Let’s elaborate on the above and take a closer look at each of the mentioned products.

Clickatell’s Central Platform

What it is: a dashboard that lets you register for application programming interface products.

What it isn’t: an interface from which messages can be sent to contacts and clients.

Clickatell’s Central Platform is an extremely feature rich interface that allows you to manage the more technical Clickatell products (Application Programming interfaces, or APIs). Under the Central platform you can control:

• API Registration
• Routing Profiles
• Sub-user management
• Sender ID Management
• Two-way messaging
• Billing
• And much more

Who Should Use Clickatell Central?

Clickatell’s central platform is specifically for businesses who wish to integrate SMS text messaging within their business to interact with existing applications. This means that they’ll use any one (or a combination) of the available APIs to integrate text messaging with their computing environment for automatic messaging or messaging using a custom application.

Example:

ABC Business has used the HTTP API to integrate text messaging with their business. Their clever developers managed to create an application that is triggered by database updates to send customers automatic balance updates and related alerts and notifications.

Clickatell’s Communicator 2

What it is: A web-based application for instant individual or bulk SMS messaging.

What it isn’t: A desktop messaging application or API dashboard.

Think of the email client you are using every day. Or even an instant messaging application such as Google Talk or MSN Messenger – applications that simply require you to log in and start chatting. Clickatell’s Communicator 2 functions in exactly the same way, except that it has been built to send and receive SMS messages through a user-friendly interface.

With Communicator 2 you can:

• Send individual and bulk SMS messages directly from the easy-to-use interface
• Upload and manage contacts and contact lists
• Receive messages from contacts
• Generate and view messaging reports

Who should use Communicator 2?

Seeing as Communicator 2 presents you with a predesigned interface, it stands to reason that this web-based application is ideal for businesses that do not have intricate messaging requirements or computing environments, but would still like to reap the benefits of SMS text messaging communication with customers, employees and other contacts.

Example: XYZ Pet Store sell both pets and specialised equipment. They use Communicator 2 to notify individual customers when orders have arrived. On a monthly basis they also send out promotional information for the month ahead to all customers. Since they don’t have any extensive IT requirements, they are happy to use a web-based SMS messaging tool that will allow them to connect inexpensively with their customers on a device that’s always carried and always on.

Need more information on bulk SMS messaging applications and tools? Visit our product page today.

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Travel companies are increasingly connecting with customers through the SMS gateway. It’s indicative of a trend whereby travel companies are increasingly trying to provide their customers with information “right there in their pocket” that would make their lives easier and their journeys more pleasant. To that end, we look at the various APIs that can be employed by businesses considering and SMS solution.

SMS Gateway APIs

For the sake of clarity we’ll group the APIs together into those that support two-way messaging, and those that only provide one-way messaging through the SMS gateway.

Two-Way APIs

The following API’s provide two-way messaging functionality through the SMS gateway:

• HTTP/S
• SMPP
• FTP

Both HTTP/S and FTP are protocols commonly used on the internet. As such they are well known and well documented, therefore minimising the need for expert knowledge or skill. Subsequently the business will benefit through ease of implementation, reduced cost and efficient maintenance.

The SMPP, or Short Message Peer-to-Peer, protocol requires a fair measure of technical skill and expertise, but provide corporate enterprises with the benefit of a fast message transport medium. This protocol is in use by most big carriers, and allows for reliable connectivity to the SMS Gateway with both synchronous and asynchronous messaging being an option.

One-Way APIs

The one-way APIs can essentially be grouped into three distinctive groups that allow for connectivity to the SMS gateway. These groups include:

• Protocols (SOAP, SMTP – also known as email to SMS)
• Languages (XML)
• Objects (COM objects)

Remember that the choice in API shouldn’t necessarily be directed to those that offer two-way functionality. It is always possible to combine two APIs to ensure that travellers are communicated with through the SMS gateway, with the least amount of expense possible.

Read more about the APIs by visit our SMS gateway page now.

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An article in USA Today discusses a new iPhone app released by price comparison site FareCompare.com that sends ‘text-like’ messages to customers as soon as the rates on selected routes drop. Needless to say this is an application that all travellers can use. But, unfortunately, not all travellers have an iPhone, which is why travel companies can reach  more people, by implementing easy-to-use SMS software.

