When a Good Plan Comes Together: The SMS Gateway Conundrum – Part 2

Hitting a blank when you have to choose an SMS Gateway? Try dominoes.

We’re talking about planning – planning the implementation of an SMS service. Another way of thinking about it is accumulating the right types of information and structuring it accordingly. This is important, since it will help make the right choice for an SMS Gateway product.

So let’s accumulate information.

Reaching Your Goals

Determining where you are in terms of your communication strategies and how it will help you reach your business goals is a crucial element of any business. After all, as humans we rely on communication to provide us with the information we need to make sound choices. If the information is lacking or inaccurate, we inevitably suffer the resulting consequences. Parallel to that is also how information is delivered and through which medium.

The next step in the process lies in identifying the SMS gateway tools that will help you reach your goals. An SMS gateway is the platform of the bulk SMS service provider that interfaces with your business. This interfacing is done with the help of application programming interfaces, more commonly referred to in technical circles as an ‘API’.

One suggestion that could help identify the right SMS gateway tool is to draw up a list consisting of various requirements. These requirements should reflect the business’ goals, take the current software environment into consideration and pay attention to current communication strategies and how the short message service will interface with them. Additionally, an attempt should be made to predict any possible short-term changes in communication strategy or technology to aid in the decision-making process.

Once the list has been completed, it should be compared to the features of SMS gateway products to best make the right choice. An example of an active features page can be found on Clickatell’s Connecting to our gateway via HTTP/S by clicking on the “Clickatell Gateway Features” and “Supported Message Types” links.

Making the right choice will:

• Keep overall development costs down to a minimum
• Provide a scalable communications platform
• Enable an effective communications solution central to the entire organisation
• Supply the organisation with a technology more than capable of delivering on a timeous and realistic return on investment (ROI)

Important: One way to ensure that the SMS gateway technology you choose is the right one is to compare it to actual use cases or case studies for your particular industry. Should its capability match or exceed the various scenarios and possible variations of that scenario, you can be pretty sure that you’ve made the right choice. In short, your planning should be like a row of dominoes – when put in motion, everything should fall in place in an orderly fashion.

Get more information by visiting our SMS gateway page today.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: application programming interface, Developers, HTTP/S API, Marketing, Messaging in action, sms gateway, sms gateways, SMS integration, text message strategy