How to Connect to SMS Gateways for Effective Text Messaging

More and more businesses are connecting to SMS gateways to reap the benefit or text message communication with their clients. What do you need to text-enable your business?

So where do you start and what do you need? While we’ll come to that and connection to the SMS gateways in a bit, it is important to understand what you will use text messaging for. Some companies use it for marketing and sales, others use it exclusively to enhance their customer service. And, of course, there are companies that use text messaging for all three, and more.

• To ensure that your connection to SMS gateways is worth it, determine where text messaging will fit into your business.

Once you’ve figured out exactly what you’ll be using text messaging for, work out where it will fit in, especially in relation to your current software environment. Create sample campaigns and see how they fit in with your software environment.

• Where’s text messaging going to fit into your business? Be elaborate in your planning, to ensure that you cover all your bases.

It’s important to know what your text messaging requirements are in its entirety – it will help you make the right product choice for successful messaging through SMS gateways. Here are some of the various products you can choose from.

Web-based Applications

As the name implies, these applications allow you to use your web browser to message your contacts through SMS gateways. The benefit here is that, when using a web-based application, you can use it from virtually anywhere where there’s an internet connection. These applications often provide you with added functionality, such as address books, contact lists, two-way messaging, and much, much more.

Communicator is an example of a web-based text messaging application.

Application Programming Interfaces (API’s)

Think of the API as the backbone of the web-based text messaging application. It’s the set of rules behind the pretty interface that makes the messaging possible. Many companies use the API’s to send text messages through the SMS gateways because it allows them to create their own interface (or plugins for existing interfaces) and integrate text messaging into their existing systems, such as databases, CRM programs, and more.

For a list of all the available API’s and how their individual features, just follow the link below.

• Choose the product that is right for your business AND that you’ll be able to use successfully.

Choosing Your Provider for SMS Gateways Messaging

One area of commercial mobile messaging that many businesses find a bit daunting is choosing the right bulk text messaging provider. In most cases businesses focus on price alone, and not on the quality of the service involved – what good is paying for messages when the service you are using isn’t reliable. And because you only pay for message credits in most cases (and because they are affordable), it is possible to afford your business, and your customers, that extra bit of quality.

• Don’t base your choice on price. Make message reliability your primary focus.

Once you’ve chosen your provider, check whether they offer free sign ups. Remember, you already pay for the message cost, so sign up should be free.

When everything is in place and you’ve sent your first messages, the only thing that remains is to keep an eye on response rates (with the aid of reporting tools made possible by the web application or API functionality) and see where you can tweak your messages for optimal performance.

For more information or a list of available API’s, just go to our SMS gateways page.

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Tags: Application Programming Interface (API), sms gateway, sms gateways, SMS provider, web-based text messaging