How Can Your Business Reach Customers Worldwide Quickly and Reliably with An SMS Campaign?

With short messages established as a powerful way for businesses to connect to customers, a cloud-based solution can ensure rapid delivery to targeted user groups worldwide.

Short Message Services (SMS) are a simple and efficient way for organizations to connect to customers globally and remain established and stronger than other communication options, including popular in-app notifications. According to Forbes, 95% of SMS messages are read within three minutes and 98% of messages are opened (as opposed to 20% of emails).

To help businesses maximize the potential of SMS, Andrew Heading, Head of Field Marketing, ANZ, Alibaba Cloud and Shawn Li, a Solution Architect with Alibaba Cloud who has more than 10 years of experience in large-scale IT solution and business process design and implementation, recently hosted a webinar that covered the opportunities of the messaging format and how the cloud can meet simple through to complex business requirements for SMS communications.

So why is SMS as a better option for businesses-to-customer communication than alternatives?

Most messages are delivered within three to five seconds globally, free of charge – even to customers who may be overseas and roaming onto a different network
Messages are device-independent, meaning different notifications do not need to be created for different devices, including Apple iPhones, Android devices, BlackBerry phones and even feature phones
Messages are simple to integrate and traceable for customers, are reliable and can be much cheaper than other technologies.

For these reasons, SMS usage is expanding to all types of businesses, for purposes such as forwarding one-time notifications, for marketing purposes and even to trigger features within applications.

Optimizing the Use of SMS

The right cloud platform powers the optimal use of SMS and Alibaba Cloud provides unified short message integration interfaces through Alibaba Cloud Short Message Service (Alibaba Cloud SMS), helping businesses avoid the inefficiency and difficulty of integrating with multiple telecom operators that each use different interfaces.

Businesses can instead use the Alibaba Cloud unified interface to avoid this underlying complexity, with Alibaba Cloud selecting the optimal channel to deliver a message to an end-user, based on each user’s network operators. These simple and efficient integrations allow businesses to focus on their own priorities.

The cloud service also has a formidable reach: Alibaba Cloud SMS is connected to more than 1,200 networks in 235 countries, delivering more than 99.9% uptime.

Easy to Test and Use

To test Alibaba Cloud SMS, users need only to visit the Quick Start section of the Alibaba Cloud Console, input their country code and mobile phone number, sender ID and message text and simply hit send to deliver the message to the nominated end-user device. This enables a user to confirm that the feature can be used in their country and in their business. Alibaba Cloud has made available free trial SMS bundles to enable testing.

The Alibaba Cloud Console also incorporates a Campaign feature that enables operations or business teams to create SMS-based campaigns without any IT integration or development. Users simply input their campaign name, sender ID and the message, and upload a file that incorporates the customer mobile number. They can send the message immediately or schedule it for an appropriate time and customize and personalize the content for individual mobile phones by incorporating the content in the file prior to upload.

To meet the requirements of advanced users, Alibaba Cloud provides a range of APIs and SDKs for different programming languages, including Java and .NET.

Alibaba Cloud SMS is proven to deliver success for businesses such as Melbourne-based EASI, Australia’s number one Asian food delivery app, that enables more than 1 million orders per month and is expanding to the United States, Canada, Japan, Malaysia and New Zealand. By using Alibaba Cloud SMS, EASI is reaching its global customers in a timely and personalized way.

The webinar then drew to a close with a session in which the hosts responded to questions about the steps required to send messages using Alibaba Cloud SMS and how to access competitive pricing for the delivery of a large volume of SMS messages.

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How Can Your Business Reach Customers Worldwide Quickly and Reliably with An SMS Campaign?

Optimizing the Use of SMS

Easy to Test and Use

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