Bulks SMS and business - Case study
SMS was created as part of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) Phase 1 Standard. It is believed that the first short message has been sent in December 1992 from a Personal Computer (PC) to a mobile phone on the Vodafone GSM network in the UK. The initial application was as a means of voice mail notification but from a humble beginning SMS became a standard mode of communication and many new applications were developed around this medium since 1992.
Global GSM users are estimated at 1.045 billion with 95 billion SMS sent globally in the fourth quarter 2004. The total South African users are estimated at 18 million (including prepaid clients) and Africa as a continent has a total of 62 million mobile phone users. (Ref. www.cellular.co.za)
This indicates major growth in the GSM communication arena. The one questions most likely on all small business owners´ lips are: "How could I make this work for my small business? Is it not just another marketing expense? Is it not just major companies that could afford SMS - I am not a technical person so how would I know how to send SMS from a web site?"
Well, there is hope for the smaller business owners (SMME) as various services are now available that accommodate smaller clients. So let´s look at the advantages of sending text messages and why you would need to do it from a web site.
- You could keep an online phone book with a list of your clients´ contact numbers. Please remember it is important to get permission from clients to send them SMS.
- You could compile a list of these numbers in Excel or Notepad, comma separated, upload the file with numbers, type in one message and dispatch it to the list of numbers. (This is known as bulk SMS)
- Branding and advertising opportunities exist by setting your sender ID (limited to 11 characters) to your business name or contact number. When the message arrives in your clients' "inbox" it will identify you as the sender.
- You could schedule text messages to be delivered on a specific day, date and time.
- If you speak a foreign language, you could use keyboard settings and Unicode option to send the messages in non-latin characters (70 characters 16-bit Unicode messaging.)
- All sent items are stored in the Outbox and customized reports could be drawn to see which messages arrived at your client.
- With the development of multi-media messaging (MMS) users could opt to send WAP bookmarks to clients - in this case a web site address (URL) will arrive in the mobile phone owner´s inbox and they could then visit the web site for details.
- Websms also allows users to send their business cards to clients.
- Users that do not have permanent internet access have the option to use a free desktop tool called PositiveSMS V2where they could compile messages offline, log in and send while online. The same user name and password could be used for desktop messaging or web SMS
- Single text messages could be send via the FirefoxIE toolbar. Simply download and install the new FirefoxIE browser, activate the SMS toolbar and text friends, family and collegues straight from your browser. Please note that 160 character text messages are allowed but that some networks in some countries only allow for 123 characters.
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