8 questions to ask when choosing a Business SMS Provider

Deciding on a business SMS provider to manage your SMS campaign can go a long way to determining your campaign’s success and ultimate return on investment.

Below are eight crucial questions you should ask any business SMS provider before you consider working with them:

1. Do they provide assistance in setting up your SMS campaign? Reputable providers will make sure your campaign set-up process is completed easily and smoothly. Can they offer you both telephone and online support when you need it?
2. How can your SMS campaign be managed? Good providers will provide desktop, web-based or API software that is simple to set up and integrate, and allows you to easily manage your campaign and send SMS to your target group.
3. Can they ensure delivery across all protocols and networks? It's critical that your provider can deliver messages to all commonly used cell phone protocols such as 3G, WAP and GPRS across every network. Otherwise, you could be missing large segments of your target group.
4. Do they allow you to send branded text messages? Mobile Messages sent from a business or organization are likely to be better received than messages sent and received from an anonymous number.
5. Can they deliver bulk text messages? The capacity to deliver a large number of messages within a short period of time can affect the impact and success of your SMS advertising campaign, and is critical to the delivery of time-sensitive text alerts. Check their commitment to service reliability and gateway capacity.
6. Can they deliver value-added SMS services? As businesses and organizations grow it is important that SMS technology is able to be integrated accordingly. Can they support MMS (Multimedia), short code and premium-rate messaging?
7. Will messages be sent from within the destination country? Less reputable providers often buy bulk SMS messages from cheap off-shore providers, bringing the risk of unreliable services and junk messages. If you’re sending messages to subscribers within the USA, you want to be sure that’s where the text message originates from.
8. Will they offer a Service level Agreement (SLA)? Reliable providers will be comfortable giving you an SLA that provides detail on their ability to deliver on the text messages you’re paying for.

Do background checks

In the expanding SMS and text messaging market many new and untested players regularly pop up. So, as with any service provider, it pays to carefully check out their history and credentials before entering into any agreement.

Remember to ask how long they have been operating, and who their clients are. Look for providers with extensive industry experience and existing corporate level clients.