Everyone knows how to send an SMS from a mobile phone, and some of the Y generation are perhaps more familiar with texting than talking.However, it’s through this familiarity that many of us have blinkers on when it comes to seeing the potential of sending SMS from a computer. Here are just a few advantages, with real life examples.
Bulk SMS messaging
Perhaps the biggest advantage of using a platform that allows you to send SMS from a computer is that you can send to thousands of contacts in one go. Literally hundreds of thousands of contacts can be sent an SMS as easily as it is to send to one contact. In comparison, a mobile phone can handle sending one message every ten seconds, that’s one minute to send just six messages.And it couldn’t be simpler. Create a spreadsheet containing all of your contacts, upload that spreadsheet to the platform, type out a message and hit send.You can even manage and maintain your contacts on our online platform.EXAMPLE: You’re the day manager at an aged care facility and you need to fill a shift because a nurse has called in sick. You have uploaded contacts into different groups for differently qualified staff, i.e. a group for nurses, receptionists, doctors, and so on. You find the nurses group and send out a message requesting someone to cover a shift. A few nurses reply within minutes, and the first one that replied gets the shift. One of our clients told us it normally took an hour to fill a shift, with our SMS platform, the shift was filled in less than 10 minutes.
Scheduling SMS
Most people who work a 9-5 job (as it was once known), do not want work to intrude on their weekend. If you needed to send out a time sensitive SMS at the weekend, you’d have to make time to do that. However, when you send SMS from a computer you have access to additional features, one such feature being scheduling.Example: You work in the marketing department for a retailer and therefore you know your biggest sales days are at the weekend, yet you work Monday to Friday. You want your SMS to hit customers’ phones on the Saturday morning, to drive them to your store. When you use a platform to send SMS from a computer, you can set up your SMS campaigns during the week and schedule them ready to hit customers’ phones at the most opportune time.
Personalising SMS copy
As you may know, modern phones have the ability to send to groups. You can send the same message to multiple people. This might work if everyone needs the same information, however if different people need slightly different information, be it a different time, different customer number or any other variable information, sending to a group from your phone doesn’t work, you’ll have to send individual messages.Example: You are a receptionist at a large accounting firm, you could potentially send a group message out from your business phone to all clients stating they have an appointment tomorrow. But that’s about as far as you can go. You’ve tried this before and the phone goes crazy with clients asking what time their appointment is. You could also spend the next hour or so sending individual messages to each client, but there are over 40 clients each day that need appointment reminders. So the thought of that is not particularly thrilling.With a platform that allows you to send SMS from a computer, you can create a spreadsheet with all the appointments on it; with their names, appointment times, the lawyer they’re seeing and any other information they need for their appointment. Then you can create a template with these fields merged in, and with a few clicks you can send out 40 personalised messages. You can do this for the entire week, scheduling them for each day.
Building templates
Do you often send the same message out numerous times? Perhaps you have it saved somewhere and you copy and paste it, or maybe you type it out each time. By using a platform that allows you to send SMS from a computer, you can save templates for future use. This ensures speed, consistency and accuracy.Example: You’re the manager of numerous optical stores across the country and you want a consistent tone of voice for all customer communications. You also want to give staff the flexibility to send SMS when required, such as informing a customer that their prescription glasses are ready to collect.Having each member of staff type their own version of that message opens it up to both mistakes and a different tone of voice. With an online platform you can create templates for different scenarios, keeping a consistent tone of voice and avoiding any grammatical or spelling mistakes. With Esendex you can also have staff that work in stores as ‘template only’ users, which means they can only use the templates provided.
Integrating with current software
Computers are extremely malleable, in that once you know your way around code, you can do almost anything. One such thing you can do is to enable the current software used in your business to trigger SMS messages at the perfect moments in a customer’s or staff’s processes.Example: you’re responsible for the platform a taxi company runs on, you want to send an SMS to customers once their taxi has been dispatched, ensuring that they are aware it’s on its way, as well as adding a level of security, by having the number plate in the message. Your software already runs most of this in the background, it dispatches the closest available taxi and communicates back to the office which taxi is being sent, but that’s as far as it goes. With a bit of extra code, you can easily enable that software to send an SMS to your customer with all the required information. Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg, and using a computer to send SMS has many more benefits and possibilities. To find out more call us on 1300 764 946.
