Choosing an SMS Gateway for Your Business or Organisation

Posted by admin on 25/Sep/2009 in Advertising & Marketing | 0 comments

People are becoming more and more dependent on their mobile devices and personal computers. Ask a lot of people and they will tell you that they just can’t see themselves living without mobile phones. We’ve even seen research that says a lot of people are more scared of losing their mobile phone they are of losing their wallet. It comes as no surprise that many businesses big and small are now incorporating mobile marketing in to their advertising campaigns.

Not that long ago retailers were the first to recognise the potential benefit of mobile devices for sending promotional information and interacting with loyal customers and for the creation of new clients. But now even politicians, many online businesses and even non-profit organisations are realising the importance of mobile technology when it comes to best marketing practice.

Lots of mobile marketing tools that are now available to advertisers, marketers and companies in general. Popular tools include SMS Alerts, SMS Contests, SMS Voting, and lots of different premium SMS content delivery applications. Something else that is beginning to be used by of many advertisers, marketers, politicians, online businesses and non-profit organisations is the SMS Gateway. Mobile messaging gateways allow people to compose and send mobile messages from the web site of a server or a provider, some of the better ones such as the CellTrust SMS Gateway even allow for the building of two way conversations and application logic in to SMS marketing or advertising campaigns. There are lots of independent companies providing free message gateways but for long term benefits companies and businesses should really consider using an SMS Gateway that offers the following key features.

• Create and manage huge lists
• Create groups and assign list members to a group or groups
• Custom tailored responses
• Management of lots of messages
• Global coverage with one integration
• Secure SMS for guaranteed and secure delivery
• Subscription Module allowing for opt-in & opt-out subscribers from your advertising and marketing programs
• Template Module to predefine and personalise messages
• Campaign Module to set up campaigns, organise user data, and send auto-responses and more
• Reporting Module to track message status once a message has been sent
• Account Module to manage your gateway online, set credit alerts and push URLs
• Coupon Module to generate random coupons and integrate it to your applications using an API
• Multimodal Module to convert SMS to email, voice or vice versa

In the beginning public SMS gateways were used for personal reasons. Individuals used such gateways to send messages to their friends and family for free without using pagers or SMS enabled mobile phones. Although you could use these portals for your business or organisation the problem with public gateways is that they are not very secure. Messages as well as your lists and groups could potentially be exposed to hacking, third party viewing and a whole range of other security threats. If you want to protect your business and if you care about private data belonging to your customers it is best to  make use of a reputable service provider when it comes to your mobile marketing or mobile advertising campaign.

CellTrust offers an SMS Gateway as well as other tools including Secure SMS, shared short code and a host of other short code solutions. As part of your overall mobile marketing strategy these are things you need. Other must haves that you need to look for when selecting an SMS message gateway provider are security measures, and value for money. When all is said and done you don’t have to choose the most expensive service, but you should be keeping an eye on using the service that best suits the needs and security of your company or organisation as well the service that best suits the needs and security of your customer.