It’s About Ubiquity

While the application is probably unique in terms of the platform it was designed for, it has to be kept in mind that similar text-based applications have been around for quite a while. Subsequently there exist a number of SMS software applications that can help travel companies and other small businesses communicate important information to customers at the click of a button.

Yet while that communicates the technology, you have to keep in mind that there is a fundamental reason why text messaging is perhaps more adequate to the purpose: regardless of which handset travel agencies’ customers have, they’ll always be able to send and receive text messages and do not require an internet connection or special platform capable of hosting applications. And, as with any application, SMS text messaging is a near-instant form of communication, which means that it is often delivered within seconds.

Getting Started with SMS Software

There exists many types of SMS software, each with its own particular functionality. Here are some of the main types as listed on the products page:

API: An API, or Application Programming Interface, refers to a small piece of software that allows businesses to integrate one system or service with another. These interfaces require technical knowledge and often software development skills and is suited to businesses that have their own development.

Browser-based: Browser-based SMS software refers to an interface accessible only through a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

Desktop: Similar to browser-based SMS software, except that it is installed locally on the desktop or laptop computer which means it can be used without a browser. However, unless a local SMS modem is used, it will still require an internet connection.

In most cases it’s a question of starting small. In other words, trying out either the desktop or browser-based SMS software to ensure that it delivers on its expected ROI before integrating an API into the business. Additionally, this will also provide you with the opportunity to determine exactly what types of information your customers want.

Get more information about the package that’s right for your business on the SMS Software page.

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You might recently have read a report about the Italian Mafia using text messaging to communicate with jailed bosses. According to the Telegraph,  text messages were sent to an Italian football show that uses a ticker to scroll fans’ text messages at the bottom of the screen. Needless to say show bosses are now considering removing this feature of the program, but it does highlight an ostensible growing trend: combining text messaging and television. And because this combination relies on time-critical messaging, one can only assume that SMPP is the message transport agent being used.

Why Texting and TV?

It’s all about being social and transforming a popular one-way medium (television) into a platform that allows businesses to create a ‘community’ feature to their products. After all, consumers prefer to interact with the businesses they deal with on a social basis that could potentially connect them to other people. It’s about turning a traditionally one-way medium into a social platform. This is achieved using SMPP as a high volume messaging agent with two-way functionality.

About SMPP

SMPP, or short message peer-to-peer, is a protocol that uses TCP/IP. This means that businesses can transmit messages to contacts and receive messages from them using the internet. Better yet, seeing as it is a protocol it can be integrated with software in any custom software environment.

Should You Invest?

In TV and texting? Only if it makes sense in terms of strategy and budget. But it’s worth considering that your customers, clients and even other businesses are expecting you to be more social – it’s about 1-on-1 communication on a personal device, which essentially means that the business (yours) is adhering to current consumer trends using a cost-efficient and very powerful communications protocol, SMPP.

So What About Social Networking

One other aspect of current consumer trends not yet discussed is the fact that consumers also like convenience (who doesn’t?). This means that having more than one solution for customer service, sales, etc. in place will prove beneficial to the business. It should however be kept in mind that text messaging is capable of providing a platform of communication that can be accessed from virtually everywhere where there is cellular coverage – perfect for those occasions where internet access might not be readily available that requires an inexpensive solution for consumers.

Find out more about the short message peer-to-peer protocol and how it will fit into your business by going to our SMPP page.

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Ray Tomlinson invented email in 1972. According to a number of sources, the Short Message Service (SMS) was created by Friedhelm Hillebrand, Bernard Ghillebaert, and Oculy Silaban. Both technologies, however, gave rise to new trends in communication that has been adopted worldwide. And now that they’ve been united by the email to SMS gateway, a new trend of text messaging via email is steadily rising.

Why is it Working?

Some of the major benefits of email include the fact that it provided an alternative to voice calls whilst being as fast. It also allowed us to transfer files as attachments, reducing the reliance on faxing and the post. But, you still need to have access to a medium that will allow you the convenience of email, such as a computer connected to the internet or a phone capable of sending and receiving email.

Text messaging on the other hand simply requires a mobile phone and mobile coverage. And because more people have a mobile phone than those with a computer or internet connection, the email to SMS gateway is more than just a gateway to send SMS text messages through, it is a portal that allows those who are used to using email to connect with current and potential customers that don’t.

