With an ever increasing sales competition among companies, they are looking for unconventional and cost-effective means to engage customers and to improve overall user experience for their web applications and services. Besides the conventional E-mail marketing, one alternative option for effective customer engagement is SMS (Short Messaging Service).
Different companies and service providers have integrated SMS in different scenarios and contexts. Some example applications of SMS are:
- Thank You message after successful purchase.
- Secret code for banking transactions.
- Online Survey link via SMS.
- Promotional messages.
- Deals and Offers messages etc.
There are several SMS Gateway service providers which provide APIs for integrating messaging service in 3rd party desktop and web applications. Among them the two well known SMS Gateway providers are:
Clickatell
Clickatell has been used by thousands of users and acclaims number one position in this business domain. Clickatell provides huge coverage of networks round the world in almost 220 countries. The credits per SMS varies among countries.
Clickatell is feature-rich. Some of the important features are listed below:
- Restricted IP access to avoid any fraud.
- Online Reporting.
- Reports can be generated based on SMS delivery status and time period.
- Reports can be downloaded in CSV format
- Service provider adds all SMS messages in a queue and tries maximum 8 times to resend the message.
- Maximum 160 characters in a single SMS message.
- Maximum 35 SMS messages can be concatenated but provider recommends for no more than 3 messages concatenation.
- API is able to send 5 SMS/Sec.
- API provides connection point for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, FTP etc.
- APIs are available for Java, C#, PHP, Flash and others languages.
- API is well documented.
- Custom Sender ID can be used (Sender ID can be set once credit has been purchased).
- All sub-accounts management
- Manage routing profile, based on pricing.
- And never-the-less Efficient support.
Clickatell integration is fast and simple, a lot of development resources are provided on the website. Upon registration Clickatell offers 10 free SMS credits.
For quick tests one can use this URL by just replacing the API and user credentials:
http://api.clickatell.com/http/sendmsg?user=&password=&api_id=&to=&text=hello+world
Clockworksms
Clockworksms is another prominent SMS service provider. Clockworksms provides wide network coverage and price per SMS (Link: http://www.clockworksms.com/pricing/) is varied among countries. Clockworksms has sweetened the service with good set-of-features and easy-to-use web interface.
Set of important features of Clockworksms are:
- Dashboard for SMS statistics (updated after 1 day).
- IP filtering for restricted access.
- Configurable Sender ID (activation time 30 minutes).
- Delivery status receipts in HTTP and XML.
- Simple and easy to use web interface.
- API allows SMS delivery using HTTP and XML.
- API can be used with Java, C#, Ruby, Python and php.
- Plugins for Integration with other services or applications like wordpress, zendesk, Shopify etc.
- Excellent support.
For testing Clockworksms quickly, one can use this URL by adding API Id and user credentials:
https://api.clockworksms.com/http/send.aspx?key=&to=&content=Hello+World
Conclusion
Clickatell provides more features especially online reporting tool. The tool provides detailed filters w.r.t sent or undelivered messages, the resultant reports can also be downloaded as Excel files.
Clockworksms does not provide any reporting tool, although Clockworksms argued that API provides these features and the assumption is that the vendors which integrate Clockworksms will manage this information as per their requirements.
Besides the given argument I still think that online reporting gives big advantage because it saves vendor’s resources and time to implement solution. Also not always the information about undelivered messages is required. So if a client faces an issue in SMS messages delivery and ask for detailed information, in such cases the reporting tool is very helpful.