SMS for Business — Application-to-Person SMS
Why SMS Text Messaging?
Communication is important for business to engage with their customers. But choosing the right media for your business communications for a particular purpose is critical.
We used to think of sending email or making a phone call to contact our customers. But let’s have a look at our email inbox to see how many unread emails we have. Too many, right? So do our customers. Making phone calls to clients during their business hours is awkward and not scalable, and most of the time you would end up in their voice mailbox. Let’s also check our voicemail messages which takes so much time to access and to listen through each of them. If it is too much hassle for us, it is too much hassle for our customers too.
Based on some researches, SMS has roughly 95% open rate with more than 90% read rate in minutes. SMS recipients are not required to have an expensive smart phone, but just with a basic mobile phone — it is pretty much, anybody with a mobile number is reachable. This makes SMS the most efficient communication method to reach your customers.
However, keep in mind that SMS was invented for us to exchange text messages between family members and friends — the people we already knew, and we are happy to receive messages from them. When we are talking about SMS for business, it is the whole different thing.
There are many things that need to be considered before sending out a text message to a customer. The first and foremost consideration should be the text messaging compliance, which is regulated normally by a government agency. This is because of violating text messaging regulations may cost your business a fortune. Every country or state has a unique set of text messaging regulations. And wireless carriers also implement their own filtering systems to enforce government regulations. The ultimate goal of these regulations is to protect mobile subscribers from unwanted messaging such as spam, fraud, or abuse. For your reference, below is a list of regulators providing regulations and guidance in the United States and in the European Union countries:
- Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
- Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)
- Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA)
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in European Union countries.
The other important considerations are relevancies as described below:
- SMS is personal: make sure that the relationship between the recipient and the business already existed.
- Good timing: SMS is most effective during business hours (10am — 8pm), not Mondays, not during common rush hour times.
- Frequency: do not bombard customers with too many messages. Overwhelm customers will kill your engagement rates.
- Short and to the point: this is how SMS has incredibly high open and read rates.
- Always ask for permission: let customers opt-in and make it easy to opt-out.
SMS applications
There are 2 types of SMS applications: P2P (Person-to-Person) and A2P (Application-to-Person). When there is a human action involved in sending a text message, like type the text message and click a button to send the message, it is considered as a P2P text messaging.
When a text message is sent from a computer program automatically, it is considered as an A2P text messaging.
There are also 2 basic types of business text messaging — information messaging such as an order confirmation, and interactive messaging such as an appointment reminder with the option to reply for confirmation or cancellation.
Even P2P text messaging is useful in business communications, it is not scaleable when we frequently need to send hundreds or thousands of text messages daily, particularly, if we have to type each message using a phone’s keypad and manually send one by one to our customers. It is also inefficient to apply P2P text messaging to interactive messaging applications, simply because of the slowness on the human actions involved. That’s why A2P text messaging application is the most suitable for business usages.
RingCentral Text Messaging Capabilities
Most of RingCentral phone numbers are SMS enabled, which means that a RingCentral user can send SMS messages out from that phone number using a RingCentral soft-phone or the RingCentral mobile apps.
The SMS capability of a RingCentral regular phone number is regulated mainly for P2P (Person-to-Person) text messaging. The RingCentral platform provides APIs for sending SMS messages programmatically. It allows you to integrate RingCentral text messaging service into your system. A common use case is to enable your employees to send text messages directly from your own application instead of using a RingCentral soft phone or the mobile apps.
To send a text message using the SMS API programmatically, you can simply make a POST request to the SMS endpoint with the body of the POST request specified with a few parameters such as the “from” phone number, the “to” phone number and the text message.
Server endpoint:
https://platform.ringcentral.com/restapi/v1.0/account/[accountId]/extension/[extensionId]/smsHTTP method: POSTRequest body:
{
from: {'phoneNumber': 'Sender’s number'},
to: [{'phoneNumber': 'Recipient’s number'}],
text: 'Hello World from RingCentral'
}
There are limitations on sending text messages programmatically from a RingCentral regular phone number:
- The API rate limit of the SMS endpoint is 40 API calls per minute. This means that you can send maximum 40 messages per minute.
- The daily limit enforced by most wireless carriers for non-marketing and person-to-person, which we recommend sending up to 200 text messages per day.
