Have you received an SMS message recently from a business, brand or company and wondered to yourself why their name appears as the SMS sender even though you haven’t entered their number into your phone book?

That business brand was using what is known as a customised Sender ID, and it’s a great way to quickly connect with your SMS customers. This is because people intuitively understand and relate to names; a name carries with it a recognition that a phone number alone will never match, no matter how much you mention it in your marketing.

How Sender ID works

All SMS text messages carry with them a unique identifier – a sending number – that is most often called an ‘originator’ number. This identifier tells the network (and the customer) where the message was sent from.

It is possible to replace this identifier phone number with a text version (an ‘alphanumeric originator’) of your name or number that your customer will quickly recognise.

In other words, you can set a custom Sender ID that is your company name, a specific phone number for customer support, brand name, trademark, or any other uniquely identifiable word, phrase or number set that characterises you.

As long as it is 11 characters or less:

TextMagic

the12Brand

Miss_Fix_it

HighStAutos

Sender ID is a perfect option for situations where you are distributing a message to a large group, where the message isn’t expected, and times where you don’t require a response. It’s an unfortunate consequence of using an alphanumeric Sender ID that your recipients can’t reply to the SMS itself, because it no longer carries the originating number.

How to set a customised Sender ID

TextMagic makes it easy to customise your Sender ID. The first step is to apply for a custom Sender ID in your customer account through the My Services section, ‘Reply Options‘ area.

To create your custom branded Sender ID, you can choose from any letter from ‘A’ through ‘Z’, including the lowercase letters ‘a’ through ‘z’. You can also choose any number from 0 to 9 and the _ (underscore) character to create your 11-character custom Sender ID.

As long as you stick to these parameters, you can be as creative as you like. Just remember that you should choose a name that your customers will recognise, otherwise they may see your message as unsolicited and not bother reading it.

You can find out more about Sender ID and other reply options here: http://api.textmagic.com/https-api/sender-id

John is at home, browsing for a new printer. His old one packed it in earlier and he needs a new one soon so that he can finish printing photos for a special birthday gift to his girlfriend, Ali.

He finds a printer he likes and adds it to his shopping basket, when he hears a knock on the door. Quickly, he turns off his computer – it must be Ali – and hurries to let her in.

The next morning, John receives an SMS from the e-commerce shop reminding him that he has items in his basket and includes a link to the online shop to complete the transaction.

SMS messages are great reminders

Normally, John’s shopping cart would register as «abandoned» as he will forget about the goods in his basket and shop somewhere else tomorrow. Even if he does remember, he’ll need to find his product again and add it to his cart.

With so many distractions taking our customers away from their computers, SMS marketing, or in this case SMS «service» is a great way to keep customers engaged and to help bring them back to an online store.

In fact, customers prefer multiple options for interacting with brands and businesses and SMS is the top of the list.

Get them to opt in

To use SMS to boost online sales by bringing customers back to your site, or to allow them to complete a transaction at a later time, you’re going to need those customers’ mobile numbers.

Most people have a deeply personal connection with their mobile phones and that results in an expectation of real value from your SMS messages.

By adding a field in your profile forms and sign up areas for mobile numbers and being clear about the SMS services and integration you offer, you’ll give customers a good reason to opt-in. Point out that by adding a mobile number to their profile, they can receive important messages and reminders from your shop.

Inform and serve

Rather than blasting out weekly messages about the latest sale item, SMS marketing is much more effective when you inform and serve your customers. They won’t see these kinds of messages as an intrusion into their personal mobile space, and they will be more likely to read your future messages (research has shown that 95% of text messages are opened and read).

E-retailers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from improved sales online, service businesses can also use SMS marketing to boost sales via their websites by offering customers:

• Appointment reminders
• Service updates or renewal reminders
• Bill notifications
• Specials and discount codes
• New promotions (be sparing and don’t send them weekly)

When everything is synced up and integrated into the customer experience, SMS marketing and service messages work together with the online retail system to increase conversions, lower cart abandonment, and improve satisfaction with the brand.

All great ways to improve your online sales.

If you own a mobile device, you’ve probably already seen the wrong kind of content.

You know what I’m talking about: cryptic SMS messages with links that you aren’t too sure about, long paragraphs that take two or three scrolls on your screen to read, huge images that eat up your data and take up the screen, or the Flash animations that don’t work because you’re on an iPhone.

When it comes to mobiles (smartphones or otherwise), readers prefer content that’s optimized for the device.

But what makes it different and how do you put this kind of content together?

Mobile readers want bite-sized info

Whether your readers are using smartphones or you are communicating via SMS, they really do want brief, easy-to-read content.

That means shorter paragraphs, fewer jargon-filled expressions, more objective information and (please, please, please) not so many images, thanks.

