While most businesses are now beginning to understand the benefits of SMS marketing, and the wider concept of mobile marketing as a whole, many are still unsure of how to use to its full potential. This post will give you a few hints and tips to help you maximise the success rate of your text marketing campaigns. 

1. Remember your call to action: As simple as it sounds, it is easy to forget the most important aspect of your text message – the call to action. Ensure that you highlight the purpose of your SMS to recipients, whether this is to encourage them to reply to the message using a specific keyword or to claim a voucher by a set date. Your customers need to know how you want them to respond. 

2. Be consistent: There’s no point sending recipients a string of messages and then lying dormant for months on end. Like any successful marketing campaign, SMS needs to be used consistently to achieve the best results. By making sure you send recipients regular updates such as important information about the company or notifications for upcoming sales and events, you are more likely to maintain interest and attract regular customers. 

3. Use SMS in a variety of ways: While consistency is important, you also need to inject some variety into your campaigns. Don’t just send out the same message template with a few tweaks every month as it will soon lose its desired impact and your recipients will quickly lose interest as a result. Experiment with sending out different types of messages such as changes to your business, exclusive information about an upcoming product, or offers that you feel your customers will love. Keeping your messages interesting and original will ensure that your customers will want to continue receiving SMS alerts from you. 

4. Make it meaningful: Ensure that the messages you send are beneficial to your recipients. Customers want to hear about information that affects them such as when your next sale is going to be and updates to a service. Texts that appear to have been sent just for the sake of contact will only waste time and money. 

5. Track your progress: It is vital to measure how well your campaign is running so that you know what’s working and what needs modification. By tracking how many recipients reply to your messages as well as keeping an eye on subscription numbers, you can help to make sure that your campaign is running smoothly and reaching its full potential at all times. 

Following these 5 tips will help you make the most of SMS marketing. For more information please visit our website or contact a member of our Customer Service team on 08451 221 302. 

One aspect of our business that we take great pride in is our dedication to improving the community by sponsoring several charities through our established TextAnywhere Foundation. We ensure that a portion of our profit goes directly to a number of specially chosen charity organisations that are devoted to the environment and providing support to those who need it. 

To ensure that our TextAnywhere Foundation runs effectively we keep in mind this key principle: 1% Profit. 1% Time. 1% Product. 

At the end of every year we donate 1% of our profit to the charities that we have pledged to sponsor as part of our TextAnywhere Foundation. We also allow for all staff members to be given three paid days off from work annually so that they can help out with the local charity organisations in their area that are important to them. Finally, we implemented our attitude towards charity projects into our products by allowing any not-for-profit organisations that use our SMS services to do so at a reduced rate. 

The charities we support:

In 2012 we sponsored two incredibly well-deserving charities and, as promised, donated 1% of our pre-tax profit at the end of the year. These two charities were the Evelina’s Children’s Hospital and the Crohn’s and Colitis Charity UK. Both charities were delighted with our donation and a thank you message can even be found from the Crohn’s and Colitis Charity in our January 2013 tweets archive here.

This year TextAnywhere’s Foundation will be supporting MacMillan Cancer Support and the Polycystic Kidney Disease Charity. Both charities are set up for an amazing cause and touch the lives of a number of our members of staff personally. More on these charities can be discovered here.

If you would like to find out more about the TextAnywhere Foundation, the chosen charities, or our other community ventures then please don’t hesitate to contact us on 08451 221 302 or email, [Link: http://www.textanywhere.net/contact-us.aspx] or visit our main website.

Text messaging has long been a popular method of communication for teenagers and young adults before its benefits were picked up on by users of older age groups. Therefore, if you are looking to target young people, it makes sense to use this original favourite. Here are some good examples of how to use SMS marketing to help you attract young customers. 

Offer mobile coupons: Most young people have their mobile phones on them wherever they go. Therefore, offering mobile based coupons will increase the likelihood that these discounts will get used by young customers and decrease the possibility of these coupons getting lost or damaged.  

Upcoming product launches and sales: Many teenagers and young adults find it important to keep up with trends and always maintain the latest fashion through their purchases. By notifying young customers through SMS of upcoming product launches and providing information about sales, they can be assured that they are in the know at all times and you can increase your likelihood of a purchase. 

