Join the International Texting Tour and Win 50 FREE SMS CREDITS from TextMagic!

If you are not already reveling in SMS technology and absolutely loving it, then you have certainly considered all of the ways text messaging could benefit you on a personal level as well as your business.

So what’s stopping you? Can’t find SMS Pricing? Does it seems too complicated to use? Haven’t found the Global SMS coverage you need?

Now is your chance to win some FREE mobile magic and see how easy it is to use SMS!

Prizes Up For Grab: 2 packs of 50 SMS credits (wow!) every week during April 2010.

Contest Rules

To enter the competition, there’re two simple steps:

Step 1: Follow @TextMagic on Twitter.

Step 2: Post a tweet and mention TextMagic with some content from our blog. Or just re-tweet a @TextMagic’s tweet.

Once you have completed the above steps, you will be automatically entered in to the prize draw. We’ll let you know via DM if you win. Also we will post a tweet with the winners.

To qualify, your Twitter account must be active for 30 days with no less than 30 followers. We love our fans, but we don’t love spam!

Contest ends April 30, 2010 at midnight (-GMT).

Thank you for participating and good luck!

Like many business owners these days, Mr. Alan Hopgood, the Southend-On-Sea franchisee of the Kendlebell Personal Telephone Answering Service, is constantly seeking new ways to streamline day-to-day operations in order to save time and money. With over 200 clients using his Kendlebell answering service, Mr. Hopgood needed a way to simplify and secure the process by which clients were notified about their incoming calls and messages.

“The majority of our customers like to receive both an email and a text message to ensure that they aren’t missing any crucial communication coming through the Kendlebell answering service,” states Mr. Hopgood. “We needed a belt and braces approach that would allow us to send SMS texts and emails simultaneously.”

Mr. Hopgood discovered TextMagic while researching his options on the Internet.

“Prior to using TextMagic’s Email to SMS service, we had to manually send an email and then re-send the same message by SMS text using 2SMS or BlueSMS. TextMagic has simplified this greatly as we can now relay both types of messages with just one click from our screens. We simply added clients’ TextMagic to their list of email addresses.”

What surprised you about utilizing SMS messaging as a business tool?

“How easy it was to integrate into our business process. TextMagic also allows clients to reply to our text messages which was not possible using conventional web-based text messaging systems. We have been using the TextMagic service for over 18 months now and we are very pleased with its advantages.”

Kendlebell (Southend) Ltd. has been the leader in the telephone answering services field for over 12 years, delivering a level of highly personal service to each and every customer. With over 20 locations, Kendlebell is the single largest provider of Personal Telephone Answering Services in the UK and Ireland. For more information on the Southend-On-Sea location, please visit http://www.take-your-message.co.uk.

An interesting discussion is going on among professionals on LinkedIn – “Is Twitter replacing text messaging?”

Different arguments and ideas are discussed, but the majority of votes are cast in favor of separating the two tools (or paradigms if you will) – even in the times of Social Media revolution, where Twitter plays a vital role, SMS is still here to stay and stay for a good reason.

Below are some of the brilliant ideas in defense of SMS:

• Twitter users still quite often see the “fail whale” error message meaning there’s no way to connect at that time. Stability and uptime issues.
• Twitter requires sufficient Internet coverage.
• Almost unbelievable but even now many people have no idea about Twitter.
• Others just don’t see the reason to tweet because they have Facebook.
• In some corporate networks and intranets Twitter is blocked.
• It’s not even clear that Twitter will be a long-lasting tool.
• Twitter will never be able to say that over 90% of tweets are read within 5 minutes of receipt.
• SMS doesn’t require any type of registration.
  
• SMS is a secure and trusted environment that is still free of much of the unsolicited and impersonal automation, spam and phishing that is already running rampant on Twitter.

What have you say about Texting vs.Twitter? We encourage you to join the discussion and share your views on LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/beSsMs

More than ever it seems as if everyone is an expert at SMS marketing from the service providers to the advertising agencies who urge you to ride the mobile wave before you lose your competitive advantage forever. Yes, mobile marketing does have huge advantages, but how do you ensure that all of your efforts get customers to open their wallets rather than getting lost in a mobile abyss? The following are some best-practice tips to get you started in the right direction:

1. Target your SMS messages to the right people by making sure they have opted in to your service.

2. Know your customer’s history and determine which specific products and services they would be interested in.

3. Make your message personal, such as a birthday wish along with a special discount.

4. Offer a service or product that is valuable. For example:

Payment Reminder

Customer Survey

Invitation to an exclusive event

Mobile Coupon

Appointment Reminder

Important alert such as a smoke alarm reminder service that tells a customer when it’s time change the batteries.

5. Make you message short, clean and actionable.

6. Go viral! Create an SMS marketing campaign that is compelling and easy for customers to share with their friends. Better yet, why not incentivize them for referring a friend by integrating an SMS customer loyalty program?

7. Don’t overuse the SMS channel. More than once a week can be disruptive and a sure way to get valuable customers to opt-out of future updates.

8. Keep your customers anonymous by never sharing or selling their mobile numbers to other brands.

9. Invest in services like SMS Gateway API and Email to SMS that will save you time and money on your texting campaigns.

With cell phone subscriptions expected to hit 5 billion this year, the mobile phone has become the most common form of global communication.Whether or not mobile users take advantage of SMS, IM or wildly-popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are able to connect with colleagues, friends and family at any given moment throughout the day.

But what if you worked in a place that prohibited devices like cell phones, Skype and tools like IM or Twitter?

By this, I don’t mean an executive management memo warning employees about wasting valuable time on social networking sites. But rather, a protocol set in place to protect the security of the company.

Meet Bruce Daly. Mr. Daly is an IT consultant for a security agency in Canada and despite being 12 timezones a part from his family in Southeast Asia, he is prohibited from using his cell phone during work hours.

“My work is in a locked down environment that does not allow me to get IM, Skype, mobile service or access to any type of social networking sites that I would typically use.”

Why choose TextMagic for your solution?

“TextMagic is allowed through the enterprise firewalls. I have the ability to send text messages via the Email to SMS service as well as receive replies with the SMS Messenger. For the locked down situation I find myself in during the day, TextMagic is a good fit for what I suspect is a rare situation.”

Like many small business today, Global Hair Limited, t/a Headrush Hair Salon considered using a texting service as a way to streamline customer communications and save money. With approximately 4,700 clients in their roster, the percentage of missed hair appointments was creating an increasing amount of spare time and costing the business hours of missed revenue. Headrush Hair Salon Global Hair Directors, Phil Saunders and Emma Fulgoney, began to look at different SMS services online and came across TextMagic which seemed the ideal choice due to ease and cost.

How has SMS messaging improved your hair salon business?

“TextMagic has improved our amount of no-show clients who may have forgotten the date and time of their appointment, therefore leaving a stylist in the salon with sometimes up to 2 1/2 hours of down time, which is clearly bad for business and profits.We calculate that our number of no-shows has been reduced by approximately 70% since we’ve been using TextMagic and we expect this number to improve further as we obtain more clients’ mobile numbers.”

SMS messaging takes customer service to the next level.

“TextMagic has also benefited our customers. Clients don’t want to miss their appointments either and text messaging helps them stay in touch and keep us updated. We also use the Email to SMS service to send our clients special messages on their birthdays as well as unique salon promotions.”

Acquired by Global Hair Ltd.in January 2009, Headrush Hair Salon is a high quality salon where customer satisfaction comes first. Their team of well-trained and experienced stylists cater to over 4,700 clients in the East Sussex area. For more information, please visit their website at www.headrushhair.co.uk.