Where to get your content

If you already create or curate content on your own website, you should be spinning off a mobile-optimised version for your readers.

Just edit down the copywriting, break it into smaller chunks and focus on the most important bits.

If your mobile audience is a specific type of user (such as a salespeople), then you can further target the content you gather and share with them around that topic.

Using a tool like Twitter is a great way to find lots of interesting and useful information from others in your niche. (It’s also a great way to share your own content with mobile readers!)

The Verge provides one of the best mobile web experiences that I’ve had. Some other websites that are popular with mobile audiences could do better work, for example 9to5Mac.

How to share

Just like your regular website, you need to share your curated and self-published content through different methods.

For mobile, that means using tools that are popular and accessible to (and used by) your audience. Not everyone has smartphones, and many successful mobile marketing campaigns use SMS to great effect.

Twitter, Facebook and other social sites are a good first channel for sharing. Many smartphone users regularly use these platforms for receiving their information.

When you have an SMS subscriber base, you need to use slightly different methods of sharing as not everyone will have a web-capable device.

Sharing via SMS can be as simple as sharing a bit of news and a source and telling them to check your blog. You can also provide a link so that those with a capable browser can view it via the mobile-optimised version of your content. In fact, SMS can be a really engaging way to get a dialogue going with your readers.

However you do it, finding and sharing specifically for your mobile audience will be good for your customers and good for your business too.

SMS is one of the oldest mobile technologies; it’s been around for over a decade and is still actively used to this date. In fact, it has changed the whole gamut of communication. However, all of a sudden, text messaging has come under serious threat from newer technology because of the explosive popularity of smartphones and apps. There is every chance that text messaging as we know it will change a great deal in the next few years. The ‘old way’ of texting still has some very strong advantages; for instance, it enables cross-platform communication using a cell phone number and does not require usernames.  Most importantly, however, carriers still make a lot of money from text messaging, so they are not going to give up on it without a fight. Let’s review the latest shifts in the global text messaging space.

The first company to succeed in making a phone-specific messaging app was RIM with their BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), which BlackBerry owners use to communicate with other such users over the internet. The prevalence of other smartphones gave developers an opportunity to create similar apps on other platforms, resulting in numerous cross-platform apps like WhatsApp, which automatically finds people in your address book that already use it, so you can send them IM-style messages, pictures, videos, files and your location on the map. The cost of such apps is a fraction of what you pay for SMS – for $2 a year you get unlimited messaging; however, it is only with people who also use this service, not everyone, and that’s the only show-stopper.

SMS is also under pressure from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, both of which are found more and more often on phones and enable text-based communication with your friends. Facebook even went as far as releasing a standalone app named Messenger that is simply a dedicated app for Facebook Chat. Upon release of the app, it quickly climbed to the top of the free app charts on both platforms it was on, but left the charts soon after.

While all those apps are proving to be extremely popular, they still have a long way to go to replace traditional text messaging. The biggest concern is fragmentation. As with instant messengers online, a person using BBM can’t send a message to someone using WhatsApp, which is a problem. So if you would like to use such apps as a primary means of text messaging, you will probably need all of them, as it could be tough convincing a person to switch to another platform once they are used to the one they started with. This way you may end up with a bunch of apps that you use for the same reason but need all of them because that’s the one the recipient is using. And when you get WhatsApp, Kik, Skype, KakaoTalk, Viber, etc, there will still be a need to use SMS from time to time because you won’t find every person you know on those networks.

Also, a lot of businesses rely on SMS for their marketing and it is not yet possible to do that with the messenger apps. Imagine a company asking if you have Kik installed and if they can message you there from time to time. Of course, businesses still prefer to know your mobile number, rather than a Skype handle, so they can send you their special offers via bulk SMS services.

Every sign leads to a world in which carriers, under pressure from free messaging apps and communication giants like Facebook and Skype Microsoft, will lower text message prices so that people keep using them, most likely bundling them with your calling plan at a cheaper price. This will fit perfectly with the future in which people pay not for texts sent and minutes talked, but for the amount of bandwidth they are actually using, which is more efficient and fair anyway. There are serious economic reasons for such a model to take place, and at this point the question is not if but when.

We are excited to announce that our new TextMagic Affiliate Programme is now open and taking new affiliates.

It’s been in the works for a while, we know. But, we really wanted to get it right and offer you, our customers, the best affiliate deal we could. We’re really happy with the response we’ve had so far, and we’re sure you’ll agree that this is best affiliate deal in the SMS market.

Take a look

As an affiliate, for each new customer you refer to TextMagic you will earn:

• 10% of all revenue we get from customers you refer to us – for the life of the customer
• £15 for each new paying customer you send our way

That means that when you refer someone from your website, application, blog, or email and they sign up as a paying customer, you will earn £15, plus 10% of their first purchase – and 10% of all subsequent purchases.