With the SMS capability and limitations of a RingCentral regular phone number mentioned above, you can build your own GUI (Graphics User Interface) SMS application that allows your users to send text messages directly from your app UI, enhancing the user experience with some features such as using a laptop’s keyboard to type a message, copy/paste or populate the text message from a database, select a recipient number from your CRM system etc.
RingCentral Toll-Free SMS
In order to implement an A2P text messaging application, you need a special phone number which can be used legitimately for 1) sending text messages from an application automatically without human actions; 2) sending massive amount of text message without being blocked by a wireless carrier. In RingCentral messaging service, that special phone number is called a Toll-Free SMS number.
So, with the Toll-Free SMS number, the limitation on sending text messages programmatically using the SMS API mentioned above, is the API rate limit of the SMS endpoint, which is maximum 40 messages per minute. This should be enough for text messaging services such as sending password expiration reminder, sending activation code for Two-Factor-Authentication or any type of applications that you can control the message sending frequency that it should not exceed the API rate limit.
Using a Toll-Free SMS number and the SMS API you can to send up to 57,600 text messages per day (40 x 60 x 24). This capability is great for broadcasting a message to a large number of recipients. However, sending text messages to 57K recipients will take a full day (24 hours) to complete the task, and you have to keep your SMS application running in a loop continuously for 24 hours to send text messages to all recipients.
The SMS API is easy to use and useful in interactive messaging services. But, obviously, it is not suitable for broadcasting text messages to a large number of recipients. That’s why RingCentral introduces a new SMS API to enhance its text messaging service.
High Volume SMS API
RingCentral High Volume SMS API (aka A2P SMS API) is a new SMS API which can be used only with A2P provisioned phone numbers to send text messages to a massive number of recipients. It operates much faster than the normal SMS API; Allows you to send more than 3 messages per second, which makes up to 250K messages per day (or 3 x 3600 x 24). The new API’s superiority is not only about its capability to send more text messages, but it is also about sending all messages to all recipients with just a single API call. You can broadcast the same text message to all recipients, or you can send different text messages to different recipients. RingCentral server will take the burden off your app to handle your single request of sending messages to all recipients. This means that you don’t need to implement a long running “for” or “while” loop as if you would implement it using the normal SMS API.
Server endpoint:
https://platform.ringcentral.com/restapi/v1.0/account/[accountId]/a2p-sms/batchHTTP method: POSTSimple request body – same message to multiple recipients:{
"from": "+18881234567",
"messages": [{"to":["14081234567"]},{"to":["16501234567"]},{"to": ["..."]}],
"text": "Happy New Year",
"scheduledAt": "2020-10-20T00:00:00Z",
"expiresIn": 300
}Simple request body – custom message to each recipient group:{
"from": "+18881234567",
"text": "Happy New Year",
"messages": [
{"to":["14081235678"]},{"to":["14089876543"]},{"to":{"..."}]},
{"to":["16501234567"],"text": "Feliz Año Nuevo."},
{"to":["16507654321"],"text": "Feliz Año Nuevo."},
{"to":["15121234567"],"text": "Hyvää Uutta Vuotta"},
{"to":["15127654321"],"text": "Hyvää Uutta Vuotta"},
{"to":["13121234567"],"text": "新年快乐"}
{"to":["13127654321"],"text": "新年快乐"}
],
"scheduledAt": "2020-10-20T00:00:00Z",
"expiresIn": 300
}
With the example request above, you can send a “Happy New Year” message to all your English speaking customers. And to all your Spanish, Finnish and Chinese speaking customers in their own language with just one API call.
It’s worth mentioning that RingCentral will automatically handle opt-in and opt-out on High Volume SMS using industry standard terms such a `STOP`, `START`. This is handled per pair of sender and recipient numbers and would help you avoid violating user opt-out choice. This feature could be a hidden option for many users who are not aware of such an easy way to opt-in or opt-out. Thus, adding a friendly reminder text e.g. “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” at the end of each message would please your users who are unwilling to receive text messages from you.
RingCentral High Volume SMS also supports push notifications for incoming SMS messages and opt-out events. This helps you build interactive A2P SMS messaging apps and easily handle your own opt-out list.
It’s really up to you to decide using A2P SMS for your business to keep your customers engaged, informed and happy.
Please let us know what you think by leaving your questions and comments below. To learn even more about other features we have make sure to visit our developer site and if you’re ever stuck make sure to go to our developer forum.
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