Run youth related campaigns: SMS can be a great way to run campaigns that are aimed at young people in particular. Anything from urging teens to text a keyword to a specific short code to be in with the chance of winning a prize, or using a similar medium to get young customers to enter a poll or vote can be a great way to boost campaign awareness.

Circulate student specific discounts: A great way to increase knowledge and spending is to personalise your SMS marketing campaigns. For instance, targeting young people through SMS with student specific discounts will help your customers to feel they are cared about and catered for by your business. Discounts are also a popular way to increase customer interest via text message in general. 

Make messaging fun: Ensure that your messages are suited to the age group they are trying to target. As a tech-savvy generation it is important to provide texts that are not only relevant to teenagers and young adults but visually presented as so. Include an assortment of media attachments such as web links and photos that will be appreciated by a young audience and that are relevant to your campaign to get young people more involved.

For more information on using SMS marketing to target younger audiences and customers please visit our website, or call our Customer Service team on 08451 221 302 who will be happy to talk through your ideas. 

TextAnywhere’s TextOnline application allows you to send SMS messages and receive reply messages online. You can send to one or multiple recipients using pre-defined contact groups from the address book or by adding the mobile numbers manually. 

Sending your text message:

• Choose ‘New Message’ from the left-hand menu.

• Type in your text message160 character limit per message credit  for a single message, 153 characters for Extended SMS messages up to a maximum of 918 characters [6 messages x 153]. Please note that each “block” of characters equates to a message credit.

Select a validity period: if the message is not delivered by the networks within the validity period the  networks will stop trying to deliver it. This can help with time sensitive messages. The validity period can be set for between 1 and 72 hours, the default validity period is 24 hours. 

• Select your contacts: you can choose one or more contact group, select specific numbers from contact groups, or enter in phone numbers manually.

• Select your reply options: if you choose no reply, you will need to enter an appropriate sender name to appear on recipient’s phone in place of a phone number. If you want to enable replies, you can choose whether these go to your own email inbox, your TextOnline inbox or to your phone. You can change the default message originator and your phone number from the “My profile” section

• You can choose to send your text message straight away, or you can use the schedule options to select the date and time you wish your message to be sent out.

• You can also set your text message to be recurring by selecting “recurring scheduled message” from the schedule options - chose your start date and time, then how often you would like the message to recur (every hour, day, week, month, year, weekday or fortnightly). You can also select an expiry date and time, so that the recurrence stops after this date.

• Finally click “Send Message” and your message will be ready to go out according to your chosen scheduling options.

Setting up contact groups:

Setting up contact groups allow you to store recipient’s mobile numbers in the application itself, which is handy if you are regularly sending text messages to the same group of people or perhaps you need to send messages from home. To add a new contact group, select “New Contact Group” in the left-hand menu, here you name your group, ready to add numbers to later.

With your contact groups set up, you can add numbers in bulk by selecting ‘Import/Export Contacts’ from the left-hand menu and uploading a .csv Excel file to your chosen group. The .csv file should include a minimum of 3 columns labelled firstname, lastname and mobilephone, you can also add a fourth column “Contact group” which will then automatically create and populate a group in the address book. Any numbers from outside the UK will need to include the relevant country code at the start. 

You can update your list using .csv files, or you can add in individual numbers by selecting “New Contact” from the left-hand menu and selecting which group you would like to add the number to or, as above, add the group name as a fourth column in the CSV file

Review text messages:

Sent messages are available to review and download from the account for 45 days, after 45 days messages are archived to secure servers and can be retrieved by our technical staff on request. You can review their delivery status by selecting “Sent Messages” from the left-hand menu and clicking on the message you wish to review. You are also able to amend scheduled messages by selecting “Scheduled Messages”’ from the left-hand menu. Here you can click through to the message you wish to amend, make any changes and click “update” to save the changes. 

If you have any questions, please contact a member of the TextAnywhere Customer Service team on 08451 221 302 who will be happy to help.

TextEmail has been set up to allow users to send SMS messages from any email application to an SMS-enabled mobile handset. You can also receive replies and delivery confirmations in return. The TextEmail function has been split into two separate services that both offer a range of benefits and capabilities. Read on to find out more about these two services:

TextMail: this service can be used with any email system to send and receive text messages to a mobile phone. This is done by sending your desired text message in email form to one of our domains. This message will then be converted into an SMS message via our system and distributed to your chosen recipients. 

