Delivering a personalized and convenient experience is an excellent way to attract and retain users or customers. While voice calling is a necessity for any business, text messaging is the ideal way to reach modern consumers. According to Forbes, SMS offers exceptional open rates of almost 98%, and nearly half of consumers respond to SMS messages from businesses.
An SMS API for developers allows you to deliver a text messaging solution to your business or client. A CPaaS provider specializing in communication applications can offer an API that you tailor to your business or client’s needs. However, it’s critical to consider the SMS API provider and the benefits and features they offer to deliver a seamless solution.
We’ll explore how to find a communications partner to enhance your company or client’s business communications, guiding you through the qualities to look for in a provider and the features that can deliver improved value.
Finding the Right SMS API for Developers to Enhance Business Communications
You can integrate text messaging into your client or company’s business communication systems and software with an SMS API for developers. An application programming interface (API) allows two distinct pieces of software to share features such as messaging or voice. It offers simple integration, reducing hours of coding your communication software from scratch to a few lines of code. Often, you can provide a ready solution in several minutes.
When you use an API for SMS functionality, it allows you to implement text messaging services into your organization’s systems. You can create automated messaging solutions, such as two-factor authentication (2FA) and appointment reminders, to enhance productivity and reduce the labor involved in sending repetitive messages manually.
Integrating an SMS API into your client’s app or website allows users to conveniently message the business and interact with representatives or staff. Enhancing your business SMS solution begins with selecting an ideal SMS API platform.
What to Look for in an SMS API Platform
When selecting an SMS API for developers, narrow down the list of potential providers by determining if the platform offers the qualities you need to deliver a seamless solution. Finding a platform with an easy-to-integrate API featuring the qualities you need to create a business-enhancing solution will ensure you can get the optimal value from your partnership.
Reliability
Reliability is a critical characteristic of a good SMS API partner. Your business or client’s text messaging systems should be available 24/7. For example, when users request a one-time passcode from a 2FA system, they demand a fast response, regardless of the time of day, to securely log in to their accounts or verify a purchase.
Look for an SMS API platform that offers 24/7 availability, high uptime, and dynamic routing with physical failover to ensure your client or company can access its text messaging solutions consistently. If you’re using cloud-based voice calling with a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solution, your communications provider can also offer Quality of Service (QoS) to manage VoIP latency by providing the necessary bandwidth for your company or client’s calls.
Scalability
Whether your company or client serves a local community of customers or a worldwide audience, scalability is critical to growth and consistent messaging. It works alongside reliability to ensure messages are sent and received, regardless of the user’s location. Scalability is necessary to ensure that your organization can grow without the friction of a limited service area or fixed messaging capacity.
Security
While an SMS API for developers can provide various benefits and features, finding a cloud-based communication provider that offers scalability and reliability is only the beginning. If not maintained and secure, APIs facing the public internet can expose your company or client’s data to malicious actors.
A study in Infosecurity Magazine found that over a quarter of attacks targeted APIs with automated agents to attempt to disrupt operations or steal sensitive information. Ensure your API partner offers secure and maintained APIs with network monitoring to protect your business or client.
Application Friendly
In addition to a secure, scalable, and reliable API provider, finding a platform that provides application-to-person messaging is necessary. While you have probably sent a person-to-person (P2P) message to a friend, family member, or business partner, when businesses send messages in bulk from an automated system, the SMS number must be registered for A2P messaging to ensure delivery.
Some SMS API platforms use aggregators and gray routes to avoid costs associated with A2P messaging, making A2P messages seem like they are sent from P2P numbers. However, these workarounds can result in carriers blocking the SMS number, limiting the receipt of text messages to users. Look for an SMS API platform that avoids gray routes and aggregators to guarantee the delivery of your business messages.
What Can You Build With an SMS API?
An SMS API for developers can help you unlock a world of business-enhancing solutions for your company or client. You can integrate SMS into existing software and systems or build tailored solutions for your organization. Some of the solutions you can build with an SMS API include:
- Enable click-to-message functions in an app or website for a convenient user experience.
- Integrate text messaging into a customer relationship management (CRM) system to text message users from within the platform.
- Automatically send appointment reminders, notifications, and feedback surveys to customers, reducing manual labor and increasing productivity.
