Consumers want to communicate with their favorite local businesses using a variety of channels, including voice, messaging, email, and live chat. According to Fortune, the average U.S. consumer spends an average of four-plus hours on their phone daily and checks their smartphone over 140 times throughout the day.
This habit can propel your company or client’s SMS communication strategy, helping it stand out with personalized messaging. SMS activation provides tools to help your client or business successfully send text messages to users.
When you partner with a modern CPaaS provider for your messaging services, you can create business-enhancing automated messaging apps, in-app communications, and other SMS solutions using an API (application programming interface).
Why Is SMS Activation a Necessity in the Modern Business Landscape?
Customers demand convenient interactions with local businesses. Text messaging offers unparalleled convenience for customers to communicate with their favorite brands and organizations. Implementing SMS into your client or company’s communication strategy can help reach new customers and retain business. SMS implementation delivers the following benefits.
Omnichannel Support
While voice and email support are critical to many businesses, an omnichannel approach with messaging, chat, voice, and email is invaluable. Providing customers with options creates a personalized experience that allows them to select the most convenient method of communication.
Many consumers prefer to receive text messages from their favorite local businesses and will even engage in conversation using SMS. A multifaceted approach to customer support and service can help retain customers with fast and personalized communication.
Improved Customer Experience
In addition to providing more ways for customers to keep in touch with the business, text messaging’s personalized nature improves the overall experience. When customers opt in, they can quickly and conveniently contact the company and receive updates and promotions.
Messaging can be integrated into mobile apps to make it easier for users to reach out while using the app. Organizations can also set up appointment reminders and feedback surveys for their clients, making the customer feel appreciated and valued. It allows your client or business to build a better customer relationship while efficiently providing support and service.
Higher Open Rates and Engagement
Text messaging offers exceptional open rates and a substantial increase in customer response rates compared to traditional communication options. According to a Forbes report, text messaging delivers up to 98% open rates and nearly 45% response rates. Your company or client can leverage SMS to take advantage of these promising statistics, ensuring a higher chance of success from marketing campaigns and engagement than email or other marketing.
Making Improvements Through Customer Feedback
The elevated open and response rates of SMS make text messaging an ideal method of requesting feedback and customer satisfaction surveys. SMS activation can help your client or business reach out to customers after a sale or service to evaluate their satisfaction. It can help the business pinpoint issues and inefficiencies to improve the next customer interaction. Reaching out to consumers also builds trust, as they feel their opinions are valuable to the business.
Automation for Seamless Interactions
Automating your SMS messaging can provide cost- and time-efficient solutions that optimize interactions. With an SMS API, you can use microservices to simplify the implementation of appointment reminders, feedback surveys, two-factor authentication (2FA), and passwordless authentication.
For example, passwordless authentication will automatically send an SMS message with a link that allows users to securely log in to an app or website without remembering a complex password.
Integrating SMS Activation for Your Client or Business
Organizations use SMS to facilitate fast and convenient communication. The most efficient way for a developer to integrate messaging into software is through an SMS API from a reputable Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider.
Related: SMS API for Developers: How to Get Started
As a developer, you likely already know an API allows multiple systems or software to share functions. With an SMS API, you can simplify implementing text messaging while adding business-enhancing features. A premade API from a reputable CPaaS partner can reduce hours of development and testing. The API provider develops, tests, and maintains the API for seamless implementation and use.
You can use microservices from the API provider to deliver solutions, including caller ID name (CNAM), appointment reminders, phone number masking, and 2FA or passwordless authentication. Microservices are easy to integrate with quickstarts hosted on platforms like GitHub and can be downloaded from easy-to-use Docker containers.
What Makes SMS for Businesses Different From SMS for Consumers?
Messaging another person from a mobile device, or person-to-person (P2P) messaging, is as simple as picking up a working phone and sending a message. However, application-to-person (A2P) messaging is often more challenging.
If you are implementing an automated messaging system into an app or sending messages in bulk through an SMS API, it will use A2P messaging. Carriers can block high volumes of messages sent as P2P as spam. A2P messaging is only for businesses using 10-digit long-code (10DLC) or toll-free numbers with carrier approval.
A reputable communication partner will provide approved A2P messaging for your client or business, avoiding gray routes and aggregators that send A2P messages as P2P to avoid carrier fees. Gray routes and aggregators risk carriers flagging your numbers as spam. It can result in blocked numbers, poor delivery, and legal issues that reduce the reliability of critical messaging applications.
SMS APIs Create Solutions for Businesses
Developers can implement various solutions for businesses using an SMS API. You can improve customer experiences and deliver automation for seamless services and support with SMS activation. Implement SMS into your company or client’s software to activate the following beneficial solutions.
Multifactor Authentication
Multifactor authentication is a common method of authenticating login credentials as a secondary level of security for sensitive data. It sends a text message to the phone number registered with the account and is prevalent throughout various industries.
For instance, financial institutions, email providers, and social media platforms use 2FA to protect sensitive data from unauthorized users. Passwordless authentication is also possible by sending a unique link to the user via SMS to verify identity through their mobile device.
