Don’t get snowed under by the bad weather, simply follow our list of suggestions to send effective SMS:

It will be a great opportunity to network, share best practice and gain insight first hand from organisations like University College London Hospitals, North 51 Healthcare, The University of Nottingham (Health Education /E-learning Media) and Optimum Contact (Customer feedback, FFT).

Whether you’re looking at driving staff efficiency, reducing DNA’s (Did Not Attend’s) or improving patient outcomes, SMS can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time!

For more information here’s our workshop flyer. If you’re interested in attending our workshop call 0845 356 5758 or send an email to hannah.giles@esendex.com – we hope to see you there!

For many, the 31st of March 2015 will bring about the closure of the NHSmail SMS service. NHS England have recently confirmed they will continue to fund SMS for primary care organisations such as GP practices or pharmacists, but this will end on the 30th of September 2015.

With SMS in healthcare proving to be invaluable, NHS trusts all over the country will be searching for a replacement provider.

Here at Esendex we offer a quick, easy and cost-effective method to communicate with your staff and patients. We’ve been working with hundreds of healthcare organisations large and small for over 13 years, so we know a thing or two about using SMS to optimise your communication.

Whether you’re using SMS for sending appointment reminders, planning staff shifts or even sending motivational messages, our trusted SMS services are the perfect replacement!

If you’re looking for inspiration and tips then look no further – here’s our best practice healthcare whitepaper.

Every year we start with good intentions, setting ourselves resolutions – however, the majority of us struggle to make these survive a month! Whether we sack off the gym in favour of a night in front of the TV, or we’re back to polishing off a big bag of Maltesers to ourselves – the fact is our New Year’s resolutions rarely stick.

Let’s make this year different and set a resolution that’s not only achievable, but also extremely effective. 2015 will be the year of kicking our communication into shape!

To help you stick to your resolution this year, here’s our top tips to get the most out of your SMS:

Have a clean out
Tidy up all your data! Get rid of any out of date or incorrect contacts so you are sending your SMS to the right people every time.

Clear message

It’s easy to get lost in the communication you’re sending – be sure to have a clear focus in mind. Your customers, staff or even suppliers don’t want to be bombarded with irrelevant messages, make sure each time you press send you have a reason to text.

How many is too many?
This is the age old dilemma – you don’t want to overload your customers with text messages, but equally you don’t want to be sending too few and miss an opportunity! In 2015 really take the time to find the right balance, and you’ll be on to a winner.

Mix it up
When you are sending marketing messages via SMS, you may be sending similar texts, but make sure you change the content each time you send. No one wants to read the same text over and over…

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role here at Esendex?
I graduated earlier this year from the University of Nottingham, starting at Esendex two weeks before my graduation! I enjoy cycling and socialising – both of which are embraced at Esendex. In terms of my role, I’m an apps developer working on our showcase apps such as Echo – basically I work on making our front end applications robust and easy to use.

Talk us through your average working day
We start each day with a daily scrum stand up where we gather round our whiteboard, so we can get together as a team to discuss what we’re working on and any progress made.

We work in two week sprints, breaking projects down into user stories – the minimum deliverables you can complete. From this we’ll get assigned different tasks to tackle. We always work in pairs to do this, it’s great having two sets of eyes on the code you are writing and someone to talk through challenges with.

Once a user story is complete we will hand it over to another developer for code review and a third set of eyes will check the functionality before it’s released.

What do you enjoy most about working here?
Without a doubt it’s the people and the supportive, relaxed environment! There’s also beer-o’clock every Friday, which is a great excuse to socialise with everyone in the company. Monthly socials are another great part of working here – we’ve done everything from white water rafting to summer barbeques.

We hold a team lunch every week where we go to a restaurant in town voted for by us.  You’ll also always find me in Rescue Rooms with a few colleagues after work on a Friday.

The opportunities to develop our skills are a great bonus – developers can attend one conference of their choice each year fully paid for. We also practice test driven development, which is key to writing clean, reliable code and it makes my life so much easier! It involves creating automated tests before writing a single line of production code to ensure its correctness – it’s great practice and it works really well.

What skills are important to become a developer?
To be a developer at Esendex, communication and teamwork are an absolute must so we can all work together to achieve the end goal. A desire to improve and learn is also important – we’re always looking for ways to become better at what we do and it’s part of the fun!

What advice would you give someone who wants to be a developer?
The thing that helped me the most is industry experience – in a way Uni teaches you how to learn, but it’s in the working environment when everything really starts to come together. Grab any chance of experience that comes your way! As well as this have your own projects happening on the side – especially contribute to open source projects.

Describe Esendex in three words…
relaxed, agile, purple

We’re always looking for bright, sociable developers to join our talented team, so if you’re interested either check out our careers page or email your CV and covering letter to recruitment@esendex.com.

We’re delighted to announce that once again, for the third year running, we’ve passed our annual external audit to ISO 27001 – an independent security standard which sets a framework for establishing, operating, reviewing and improving Information Security Management.

Protecting our customers’ data is vital and achieving the high standards required for ISO 27001 reaffirms our commitment to our stakeholders.

Robyn Charlton, Project Manager comments:

“ISO 27001 is hugely important to Esendex, the whole team take Information Security very seriously. Another certification that sets Esendex above the competition, demonstrating to our current and prospective customers that Esendex is a brand to have confidence in.”

With mobile phones rarely leaving our hands, it’s the perfect way to deliver any last minute Christmas messages direct to your customers, staff or suppliers. So whether it’s last order dates, Christmas offers or just festive greetings, send an SMS!

Research by Queen Mary University of London involved around 300 patients, randomly divided into two groups – one group receiving text message reminders and the other receiving no texts. The study has shown sending patients text reminders to take their medication improved the uptake of pills by 64% – it could also save healthcare providers millions!

Not only is text messaging for medication reminders effective, it’s also extremely low cost and can save valuable time and money.

For more insight into how SMS messaging can help healthcare organisations become more effective here’s our best practice healthcare whitepaper.

Iain Pink, Debby Walsh, Tom Mutton and Sam Ruddy all slept rough for the night in Sneinton Market Square. Everyone who took part was faced with a long night without their usual home comforts, freezing temperatures and nothing but concrete to sleep on.

Our team managed to raise just under £300 for Framework. All money raised will be invaluable for Framework’s continued dedication to preventing homelessness and supporting thousands of vulnerable people in the East Midlands.

Well done to everyone who took part! If you want to get involved visit our Just Giving page.

Collstream has got an outstanding team, some great technology and a really strong customer base. All of which will be added to our already existing offering to make us an even stronger combined force.

Collstream currently specialises in the debt collection agency space and provides automated SMS, Voice Messaging and IVR systems. These systems allow businesses to keep in touch with customers more cost-effectively than ever before, working together intelligently to provide alternative customer touchpoints based on where they are in the relationship. And best of all, they perfectly complement our mission-critical messaging services.

This acquisition will affect our customers – but only in a positive way, as we now have new services that you can benefit from. We’ll start to roll these out as soon as we can.

Following the acquisition of Text Marketer last year, this deal shows that we are continuing to strengthen our position as the leader in the business SMS market.