SMS stands for short messaging service and is synonymously known as texting. Mobile marketing is highly interactive and personalized and has a powerful and immediate impact. By integrating mobile technology into existing communication campaigns, businesses enable their customers to take advantage of special offers, cash in mobile coupons, obtain additional, relevant information and receive alerts about events. Mobile marketing enables advertisers to send out custom-made and personalized multimedia campaigns to lists of targeted audiences—enabling customers to respond directly.

Some of the benefits include new customer acquisition, brand awareness, decreased no-shows, and more money in your pocket! SMS marketing is the most affordable and the highest converting form of marketing you can be involved with.

What can you do with Mobile Marketing?

Create short-codes and mobile keywords. An example is texting a certain number to a specific word like PIZZA. You’ll start to heard this on the radio and TV if you’re paying attention. Text message marketing is really in the early adopter stage.

You can build a list with your mobile short-code and keyword. The great thing is that mobile has conversions / action rates from 11-30% on average! This is an easy way to flood your business with traffic.

You can post your mobile keyword and short-code on your website, your Facebook page, or posters in your office, billboards, TV, etc.

Send appointment reminders. This will decrease no-shows between 50-75%! That equals more money for you and your business. Reminders should be sent before each appointment for maximum effectiveness.

Send bulk SMS blasts. This will allow you to make offers to your text database. The average open rate for text messages is a whopping 97%! In fact, over 90% open their messages within 30 minutes. That’s crazy.

Utilize mobile voting. American Idol made this method extremely popular and mainstream. You can use voting to poll your database or list to get valuable feedback. It’s another tool to make your more money.

Send coupons. You can use mobile coupons to get people through your doors fast. Everyone likes a deal so give people what they want, a special hook-up. It’s such a simple way to drum up business literally on-demand if you’re having a slow day in the office.

Get in the game! If you’re not using mobile SMS marketing, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity and goldmine. There are more than 4 times as many mobile phone users as those that have computers. Cell phones are extensions of people today, so take advantage.

Anytime, anywhere communication that is direct and immediate, can be targeted to particular audience groups based on age, profession or gender, cost effective, huge potential for viral marketing as customers tend to forward messages in groups, can be easily integrated in cross-media including TV, print and radio.

Mobile marketing is the ONLY medium that reaches customers on the go.

The first benefit of using bulk SMS is keeping touch with your customers. If you already have the customer’s contact information, you should use it to its full advantage. The fact of the matter is that many businesses don’t contact their customers enough. Using SMS is a great way to do so and an effective way to let customers know about special events and offers.

The second benefit of using bulk SMS is that it can be quite cost effective. This strategy is far cheaper than using direct marketing to let your customers know about your promotion. If you feel that you can’t afford to use direct mailing because of the costs involved, you should consider using SMS as an alternative. You may be surprised with the kind of results you get.

Purchase in bulk if you’re a regular

Buying bulk quantities of SMS Messages can save you big cash; I guess this is obvious, but a look at the prices on your favorite bulk SMS provider will confirm how true this is — so think before you buy…
If you’re going to be sending SMS messages to small groups, but regularly, buy in bulk. Think of your overall SMS needs for, say, 3 or 6 months or maybe even a year, if you’re serious about SMS marketing, in order to cut costs dramatically.

Be careful about the encoding

The SMS protocol has support for different SMS message encodings. The most common is GSM , but there is also UCS-2 support.. In short, GSM contains only a number of characters, while UCS-2 supports practically every language out there.
If GSM doesn’t cover your needs, beware because the character limit drops in UCS-2 from 160 characters per SMS to 70 characters per SMS!
So make sure you’re informed – or you might end up getting charged for double the amount of SMS messages you meant to send!

Did you know what ‘concatenation’ is?

Concatenation is an option some Bulk sms providers offer — others don’t, and others have it set as default.

Without it, if you send an SMS that’s over 160 chars (if it’s on the GSM encoding) your ‘one’ SMS will get delivered as two separate SMS messages on the consumers mobile phone. Be sure your bulk SMS provider offers this option, if you will often be sending messages that exceed the limit.

Remember to include contact details

Given the nature of my profession, I register my mobile phone number in all sorts of places. As a result I get sent loads of texts from various SMS marketing campaigns. Once in a while there’s a text that I find interesting, so at that point I need a way to participate, either by sending an SMS, or by calling a number.

