SMS Gateways: Your Clients WANT Text

It’s official, and very much confirmed what we knew all along: consumers not only prefer SMS alerts sent through SMS gateways, but really want them! Don’t believe us? Check out the figures:

• only 3% of mobile users currently receive SMS reminders
• 67% of mobile users want SMS alerts (bill payments, medical appointments, etc.)
• The United Kingdom is a world leader in SMS messaging (83 billion SMS messages per annum – US: 830 billion per annum)
• 60% of participants would opt in for a reminder service
• 80% of participants would also like a “customer service text call-back request capability”

(Full report available at Dialogue)

What does this tell you? If you’re not connected to SMS gateways for all your messaging needs, then now is the time to do so. And if you’re still unsure, then here are a couple of reasons why you should – and it has everything to do with the money in your bank account.

1. SMS is Cheaper & Greener than Post

   Add together the potential cost of the following items:

   • Paper
   • Printer Ink (Cost of cartridge divided by total amount of printouts)
   • Envelope
   • Stamps
   • Man hours*
   • Potential cost of undelivered / unopened letters

   * if your letters are printed, folded and stamped by machine, add machine maintenance costs

   One SMS message to a destination number within the UK clocks in at about GBP 0.057 (it’s a rough average and might change in accordance with exchange rates)

2. SMS is More Rewarding than Email

   It has been proven time and time again that messages distributed via SMS gateways to the mobile phone handsets of your contacts are capable of getting higher response rates than, say, email. There are essentially three reasons for this:

   1. Your contacts are getting too much email
   2. Email takes long to read. More often than not there are quite a number of unwanted emails
   3. SMS messages are received on a device personal and pretty much unique to the individual. In other words, communication via SMS is much more personal.

3. SMS Gateways Deliver Instantly

While there is no definite time frame according to which messages are sent through and delivered by SMS gateways, it doesn’t take more than a few seconds. Contrast this to the average delivery times of snail mail, or even the delay between the sending of an email and the recipient (hopefully) reading it. And then, of course, you’ll also have to keep in mind that SMS messages are delivered to a mobile phone, which is always carried and pretty much always on.

So if you had to choose between snail mail, email and SMS gateways for your messaging needs, which one would you choose to look after your messaging and financial interests?

Get Messaging!

That being said, let’s look at how you can start employing the SMS gateway at virtually cut-throat prices to get in touch with your customers and clients – the people who WANT you to contact them via SMS messaging.

Small & Medium Businesses: If you have less than 10,000 clients, then I’d recommend you use either Messenger PRO or Communicator, the former being a client you can install on your desktop and the latter being a web-based application with the advantage that you’ll be able to log on anywhere in the world and get those messages fired through the applicable SMS gateways.

Large Businesses, Corporations & Organisations: If you need to get in touch with more than 10,000 contacts or if you want to arm your current native software infrastructure with some serious messaging potential via SMS gateways, then choosing the most appropriate developer API (Application Programming Interface) or a combination of them suitable to your business would be the best move.

For more information and to kick-start your business with some serious short message potential, read more about SMS gateways.

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Tags: Desktop to SMS, developer API, Instant SMS Messaging, SMS alerts, sms gateway, sms gateways, Web to SMS