TextOMS: this service works directly with Microsoft Outlook 2007 and onwards allowing you to send SMS messages from within this email application. Users simply prepare their message using the in-service text composer. These are sent out via our SMS Gateway. 

Benefits of our TextEmail services:

Here are some of the benefits that you can enjoy by choosing either of our two TextEmail services. 

• No training required: it’s simple and easy-to-use meaning that you don’t need specialist knowledge or training to send messages. 

• Swift delivery: your messages will be sent to your recipients promptly so that you can be assured that any important information will be sent direct to the people who need it when they need it. 

• Use existing contact lists: you won’t need to worry about compiling additional spreadsheets and contact lists as you can simply use the existing address books or contact lists that you already have.

• Receive reminders: you can set up your TextEmail service to send you SMS reminders of any important appointments that you may have in your diary. Now you never have to miss a meeting again. 

• No additional hardware or software required: all you need is an existing email application such as Gmail, Hotmail or Microsoft Outlook (2007 and onwards) etc., and you’re good to go. 

• Only pay for the messages you send: no surprise payments or billing for any other service except the message you send. You won’t need to pay to receive replies either. 

• Global coverage: you can send messages to recipients based anywhere in the world and receive replies. 

For more information on our TextMail or TextOMS products please contact Customer Service team on 08451 221 302, or visit our TextEmail section on the TextAnywhere website.

Recently TextAnywhere has been busy making some exciting changes to our range of web, developer, and bulk SMS services. We believe that these changes will greatly improve our users’ experience and further highlight just how we stand out from our competitors.

So here’s the lowdown on some of the changes we have made:

Changes to our message credits expiration policy:

All customers can now be confident in the knowledge that their message credits will remain on their account and will not now expire at any point, regardless of how long it takes a client to use its message credits.

More free credits upon setting up your new account:

Now all new TextAnywhere clients will receive 50 free message credits upon setting up their new account, rather than the original 20. This is to provide our new users with an extended opportunity to trial our services before needing to purchase a Message Pack securely online.

Our new price promise guarantee:

We have spent many years diligently providing our clients with the highest quality of messaging service. To underpin our focus on service quality, we only send our messages through UK network operators, we host our redundant messaging platform with Rackspace in the UK, and we are a PCI DSS compliant organisation.

We also recognise the importance of providing a quality service at the right price. Our clients only pay for the messages they send while benefiting from free access to our Developer Toolkit and technical support at the same time. And there are no set up or monthly charges either.

We also believe that our message charges are competitive, particularly for the quality of service provided. However, if you can find a competitive service cheaper than ours, then we will guarantee to beat that price.

We have a couple of caveats to ensure we’re comparing apples with apples, however we genuinely believe that we can save you money and provide you with an excellent quality of service. 

We sincerely hope that these changes will be positively received and help all of our customers to make the most of their chosen TextAnywhere services.

If you would like any more information on these changes then please do not hesitate to visit the TextAnywhere website or contact our Customer Service team on 08451 221 302. 

TextAnywhere’s SMTP web service allows users to send SMS messages and receive replies from customers using any application that has an email sending and receiving capability. Here are some of the main features that we feel help our SMTP service stand out from the crowd:

Swift compilation and distribution: Creating and sending your SMS messages using the SMTP service couldn’t be easier. Using your existing email system you simply construct your message and choose a subject. Send the email over to us including your list of recipients in the ‘To:’ line separated by a semi-colon. We will then convert your message into SMS form and distribute it to all your desired recipients as one or more text messages depending on the length of the original email message. It’s as simple as that. The best thing is you won’t have to download or install any additional software to use our SMTP service as the SMS Gateway is designed to work with any email application.

Receive and manage replies easily: Recipients can reply to your messages if they have been sent using the sms.textapp.net or sms160.textapp.net domains. The reply is instantly converted back into email form via our system and sent to your email application ready for you to act upon. 

Added security: Our SMS Gateway is designed to be completely secure when dealing with user messages. However, if you prefer to have additional security you can also add a PIN to your phone number for client verification purposes. 

Plenty of choice: there are four different email domains for you to choose from within the SMTP service. These let you perform a variety of actions including choosing whether to provide a phone number only or Originator (sender ID) for recipients to identify you by, controlling the number of text messages you can send for one email, and tracking your message status through delivery receipts. Plenty of other options are available and can be edited within the admin panel of your account. 