Great for developers

In addition to being able to integrate our bulk SMS features into your application through our  SMS gateway API or Email to SMS, you will also earn affiliate revenue from your apps when you sign up as an affiliate with TextMagic.

Using our text message gateway gives you easy and cost-effective bulk SMS messaging for your user base, including:

• Two-Way SMS functionality with SMS reply numbers so that recipients can reply to your text messages.
• Up to 459 characters in a single text – no more annoying message breaks for long texts!

How much can you earn?

Here’s an example of what you can earn from referring a new customer to TextMagic:

£15 (First purchase bonus)

+          £10 (10% of first purchase revenue of £100)

=          £25

After that, every time they purchase more credits, you’ll earn 10%. If they purchased £100 of credits every quarter, you’d earn a further £30 that first year – and just from that one referral!

Most of our customers make many purchases over several years, so you can earn a continuous income, even after the cookie expires.

How It Works

We’ve worked hard to keep this easy-to-use, just like our SMS services:

1. A visitor clicks your affiliate link.
2. When they arrive at our website, we log their IP and place a tracking cookie on their computer (this is so we can attribute the next part to you).
3. After browsing our website, if they order, it is registered as a sale for you.
4. We review and approve the sale. You get £15 + 10%.
5. Now that your referred customer has signed up, we credit all his or her purchases as your sales, even after years have passed and the original cookie is deleted.
6. You receive your commission payouts via PayPal on the 15th of every month (as long as your balance is at least £25).

You can join our affiliate programme today. If you’d like to find out more about it, check out the affiliate section of the site.

TextMagic is a breakthrough technology for SMS — short message service — texting from your full-size, easy-to-use computer keyboard. TextMagic provides SMS Gateway software that brings business users the convenience of sending text messages to over 700 global mobile networks without the frustration of tapping out letters on a tiny mobile phone keypad.

Ideal for companies, such as logistics firms, that must track several connections at once during any given project, text messaging allows personnel to transmit quick updates to the entire crew or send single texts for specific task management from PC or laptop keyboards.

When a transport delay notice or a change of order comes in via email, but the recipient is away from the computer, TextMagic’s mobile SMS software automatically forwards those critical messages to the recipient’s mobile phone in the form of texts, keeping employees in the field connected to the latest updates.

Logistics companies’ data must be accurate and complete if operations are to run smoothly. A last-minute change in schedule could mean unfulfilled orders, supply delays, or even a complete breakdown of supply chain management if a quick, dependable system of communications is not in place. TextMagic SMS gateway software and mobile SMS software enable timely, concise and targeted text communications to the appropriate personnel for last-minute changes.

One TextMagic logistics company client set up a UPS notification system within five minutes that facilitates regular advance notification of pickups and deliveries via email to SMS. TextMagic services also streamline daily exchanges of information that are critical to keeping track of logistics companies’ data. Inventory, warehouse availability, and transportation ETAs are all aspects of operations that frequently change. TextMagic optimises any company’s communication network by linking office PCs and mobile devices with lightning-fast transmission of updates.

When a distribution firm makes across-the-board policy revisions that affect a number of supply chain partners, it can utilise the TextMagic gateway to issue one text to a group of recipients, whether they are locally or internationally distributed. With coverage in over 200 countries worldwide that includes several hundred communications networks, TextMagic online text messaging services provide the scope and capabilities for virtually unlimited connections.

Whether coordinating an inbound or outbound supply chain, specialists can operate most efficiently when each manager throughout the system is part of a dedicated communications network. For example, the hub of most operations is the office computer system, where data are stored for supply chain coordination. All links in the chain, including suppliers, inventory, transportation, warehousing, sales, marketing, and end-user (customer) service, depend on connections to the hub. By assuring direct lines of communication between these and other elements of the supply chain, operations managers can implement efficient, integrated systems. As one of the fastest and most targeted methods of communications, TextMagic text messaging technology ensures economical and dependable computer-to-mobile SMS communications. Logistical operations organisers who utilise TextMagic SMS software can far outperform competitors that do not.

By offering clients the ability to send text messages to any member of the team, any firm can build stronger customer relations and a reputation for excellence in customer service. Being available and responsive to text messaging saves both the client and the company time, keeping operations on schedule. TextMagic ties it all together with online texting software that is quick and easy to set up and utilise to its fullest potential.

Nobody likes wasting time. Companies that depend on schedules, including product distributors and service providers, can fine-tune their operations with TextMagic’s online SMS-to-mobile applications and SMS gateway technology, streamlining communications and keeping the entire supply chain running smoothly.