether we’re talking about email to SMS or the HTTP/S API, how do you know which to use? Well, there are a couple of things you should take into account before finally deciding. Here are a couple of questions you should ask yourself:

“What are my texting purposes?”

Identifying the purpose will automatically identify the requirements. As mentioned before, email to SMS is most efficiently employed in situations where one-way communication, in the form of alerts and notifications, are most applicable. These alerts and notifications can either be automatically generated (systems alerts, network alerts, weather alerts, etc.), or they can be typed (promotional alerts, sale notifications, etc.).
Answering this question requires a bit of future planning. If your requirements for two-way communication are low to moderate, then email to SMS can be used in conjunction with the HTTP/S API to make bidirectional communication a possibility whilst still drawing on the strengths of the SMTP API.

“What could my future software infrastructure look like?
It’s hard to predict the future, but in business it’s the one thing that will help you keep your head above water. If you’re intending on expanding, and need a sure-fire method of communication, then the SMTP API could well be the solution for you – easy to use ‘out of the box’ and comes with super scalability.

And that’s the basic API checklist. Think this is something you can use? Follow the link to our email to SMS page now…

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Tags: email to SMS, HTTP/S API, one-way messaging, SMS alerts, sms notifications, SMTP API, two-way SMS