The problem is I have seen too many of these texts without full contact details so I can choose what suits me best.  This is really important when the SMS being sent is a call-to-action, or if the consumer might have a question or require clarifications.

For example, restaurants often send me promotional SMS messages, but in case I want to participate I want more than just the phone number they usually give me. Why not also have the website, so I can visit it directly from my phone, or also have the ability to text back to participate/book a table/etc?

Run your SMS text through a spell checker

This is, again, simple, yet sometimes overlooked. Quickly pass your text through a spell checker to ensure you don’t get any embarrassing comments, because this sort of thing can hurt your campaign and your own (or your business) image. Do you really want a politician who either can’t spell or just isn’t bothered to pass the SMS through a spell checker? (The second’s far worse for me cause it shows poor professionalism, while making spelling mistakes isn’t that big a deal for me)

Send a test SMS

Once you’ve prepared your SMS in your favorite Bulk sms software, or website, and you’re ready to press that big red ‘SEND’ button… STOP!

Now is the time to take a second and send the message to your own mobile phone first, to make sure it comes up ok. Then, because, to be honest, we’re not very fair judges of our own work, send it to a friend or colleague who hasn’t seen it yet, and see how they react / ask them what they think.

When you get the green light from them, you’re good to go!

The situation varies around the world — some of this is due to the different views on spam in various cultures, similar to email spam. For example SMS spam in China is much more prevalent than it is in the West, but the locals are far more tolerant of it than Westerners are.

A widely-quoted statistic on SMS spam is from Ferris Research, who estimated that 1.5 billion spammed text messages were received in the U.S. during 2008. That sounds like a big number, but a year is a long time and there are tens of millions of subscribers in the country.

I work that out as about one spam message per person per quarter, on average — some people will get more, some less. It’s occasionally annoying, but incomparable to the email spam problem, where a typical user might receive hundreds of spam messages per day (unless they have a good spam filter, of course!)

So why is this? How come email spam is a 5,000,000% bigger problem than SMS spam? It mainly boils down to three related factors…

Cost of Service

Email is free. Mobile phone service isn’t. To be more precise, the marginal cost of sending email is zero, but sending a text message costs of the order of $0.10 (much less in quantity).

Shady marketers and criminals love email. They can send email for free, either by stealing service from innocent users via botnets, or by using so-called “pink contracts” (where ISPs turn a blind eye to a customer’s spamming ways).

If the marginal cost per message is zero, who cares if 99% of your email is filtered before reaching your victims’ inboxes? Let’s say you send a million messages advertising fake ED drugs and 1% gets delivered. Of that, 1% results in a sale. That’s 100 sales, each of which might generate, say, a $10 affiliate revenue; $1,000 in total. So, in order to make a profit, your average cost to send each message needs to be less than one tenth of a cent.

However, in the SMS world, the privilege of sending bulk SMS is reserved for those with money and a valid contract. Bulk SMS might cost a few cents per message to send: a couple of orders of magnitude more than email.

Of course, spammers can and do uses stolen credit cards to buy service, but the providers are quick to shut down such abuse.

• If you receive a SPAM text message, please let your carrier know as soon as possible. Make sure to include the message, time and phone number.
• In general, we recommend wireless users to make sure their purchase is from a trusted source before them sign-up for a product or service.

SMPP was originally designed by Aldiscon, a small Irish company that was later acquired by Logica (now split off and known as Acision). In 1999, Logica formally handed over SMPP to the SMPP Developers Forum, later renamed as The SMS Forum and now disbanded. The SMPP protocol specifications are still available through the website which also carries a notice stating that it will be taken down at the end of 2007. As part of the original handover terms, SMPP ownership has now returned to Acision due to the disbanding of the SMS forum.

The protocol is based on pairs of request/response PDUs (protocol data units, or packets) exchanged over OSI layer 4 (TCP session or X.25 SVC3) connections. PDUs are binary encoded for efficiency.

In SMPP terminology, two types of entities is defined, a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC), and an External Short Messaging Entity (ESME).

In simplistic terms, an SMSC manages SMS messages for a mobile operator network, delivering SMS messages to mobile phones.

An ESME is any other type of entity that wants to exchange SMS messages with these mobile subscribers.  In other words, it is any type of application or service that wants to be able to send and/or receive SMS messages. These applications or services are also often referred to as Value Added Services (VAS) or Value Added Service Providers (VASP).

