There are many SMS aggregators on the market today, but they aren’t interchangeable. To ensure that your company chooses the best aggregator for your needs, consider three important factors:
1. Speed
Whether your organization needs to reach customers with targeted messages like; client check-ins, appointment reminders, or even delivery logistic updates, speed of delivery is important. Compared to phone calls, emails and snail-mail, SMS has a major advantage: Real time delivery.
While postcards get tossed in the recycle bin and promotional emails lie dormant in unchecked mailboxes, text messages get noticed. In fact, Dynmark found that 90 percent of text messages are opened within 3 seconds. For many people, the chime of an incoming message is just too hard to ignore.
It’s of no value getting a message alert from your dentist late. It annoys you and makes your dentist’s office look bad.
Real time SMS offers a huge advantage over other forms of communication, especially when the content of the messages is personalized, relevant and important. A SMS aggregator should be able to deliver your content in a quick and efficient manner too. Your organization will benefit from almost instantaneous communication with customers and clients. Remember: Speed of delivery has a direct relationship to relevancy of your text message. Choose your text message SMS aggregator wisely.
2. Capacity
In today’s business environment, capacity plays an important role. In the past, it would take an enormous effort to prepare and send direct-mail flyers and postcards to an extensive mailing list. Now, organizations can achieve the same bulk messaging load with much less effort, but with this management consideration:
Always take care to ensure proper opt-in compliance. Message recipients have to implicitly agree to you contacting them via text messaging and to why you are contacting them. SPAM is not allowed.
So take note of a SMS aggregator that will assist you in capacity management and SPAM management best practices. Your choice of aggregator is critical. A good aggregator can advise you not only in setup and technical configurations of your SMS API calls, but help guide you in meeting the proper regulatory guidelines to improve your message content. Capacity management in terms of velocity (the amount of messaging you may place in the queue at anytime), can be adversely affected by mistakenly connecting using a less than optimal API syntax. A superior aggregator will give you guidance with support to provide real value in making your SMS API connection services agile. This is especially important when sending long messages that need to be concatenated.
Concatenation is when a long message is automatically split into multiple messages and reassembled in order, as a single message, on the receiver’s device. Once again, an effective aggregator will take care of this complex work for the user, saving them from the headache of additional work. So it’s important to closely examine the aggregator’s feature list to ensure that it can handle a bulk load of concatenated messages nimbly and efficiently.
3. Reach
Your customers and clients likely use smartphones from a spectrum of wireless carriers. To ensure that messages get delivered intact and on time, you need to select a SMS aggregator with superior reach and quality routing services. When auditioning an aggregator, ask them who their big messaging clients are, with this in mind:
Aggregators that encourage “SPAM Like” content to mobile marketers do not have quality routing and reach, because their numbers have been blocked by Telcos due to abuse. Choose them and expect poor message reach statistics.
Bulk mail service providers offering text messaging aggregation services are often plagued by SPAM, because so much of bulk mail is just that – SPAM. Critical messaging over recent years has moved away from e-mail to text messaging for this very reason. It is wise to separate your text messaging services from bulk mail services.
When you send messages, they get routed via various data networks. Your SMS aggregator needs to support each of the networks used by your organization, as well as those used by your clients. This work should be all but unnoticeable to the end user, who simply experiences a flawless transmission of data, but you need to concern yourself with these behind the scenes tasks, as you select an aggregator for your business organization’s text messaging requirements.
Are There Other Factors of a Superior SMS Aggregator?
Beyond speed, capacity and reach, there are other factors too. Experience with clients in the same business as you is invaluable. Quick and accurate response from Support when you have a problem is important too. This is especially true when Custom Message Handlers connecting SMS API routines are in your development requirements.
Learn other benefits of what a superior SMS aggregator can offer your business by visiting SwiftSMSGateway.com today.
