What are the Factors to Consider When Picking a Bulk SMS Gateway Provider?

Making the choice of a bulk SMS gateway API provider, whether for transactional SMS or promotional mass SMS OTPs and updates, demands something more than just price comparison. There are a number of factors on which the impact or the effect of your messaging campaigns depends. These include delivery speed, delivery report, scalability, uptime, security, compliance, campaign customization alternatives, and support. What’s more? It is necessary for you to take UI/API restrictions and different hidden charges into account as well because these can increase your overall expenditures, either directly or in an indirect way.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Bulk SMS Gateway Provider
It might be quite tempting to save lots of money by going for poor quality mass text messaging solutions. But it is important for you to note that such messaging solutions might ultimate cost you more in the form of lost transactions and lost customers. Therefore, it is necessary for you to evaluate the different factors influencing the effectiveness of your campaign carefully.
Avoid going for a provider offering insanely low rates as they might fall short on some of the most important factors. Perhaps, their low rates reflect a lack of investment in message gateway infrastructure, product features, customer support, and telecom partnerships. If you are looking to get the maximum returns from your business by going for the right bulk text messaging service provider, consider the factors mentioned below:

• Maximum Deliveries for Optimum Returns
  

The bulk SMS gateway provider you are going for should have several telecom operator partnerships. Also, it should make use of fine-tuned and intelligent SMS gateway technology. This is important because only such SMS gateway providers will have the ability to guarantee top quality delivery rates along with ultra-low latencies for all the SMS messages. These providers and their services will also be fully compliant with the TRAI rules and regulations.

• Deliver Messages Your Consumers Appreciate
  

Go for a provider that allows you to easily create customized and powerful messaging campaigns right from their web user interface. Regardless of whether you are looking to personalize your text messages through merge fields; send messages in regional language; attach images and files or stagger or schedule pushes, make sure everything is easy with the services of your SMS gateway provider. Your provider should also offer you the ability to create and send customized tickets, surveys, and coupons.
This is important because fully customized and media rick messages are considered more effective in comparison to simple SMS campaigns. The bulk SMS provider you are going for should offer you exclusive features and services that can help you in crafting SMS campaigns that save both resources and time.

• Authentic Reports Equal to Right Decisions
  

The SMS gateway provider you are going for should have the ability to provide authentic and real-time SMS delivery reports. This is important because real-time SMS delivery reports will help you in tracking the delivery status of your messages. The delivery reports provided should come directly from the operator updates. They also need to be certified genuine through different audit teams.
Starting from measuring the SMS campaign reach to validating database, it is beneficial to have real-time and authentic SMS delivery reports. Always stay away from fraudulent providers that are into providing fake reports for making up for their ridiculously low rates.

• Strong SMS APIs for Proper and Easy Integration
  

The SMS APIs provided by your bulk SMS provider should go beyond the send-SMS functionality. It should give you the ability to fetch delivering reports; receiving messages; scheduling campaigns and pulling results from different surveys and mobile forms. The gateway provider should have the ability to offer extensive API documentation along with sample codes in varied programming languages.
Powerful APIs can be of good help in deeper integration, lower development effort, and faster market. It is always very important for you to be careful about local text messaging providers offering limited API features and functionalities. These providers can also indulge in offline documentation resulting in an increase in business development expenditures.

• Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns
  

It always makes good sense to go for the services of companies that have shown unprecedented visibility in their SMS campaign performance by offering detailed reports for attachments and web links in the messages. Fine-tuning messages and campaign timing through iterative A/B tests can help you in maximizing the returns you get from your SMS campaigns.