Attractive prices: To use our SMTP service you are only required to pay for the messages you send and the choice of domains will allow you to opt for a service that only allows you to send messages as a single text so you can keep track of how much you’ve spent. In addition, our Developer Toolkit and any technical assistance you may require are also completely free. 

For more information on our SMTP service please click here, or to find out about our other web services please visit our Developer Centre. Alternatively, please call our Customer Care team on 08451 221 302 who will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Our web services have been created with ease-of-use and functionality for our clients at the forefront. Therefore, we think you will find that using these services will provide you with a wide range of benefits.

Here are some of the things you can do with our various web services:

· Access our user-friendly toolkit:

Our Developer Toolkit is a resource centre offering documentation and examples to help you make important decisions when it comes to the text messaging integration.  With our web service you can efficiently send and receive messages, you can also use functions such as selecting whether your messages are premium rate or free to receive,  checking the delivery status of all or specific messages, and much more.

· Enjoy seamless integration:

TextAnywhere understand that integrating our text messaging service needs to be as simple as possible which is why we have specifically created a solution that does not require any additional software to be downloaded or installed from TextAnywhere. You can easily integrate our service with your current website or application and get sending messages within minutes.  

· Ways you could use our services:

Our text messaging services can be used by pretty much any website or application. For instance, if you are running an e-commerce site you can integrate our web service to send your customers an automated confirmation as soon as they have placed an order, or delivery advice to let them know when their order has been dispatched.

Another use is for businesses who offer a maintenance provision such as laptop repair or vehicle mechanics. Simply set up our text solution to deliver a SMS message to your customers at every step of the repair process, such as an acknowledgment receipt for the product that requires maintenance, regular updates on the repair status, and followed by confirmation that the items has been dispatched or is ready to pick-up.

There are endless other uses for our web services. If you would like to find out more about these services please visit our Developer Partner section or call our Customer Care team on 08451 221 302. 

Our HTTP(S) service is one of the three API’s or Application Programming Interfaces available to our clients alongside our web and SMTP services. The goal of all three of these services is to enable our clients to combine our web SMS services with their existing web sites and applications. This allows for smooth and hassle free integration between the two.

The HTTP(S) connector specifically lets you send and receive SMS messages within your website or application using our simple HTTP(S) command. The (S) denotes the ability to use SSL encryption to send and receive your messages securely.  

Here are some of the main highlights of our HTTP(S) service:

·  You can send extended length text messages that appear as a single SMS on your recipients’ handset.

·  You can choose whether you want your messages to appear from a long number (traditional mobile style number), a short code, or an 11 character text string.

·  Receive replies swiftly to your messages regardless of whether you are using HTTP (non-secure) or HTTPS (secure).

· Easily check the delivery status of your messages so that you know immediately whether they have been received by the desired recipient. You also have the option to check a single message in particular as opposed to checking in bulk.

· Receive messages from your customers to your chosen long or short code number. This is particularly good for responding to orders or customer enquiries.

For more information on using our HTTP(S) service please visit our Developer Centre or contact a member of our Customer Care team on 08451 221 302.

TextAnywhere’s web integrated SMS services are designed specifically for customers who want the ease of combining our text message services with their own pre-existing applications and websites. If this sounds like something you would be interested in then keep reading!

Our SMS gateway API is the tool used to enable our clients and developer partners to send automated SMS messages from their website or application. It supports three types of interface: these are our HTTP(S) service, SMTP service and our SOAP web service. These services allow clients to perform such activities as sending and receiving text messages, control message features such as free-to-receive and reverse-billing options, and check the delivery status of messages.

But why should you choose our web messaging functions?

TextAnywhere have spent a lot of time carefully deciding which features we would like our web SMS services to provide for our customers to ensure that they are receiving the best quality service as possible and these are the features we have decided are most important:

·  Simplicity: Our clients want a service that is straightforward to use and doesn’t require a lot of time and effort and complex coding knowledge. Therefore, we have adapted a service that does not need additional software to be downloaded in order to run our SMS products. This means that our solutions are ready to use the minute you need them.

·  Support: If you do find that you are in need of some help with integrating our SMS services then our technical staff are on-hand to provide you with free support. We also have extensive and detailed information available within our developer section.

·  Save money: With our web SMS service you only pay for the messages you send. We even add 50 free credits automatically to your account so that you can test our service.  

For more information please don’t hesitate to visit our website or contact a member of our Customer Care team on 08451 221 302.