Is it Scalable?

The fact that email is entirely scalable as a result of decades of testing and trying different implementations to cater for various scenarios makes the email to SMS gateway a totally scalable solution with increased business reach.

Another benefit that arises as a result of its ease of use is the fact that it doesn’t require any special training in terms of the technology used – sending a text message through the email to SMS gateway is as easy as composing a plain text email with the following body or structure:

user:xxxxx
password:xxxxx
api_id:xxxxx
to: 448311234567
text:Meet+me+at+home

It’s as simple as that. The above format can, for the sake of convenience, be converted into a message template, or integrated into a system for automatic messaging via the email to SMS gateway.

Get more information! Read about the email to SMS gateway today!

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“Post-recession consumer trends” – if you haven’t yet realised that emerging technologies and strategies are edging toward them, then now is the time to start doing your homework. Quite simply, it refers to the effect the recession has had on consumer behaviour. The latter is important because it determines how businesses should present themselves to their current and prospective customers in order to maintain or increase retention whilst still gaining new customers. This also has bearing on the technology used – the more effective, the greater the eventual response from the consumer… which is why bulk SMS is rapidly climbing the ‘preferred technology’ charts.

However, quite possibly one of the most important advancing consumer trends is business transparency. While there may be many variations on the definition, suffice it to say that customers and stakeholders expect the business to be more open and honest about what’s happening in the company. It’s about being personal with your customers – gone is the day where trends are set by the business. Now it’s about the perception of the consumer, and how far the business is willing to go to provide better value for money.

So what has this got to do with bulk SMS text messaging? And how can it be used to further business transparency?

Bulk SMS allows for the concise distribution of information that can be read on any device capable of receiving an SMS text message – no need for an app-enabled phone or the mobile internet. This makes it a viable channel to get in touch with 75% of the global population. It also makes it the ideal channel to communicate with users who might not have time during the day to use the internet to catch up on all the news that’s important to them.

From the business’ point of view, bulk SMS provides a reliable medium that can be used to build a rapport with the customer by sharing relevant news and business developments through alerts and notifications – information that will make the business more transparent and that could potentially fuel sales and increase retention (depending on the information). Perhaps most importantly, one should keep in mind that SMS text messaging is by nature a form of communication with the emphasis on immediacy, which means real-time information can be passed on to customers, wherever they may be.

Think you can use text messaging as a medium to enhance your company’s transparency? Read more on our bulk SMS page.

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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.

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“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning” – Winston Churchill

A lot of speculation as to the reasons why businesses fail seem to be doing the rounds these days, especially since more than 32,000 businesses were predicted to fail for the 2009/10 period.

One of the most common reasons across a number of different websites, is bad management… many business owners don’t seem to know how to manage their business, with the result being imminent doom & gloom.

Arguably, good business depends on good planning. And the same is true for the SMS service you want to use to provide your customers with increased value; to provide them with a reason to stay loyal to your business…

Operational Planning: Now & Then

A number of planning models exist both in print and online. All of them, however, seek to answer four or 5 key questions:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to be (after x period of time)?
3. How will we get there?
4. How will we measure our progress?
5. (Optional: Where can we tweak?)

Answering these questions successfully won’t guarantee your success, but the answers will provide you with a roadmap of where you want to go and how you could get there (I’m using the conditional form, as planning often differs, even if slightly, from reality). Let’s look at how the above can be applied to plan successfully for the implementation and deployment of an SMS service.

1. What types of customer communication do you currently use?
   • Do you want to distribute promotional information, account information or a combination of different types of information?

This isn’t exclusive to an SMS service: whenever a new form of communication is brought into an existing communication strategy, care should be taken to see how these various forms of communication will affect one another.

Additionally, what do you want to use the SMS service for and what are the results you expect from it? Answering these questions is a bit more tricky than might initially appear:

2. What do you expect from an SMS service?
   • Can it easily provide a return on investment (ROI)?
   • Can it increase revenue, either on its own or in conjunction with other media types or when used in a different department?

What are your monetary expectations from your SMS service:

It should also be considered whether and how the SMS service can be used to fuel customer retention (one of its great benefits) as well as customer acquisition – it is inevitable that there are some customers that will want to leave. But, with some careful planning and a well thought out SMS service, it is possible to tip the balance in favour of new customers whilst retaining the majority of current customers.

