Running an SMS Service for Intermediate Web Developers

So you’ve got a website and are looking to provide an SMS service as an incentive to keep your customers coming back. How difficult is it to implement? What can you do offer them?

A couple of years ago when online SMS just took off, I was doing tech support for an internet company. As is the case with an office full of computer junkies, all the latest tips, tricks and hacks surfaced and you found yourself doing stuff with computers and other electronic devices that you hadn’t thought possible a month or two before. As online SMS services were still scarce back then, it was quite nifty to send SMS messages using email. And it wasn’t just any email, it was command-line email, too (yes, the thrill of being a Linux newbie…).

The point of this is that you could send a normal text email to number@domain.tld and it would work, just like that, which was a great convenience because you didn’t have to spend that extra 30 secs to open up a web page, type your message and hit send.

Today we all know that SMS services like that exist with the SMTP API, but aren’t freely available anymore. However, it would be a great convenience were it available, say, from any of my favourite online retailers if they provided me with 10 free messages each time I made a purchase.

How can you provide your clients with that extra incentive to keep them coming back?

Setting up the Email to SMS Service

Setting up an SMS service that converts email to SMS isn’t that difficult, but does require some computer and/or programming skill (depending on your operating system). Seeing as software environments vary, it may be appropriate to explain the logic instead of referring to any one operating system. Here goes:

Start by running the process through your head, listing all the areas where you might encounter problems. This is how I envisioned the process:

If I want to provide a service where clients can send an SMS message to number@mydomain.tld (in other words, their contact’s number @ a domain I host – TLD is Top Level Domain) then I would probably start using a catch-all email service that forwards any address at my domain to a certain inbox. Now in most cases you can specify wild card addresses like these:

• 0*@domain.tld → address@domain.tld
• 1*@domain.tld → address@domain.tld
• Etc.

The examples above simply mean: any address @domain.tld that starts with a 0 or a 1 respectively, should be sent to address@domain.tld, which can either be the same address or a totally different address, pretty much like message rules in your favourite mail client. This operation is usually performed at the entity responsible for your domain’s MX record.

Once you’ve set up your domain’s MX record to forward all mail accordingly, you’ll have to set up the receiving account on your mail server. Now this is where it gets a bit tricky, because you’ll have to put some checks in place to ensure that the destination number is more or less valid, that the content is plain text and not HTML and to check how long the message is. If the message is more than 160 characters, then the user will obviously use more of his or her free messages and you’ll have to modify the message you send to your SMS service provider to cater for message concatenation. These checks will have to be in place for each email that comes in.

When the email has been checked, you’ll have to have it forwarded to your SMS provider’s SMTP API address (or posted to the relevant handler if you’re using a different API), but only after inserting the necessary fields. Sending a message using Clickatell’s email to SMS service would require your message to be in the following format:

user:xxxxx
password:xxxxx
api_id:xxxxx
to: 448311234567
text:Meet me at home

And that’s the skeleton of providing your customers with an email to SMS service. Just keep in mind that only your customers need to use email to SMS; as soon as the SMS arrives at your email server or computer, you can use any API you want.

About Replies

Paying attention? If you have, then you’ll have noticed that we didn’t say anything about sender IDs or replies to your customers’ messages when they use your SMS service.

Depending on where you are sending to, sender IDs and two-way messaging could pose a potential problem. In the United States, for instance, all commercial SMS services need to use a short code (that costs money to register). Should you be Australian, you are in luck, because it is possible to register your customers’ mobile numbers as sender IDs, and this can even be done using the sender ID API http://www.clickatell.com/downloads/Clickatell_Sender_ID_User_Guide.pdf . When their contacts reply, they will reply directly to your customers’ mobile phones.

While more complicated methods for two-way messaging exist using other API’s, this is your easiest way to provide your customers with a two-way email-based SMS service.

Want more information? Click here to read more about SMS services.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: email to SMS, SMS incentive, SMS service, SMS services, SMTP API, SMTP to SMS