Introducing Texters Realm Links
When we first launched Texters Realm, we displayed a beta version and allowed users to test it and see if it is something they would like or find useful in future. Our clear objective at the time was to provide normal users e.g. event organizers, chama administrators and anybody with an online interface to send bulk sms messages with the click of a button! No shortcodes, no sendernames, no strings attached.
When we talked to the initial users, the key theme revolved around getting contacts on the platform. At the time, Texters Realm provided a form which the user could fill and add a contact to their account.
At the time this served the purpose of a user who had five to fifty contacts. But the customer’s that Texters Realm serves have thousands in audience! There had to be a better way.
When we looked at historical ways of enabling organizations to onboard thousands of contacts on platforms like Texters Realm, the obvious method was with a spreadsheet. This usually involves the marketer downloading a template of excel and either:
- Moving it around the organization (through email or google docs) for individuals to fill in their contacts and then finally coming back to the site to upload this excel template.
- Talking with the IT team to migrate contacts from a legacy database, generate a script to convert those contacts to the downloaded excel template and then sharing it with the marketer for uploading to the site.
These use cases are so common and they have worked in the past. However, the engineers at Texters Realm examined these approaches and noted a few weaknesses.
- Cost of administration = High
Talking to IT is probably the slowest process to getting things done in an organization. Most of the time the IT guys are swamped and this may slow down the marketer by a factor of days.
In case of sharing the excel template within the organization, the marketer hops around email conversations, hope that everyone fills it… keep checking progress on periodic basis and then when finally everything falls together, go to the site and upload it.
This slows down the marketer by a minimum of 24 hours and an infinite maximum depending on the size of the organization. - Stale contacts
Almost all the time, the contact information that an organization has of it’s users is not the freshest possible. A user may have supplied a certain phone number or email during onboarding, but has since changed contacts or even email providers. Uploading this stale data from legacy databases in the organization onto a different platform doesn’t solve the problem. It compounds it, especially when money is involved and texting usually involves money.
This especially resonates with Texters Realm since we want to make sure when the marketers text a contact, the message reaches the contact, not a different person who happens to have been assigned the contact’s former mobile number. - Validation challenges
Most of the time the marketers have to validate the phone numbers and emails of the contacts they are on-boarding, making sure they start with +254 or the emails are valid. Once the validations are okay, then they would proceed to upload contacts to the site. This takes time.
As we became aware of these three problems, we wanted to provide a better experience for our marketers. One that would solve all the three problems with software and a few smarts.
Today we are happy to announce Texters Realm Links.
This feature is intended to facilitate painless onboarding of contacts and accurate data capturing. The process of getting these links to work is described below:
- The marketer creates an account with Texters Realm, immediately they log in, they are assigned a link that is unique to their organization, and that they can share via email, Whatsapp, Twitter and all the various channels.
- The marketer shares this link with their intended audience, the audience would then visit the link and see the list of requested information by the organization.
We included a required field by the name additional notes, this will help marketers discern things such as expiry dates and how to group the users.
All these information is automatically validated by the platform while the target is supplying the data.
- The target supplies the data and submits, this data does not automatically go to the marketer’s contacts…. yet.
The marketer has to login and approve the supplied information. This prevents gaming the platform where if a hacker intends to blow an marketer’s communication budget, they just provide lots of fake contact information (it happens BTW!). It also involves additional housekeeping work like determining a contact’s expiry date and grouping it before the target can begin receiving messages.
The marketer sees the target’s information in their account and can click the tick to approve or the x to reject the contact.
That’s it. The contact can will then be part of the marketer’s contact list and will receive any messages sent by the marketers in future.
We believe that Texters Realm Links are going to go a long way in enabling easy and painless on-boarding of contacts and we can’t wait to get it in our customers hands, customers like you…. and see how you use them!
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Notes
*marketer: A Texter’s Tealm account holder who logs in to the Texter’s Realm online dashboard to send bulk SMS messages to target audience.