Next week’s post will cover how you can get there. But in the mean time, read more on our SMS service page.

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You’ve heard about bulk SMS text messaging for businesses and have read up on the pros and cons, and decided it’s something you’d like to use. But you’re scared that it requires too much tech-savvy and will take too much time to learn to use effectively. Luckily bulk SMS providers have taken this into account and have developed what they think is a suitable web SMS texting client for their current and potential clients. Here’s how you choose the right client…

Take the Email Approach with Web SMS

It doesn’t matter which email client you use, be it online or on your desktop, there are a couple of things that stay the same:

• The ‘New’ mail button will always be somewhere to the left
• To the far right you’ll always find ‘Help’
• With most clients you can press F5 or F9 to Send/Receive
• Account preferences are more or less in the same place
• And there’s always an address book

The same can be said about websites, with the ‘Home’ button always to the left, and so on. When it comes to web SMS, it therefore makes sense to look for an interface that you are familiar with and one that all members of the company will be able to use without needing any significant amount of training. In short, expect the same intuitive interface that you would from your email client. Here’s an example:

A: The Menu Bar

Whether it’s on the side or displayed on top most Web SMS clients should at least have some kind of menu where all the many functions are grouped together. This facilitates ease of use, making web SMS as easy as using a website or desktop application.

B: Address Book

Ever seen an email client without an address book? Doesn’t make sense, does it? Especially since the purpose of the entire application is to use SMS text messaging to get in touch with your contacts. The test is in the functionality of the address book – does it allow you to import your contacts and manage them with a certain amount of flexibility? Can you manipulate lists, create groups, etc.? These aspects of address book management become important the deeper you go into mobile marketing.

C: Reporting

In terms of web SMS, reporting is a very important feature. It helps you track your text messages to see which  of them have been delivered, which have been opened, etc. When you’re running campaigns, this becomes especially important as it will help you analyse the success of the campaigns you’re running and also identify areas where you can improve.

D: Help

Here’s an interesting thought: where would the cyber realm be without the trusty ‘Help’ or F1 function. True, most of us don’t use it until there’s no other option, but, still, it’s nice to know that it’s there and that it works. The help function should provide the same in-depth product information found in any other application.

Can you think of anything else to keep an eye out for when selecting a web SMS product? If you can, leave it in a comment below.

For more information or to register for your free account, go to our web SMS Communicator 2 page.

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What is SMPP?

Like FTP, TCP and SMTP, to name a few, SMPP is a protocol. It’s short for Short Message Peer-to-Peer protocol and was originally designed by Aldiscon. Afterwards Aldiscon was acquired by Logica who then handed the SMPP protocol to the SMPP Developers Forum, which later became known as The SMS Forum, which is now disbanded. Version 5.0 is the most recent version with versions 3.4 and 3.3 being the most widely used.

What Makes SMPP Different? The Checklist…

1.      High-Volume Sending

While low message volumes are possible, SMPP is ideally used for high-volume messaging. This is done via an SMPP session that is active on a TCP/IP session, which essentially means that SMPP relies on internet connectivity to deliver bulk SMS text messages. These sessions can either be synchronous or asynchronous:

• Synchronous SMPP: When a message is sent, an acknowledgement is required before the next message is sent.
• Asynchronous SMPP: Messages are sent in batches and acknowledged in the same manner.

It’s safe to say that this protocol is ideal for companies and organisations who require high-speed messaging to a number of contacts.

2.      Developer’s Touch

The way companies connect via SMPP to an SMS gateway for the delivery of bulk SMS messages is by means of an application programming interface, or API. A number of API’s exist for other protocols that will allow different software environments to connect to the SMS gateway.

SMPP, however, is different in that it requires in-depth technical and development knowledge for implementation. If you’re a developer with keen insight into languages like PHP, PERL, C, etc., then this should not pose a problem. However, if you do not have said skills, then one of the other API’s or SMS-enabled applications might prove to be more beneficial.

3.      Focused Support

Unlike the other protocols, SMPP was specifically designed for text messaging. And seeing as this protocol is also supported by Short Message Service Centres (SMSC’s), it is quite popular and therefore enjoys a lot of support on the internet in forums and other websites.

For more information or to get your hands on detailed documentation, go to the SMPP page now.

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