Appointment Reminders
Appointment reminders are invaluable to service industries. Professionals such as doctors, dentists, hair stylists, mechanics, and real estate agents use appointment reminders to message clients and patients, ensuring they’re more likely to arrive on time. It reduces costly no-shows and allows clients to reschedule, permitting the business to fill open timeslots.
An appointment reminder can contain a link to reschedule online or ask the client to reply to confirm or cancel their appointment. For example, a dental clinic can send patients a reminder 24 hours before their appointment with a link to reschedule if necessary. It allows the dental clinic to fill the appointment slot with another client and offer a new schedule to the initial patient.
Feedback and Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Businesses can use SMS to automate feedback and customer satisfaction surveys, ensuring all customers who opt in receive a message to provide their feedback. Surveys help the company calibrate customer service and deliver products that appeal to clients and meet their needs. For example, a delivery service may send an SMS survey to the sender and recipient to determine if the delivery was successful and what could be improved next time to gain their satisfaction.
Click-to-Message
Integrating click-to-message into an app or website offers users a fast and convenient way to reach the company for support or service through messaging. SMS activation allows you to add this helpful feature, making communication with customers seamless. For example, a ride-sharing company can integrate a click-to-message button to help users coordinate with their driver for pickup.
Phone Number Masking
Phone number masking is critical to ensure privacy when users are messaging each other via dating, ride-sharing, and delivery apps. When you enable this feature as part of your SMS activation, users can message other users or delivery drivers while maintaining a comfortable level of privacy by concealing their phone numbers.
SMS Marketing Campaigns
SMS activation can boost your company or client’s marketing campaigns. With SMS’s high open and response rates, your business can create personalized and engaging marketing campaigns. For instance, the organization can send special offers to new users or invite them to exclusive events like flash sales or product launches, driving business growth.
You can also implement MMS messaging, allowing the company to send rich media to users, including images, videos, and audio recordings. The flexibility of MMS marketing helps the business stand out among the competition with branding and engaging messages.
How to Partner With a CPaaS Provider for SMS
While a cloud-based communication platform can deliver reliable messaging, finding the right partner is crucial to enhancing business communications and seamlessly implementing messaging services. Consider the following to select an ideal messaging partner.
Simple API Integration
While some businesses need a custom API, most will benefit from the simplicity and efficiency of using a premade SMS API from a reputable CPaaS partner. An API can reduce your work to just a few lines of code.
Related: 7 Reasons to Implement SMS API for Business Communication
When you choose a reliable SMS activation partner, the API is already tested and ready for implementation. You can have your messaging capabilities ready in minutes and quickly port phone numbers from another carrier.
Documentation
An ideal SMS partner will have documentation to help you implement and configure the SMS API to your satisfaction. When searching the communication platform’s website, look for a dedicated resource section containing the following:
- Software development kits (SDKs)
- Use case articles
- Quick starts for implementing microservices from Docker containers
- Code examples
An exceptional API provider will offer resources in your preferred programming language, such as Ruby, Python, and PHP, making integration with your existing code seamless.
Security and Maintenance
Using an SMS API for communications can expose your client or company’s business and user data to the public internet. According to Salt Security, web-based vulnerabilities have increased by 360% over three years. More than 33% of companies reported an API-based attack in the last year. However, working with a secure CPaaS solution that provides up-to-date, secure APIs and microservices will protect mission-critical communications.
Reputable CPaaS providers keep your API secure and provide version-controlled microservices in Docker containers to ensure the latest and most secure software. They can also deliver services like toll-fraud protection and real-time network monitoring to enhance communication security.
A secure API can be a considerable advantage for small businesses without the resources to hire an IT security professional or businesses in locations where talent is not readily available.
Scalability and Reliability
In addition to easy API integration and security, a reputable CPaaS partner provides reliable and scalable messaging to ensure your client or company has the capabilities it requires to serve users. A scalable SMS platform will allow the business to leverage the scalability of the cloud, adding users and messaging capacity to its communications.
Reliability ensures messages are delivered with 24/7 accessibility and over 99.99% uptime. With a cloud-based SMS service, your client or business won’t need to invest in infrastructure and hardware to scale its service up. During slow periods, they can scale down with no financial consequences.
Affordable Pricing
While scalability is essential to ensure your client or business can send and receive messages during peaks like marketing campaigns, flexible pricing ensures the business pays only for the messaging it uses. A metered, or pay-per-message option, allows your company to have the scalability it needs without investing in more messaging capacity than it uses with a flat-rate plan. It also allows you to test the service without a long-term commitment to an SMS subscription.
Boost Local Engagement With a Reliable SMS Platform
Text messaging allows businesses to deliver personalized communication to customers and users. The organization can benefit from more channels for consumers to conveniently contact the business and higher open rates and responses for important text message marketing campaigns. You can make implementing messaging simple with an ideal SMS partner.
Flowroute is a business messaging platform that ensures mission-critical messages are reliably sent and received. We offer 24/7 availability and 99.999% uptime to guarantee delivery. You have the scalability and resilience of our HyperNetwork™ with zero gray routes and aggregators to ensure your messages reach their destination. Get started with our reliable business text messaging APIs to begin developing SMS solutions for your company or clients.