The SMPP protocol is designed to facilitate the exchange of these SMS messages over the standard TCP/IP protocol. SMPP is designed to be fast and efficient to facilitate high volume reliable message exchange.

This page is designed to be a quick resource for more information on SMPP.  The following links provide more detailed information on specific issues or considerations regarding SMPP (especially for users of Now SMS):

The most commonly used versions of SMPP are v3.3, the most widely supported standard, and v3.4, which adds transceiver support (single connections that can send and receive messages). Data exchange may be synchronous, where each peer must wait for a response for each PDU being sent, and asynchronous, where multiple requests can be issued in one go and acknowledged in a skew order by the other peer. The latest version of SMPP is v5.0.

100% Dell Server

Dell is a multinational technology corporation focused on personal computers and related products, and based in Round Rock, Texas, USA.

Dell gives the name Power Edge (PE) to its server product line, which as of 2007 brought in approximately 15% of Dell’s overall revenue from computer-hardware sales.

Most PowerEdge servers use the x86 architecture. The early exceptions to this, the Power Edge 3250, PowerEdge 7150, and PowerEdge 7250, used Intel’s Itanium processor, but Dell abandoned Itanium in 2005 after failing to find adoption in the marketplace. The partnership between Intel and Dell remained close, with Intel remaining the exclusive source of processors in Dell’s servers until 2006. In May 2006 Dell announced that it also intended to develop servers using AMD Opteron processors. The first Opteron-based PowerEdge systems, the PowerEdge 6950 and the PowerEdge SC1435, appeared in October 2006.

PowerEdge machines come configured as tower, rack-mounted, or blade servers. Dell uses a consistent chip-set across servers in the same generation regardless of packaging,allowing for a common set of drivers and system-images.

We only use Dell servers in our web hosting platform. Utilizing state-of-the-art technology we have built a web hosting platform that is second to none.

Our platform is designed in such a way that if any server fails another server automatically and without delay takes over that server’s workload. For example, if one of our mail servers breaks down another server automatically comes online, with all the correct configuration, and takes over the work of the failed server. During this period no email is lost.

As well as this, all data is stored in two large network disk arrays. Data is automatically synchronised between the arrays so that in the event of an array failing the remaining array continues to serve data to the servers with no downtime.

1: Buy in bulk if you’re a regular

Buying bulk quantities of SMS Messages can save you big bucks. I guess this is obvious, but a look at the prices on your favorite bulk SMS provider will confirm how true this is — so think before you buy.

If you’re going to be sending SMS messages to small groups, but regularly, buy in bulk. Think of your overall SMS needs for, say, 3 or 6 months or maybe even a year, if you’re serious about SMS marketing, in order to cut costs dramatically.

2: Be careful about the encoding

The SMS protocol has support for different SMS message encodings. The most common is GSM ,but there is also UCS-2 support.. In short, GSM contains only a number of characters, while UCS-2supports practically every language out there. If GSM doesn’t cover your needs, beware because the character limit drops in UCS-2 from 160 characters per SMS to 70 characters per SMS!
So make sure you’re informed – or you might end up getting charged for double the amount of SMS messages you meant to send!

3: Did you know what ‘concatenation’ is?

Concatenation is an option some Bulk SMS providers offer — others don’t, and others have it set as default. Without it, if you send an SMS that’s over 160 chars (if it’s on the GSM encoding) your ‘one’ SMS will get delivered as two separate SMS messages on the consumers mobile phone. Be sure your bulk SMS provider offers this option, if you will often be sending messages that exceed the limit.

4: Remember to include contact details

Given the nature of my profession, I register my mobile phone number in all sorts of places. As a result I get sent loads of texts from various SMS marketing campaigns. Once in a while there’s a text that I find interesting, so at that point I need a way to participate, either by sending an SMS, or by calling a number.

The problem is I have seen too many of these texts without full contact details so I can choose what suits me best.

This is really important when the SMS being sent is a call-to-action or if the consumer might have a question or require clarifications.

For example, restaurants often send me promotional SMS messages, but in case I want to participate I want more than just the phone number they usually give me. Why not also has the website, so I can visit it directly from my phone, or also have the ability to text back to participate/book a table/etc?