- Send messages in bulk for a marketing campaign and benefit from the high open and response rates of SMS.
By using a reputable API provider, you can implement microservices for features like 2FA and appointment reminders. Microservices make implementing the solution simple and take the effort out of maintaining and securing your messaging solutions with version-controlled software in repositories like GitHub or Docker.
Features an SMS API Platform Can Provide
Now that you know what qualities to look for in an SMS API platform, consider specific features each provider offers and how they fit in with your business or client’s goals. Features help you tailor the SMS API to create a seamless solution for your clients. An SMS API platform can offer the following features:
Messaging Capabilities
When looking for an SMS solution, it’s important to know what options are available to you and how each potential API fits into those needs. Here are some additional messaging options to look for:
- Toll-Free – A toll-free number is capable of sending mass SMS messages after your registration is approved. While you can send large amounts of messages through them, toll-free numbers are often less personal. However, they provide an ideal solution for automation, such as notifications, appointment reminders, feedback surveys, and 2FA.
- 10-Digit Long Code – The 10-digit long code (10DLC) number allows your company to send messages from a local number, making the message more personal and convenient for the recipient. They are an affordable option for bulk SMS messages for marketing campaigns and communicating with local users through text.
Other Business Enhancing Services
Often, the ability to send SMS messages doesn’t cover the entire range of communication services your client or business may need to integrate into its software. If this is the case, you’ll want to determine which services are available from your chosen provider. This may include:
- MMS – Perhaps the most obvious additional feature to go with SMS, MMS allows a business to send engaging content to users. Through images, video, and audio, you can refine the type of content you send and do more through messaging than SMS alone allows. MMS can be ideal for confirming the receipt of delivery in an e-commerce setting or providing detailed photo and video instructions for customer support for a product.
- Phone numbers – The ability to choose your phone number can provide a few benefits to businesses. Your company or client can send communications to customers from a number that’s local to them to improve trust and build a sense of community. A toll-free number can reduce the costs of inbound customer calls. You can quickly port existing numbers to the new platform or choose from available vanity numbers for your organization. Your client or business will also have a simple administrative portal to procure and assign numbers after deployment.
- Voice – Modern digital systems combined with broadband allow companies to move beyond the traditional private branch exchange (PBX) system and take advantage of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking capabilities. If your company uses voice calling to communicate with customers, you may find the voice SIP offerings of many SMS API providers to be a useful addition. As a technology solutions developer, you can also resell white-label SIP trunking to offer seamless voice, chat, messaging, video conferencing, and data in a comprehensive and unified solution.
- Fax – Although faxing is becoming less common, it has still managed to evolve to keep up with the digital age. Just as VoIP brings voice communications over the internet, the T-38 protocol brings faxing into the modern, internet-powered era. Fax over IP (FoIP) can bring new life to old technology and might be just the solution companies still relying on fax need to revitalize their workflows.
Reporting
When messages aren’t received, it can frustrate the business and user. The ability to quickly identify and diagnose the problem is paramount to the success of your messaging campaigns. Reputable SMS API providers will give you and your company access to reports through an administrative portal. The message detail record (MDR) can provide helpful information, such as the date and time sent, the recipient number, and whether the message was successfully received.
Ease of Implementation
As mentioned above, an SMS API for developers offers hassle-free integration in a few lines of code. While using an API from a cloud communications provider is often a better option than coding the SMS API from scratch, it’s still necessary to ensure compatibility and simplicity.
Reputable API providers write their APIs in representational state transfer (REST) architecture. REST APIs are resource-friendly and compatible. They work well with some of the most popular programming languages, including Python, PHP, and Ruby, allowing you to choose your preferred one. REST APIs use common HTTP commands, such as PUT and GET, and are compatible with popular data types, including plain text, HTML, and JSON. Since communications are stateless, the server stores no client information between requests.
Partner With a Reputable SMS API Platform
Flowroute’s APIs were built with developers in mind. They are designed to make integration into your software as simple as possible. We are the experts in CPaaS solutions for developing communication applications. Our HyperNetwork meshes multiple networks with physical failover into a single powerful telecom solution, ensuring maximum reliability for your communication needs. Get started with communication solutions designed for developers from Flowroute.