Thousands of SMS Aggregators and SMS Gateway Providers are providing unique services such as instant sms with high priority gateway, economic sms gateway and non-time critical gateways in India. Reaching the potential clients at the fingertips has just been made possible by Bulk SMS companies. Just type 160 characters sms in seconds and then click the send sms in bulk and it reaches the reciever in no time.

Traditional Marketing tactics are getting sidelined with this new innovative technology. Click of a button to send sms in bulk is easier than any other media to reach anyone’s own hands. Mobile Technology proved as one of the real media to Indian companies to explore new ideas and better profits.

Sending  sms

Bulk sms has become a MUST Advertising & Marketing tool in India to promote business. Avail bulk sms services to achieve maximum profits. To send bulk sms, you need to have bulk sms software or bulk sms providers online tool, where you can configure your bulk sms message.

Planning to buy huge Mobile sms volume,then ask our bulk sms provider team to get the lowest, cheapest bulk sms package. We have a special bulk sms software to send bulk sms through Excel to any mobile in India. Sending SMS to Mobile absolutely free from our SMS Gateway.

Bulk SMS will just not create awareness of your brand but it also helps in reaching the wide potential market which might have been untouched.

Contact us www.version-next.com for solutions regarding bulk SMS in India, SMS using excel, free bulk SMS software, lowest cost SMS, SMPP connections, SMS packages for stock brokers, SMS using your own name/brand.

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SMS also has its place in the field of marketing. Television shows have hosted voting polls via text messaging and various commercials now offer downloadable music through cell phones simply by texting a phrase to their short code number. Google now has a messaging service where texting “Google,” can offer you directions, calculations, stock tips, and answers to trivia.

The world of SMS is unlimited in respects to communication. It can be used to tell a loved one that you are in a meeting, or it can allow you to reach 10’s of thousands of people with your ad campaign. Mobile marketing is a relatively new and unchartered territory for most, but those who have benefited from its power first hand, know how effective it is. The possibilities are limitless.

• Short codes (also known as short numbers) are special telephone numbers, much shorter than full telephone numbers, that can be used to address SMS and MMS messages from mobile phones or fixed phones. There are two types of short codes: dialing and messaging.
• Short Code was one of the first higher-level languages ever developed for an electronic computer. Sebesta,W.S Concepts of Programming languages. 2006;M6 14:18 pp.44. ISBN# 0-321-33025-0 unlike machine code, Short Code statements represented mathematic expressions rather than a machine instruction.
• Is a chip sequence which is 2 15 chips long which repeats every 26.666 milliseconds. Different cells and cell sectors all use the same short code, but use different phases of it, which is how the phone differentiates them from each other. The phase is known as the PN Offset. …

Use of the Short code:

Common uses of Short Codes include alert services, contests, coupons, and opt-in marketing lists. Short Codes make it easy for consumers to respond to and engage with your advertising and marketing programs.

In addition to speed and ease of use, Common Short Codes provide consumers with an unparalleled level of control, as all CSC-based mobile marketing programs do.

welcomes you to the exciting World of Mobile SMS Shortcodes and Longcode Services. Today’s cutting-edge Mobile and Cellular Technology has changed the way we live and work. Short Code Messaging (SMS) service avails one stop interaction media through which we could interact with our customers directly and conduct various Media Promotion events like Contests/ Survey, Lucky Winner Draw, Bids, Product Enquiries, Lead generation in a cost effective manner.

SMS Short code service is primarily used for lead generation or receiving feedbacks from the customers. In a shared short code environment every company which wants to avail this service will be provided with a Keyword (Keyword is an unique identifier for your company on our shared short code. e.g. if, your companies name is XYZ Ltd and you took a keyword say XYZL on our short code then every message which starts with XYZL and a blank space will be forwarded to your panel. In short we recognize the incoming messages on the basis of keywords and forward it to the respective companies account.

Above are some of the uses of bulk sms services. Likewise, there are many more uses which come in the sub-categories of the above three exploring the uses of bulk sms. Many companies provide these services but as a said there is difference between cheap sms and premium sms service. www.WeDealsIndia.com is one of the companies which have excelled the field of sms marketing. They provide both solutions cheap sms as well as premium sms to send group sms all over India. With the use of their services you can reach people all over India using bulk sms and many more services like sms short codes .

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