But before you plan your first campaign, you need to choose the inbound number your customers will use to talk to you. Will you choose a short code or a long code? Either one will work, but one may be better than the other for your use case.

Long codes are essentially phone numbers, complete with an area code. Short codes are generally five or six digits. Keep reading and we’ll bust a few myths about short and long codes to help you make a decision.

Myth #1 – Short Codes and Long Codes Are Essentially the Same

Short and long codes are not the same. They differ in three ways:

1.     Long codes can send and receive text, faxes and phone calls. Short codes can only send and receive text messages, either SMS or MMS.

2.     Long codes take longer to send – almost a second per message. Short codes are much speedier – 40 messages per second – and they work better when a high-volume response is expected, such as voting during a television program.

3.     Carriers limit inbound long-code messages to one for every four outbound messages. Short codes don’t have a limit – you can send and receive as many as you’d like.

Myth #2 – Short Codes Aren’t Worth the Cost

It’s true that short codes cost more than long codes, but in the U.S., you aren’t allowed to send marketing texts with long codes. Don’t put your business at risk because your communications have been blocked by the carrier. SMS short codes also work better during two-factor authentication and emergency alerts because of their speed. If you plan to send multiple marketing messages to many people, short codes are a must.

Myth #3 – Long Codes Don’t Have Any Value

On the other hand, if you plan to send customer service communications to your customers, long codes may be the best answer for you. A courier company could use a long-code message to inform customers that their packages are out for delivery. A bank could text clients their account balances every month. An airline could reply to a passenger’s seat preference request. Value is related to how well your code choice helps you reach your goals.

Myth #4 – Tracking Message Delivery is Impossible

If you use long codes, you can send messages around the world but the technology doesn’t support delivery receipts. With most text messaging solutions, you won’t know if the intended recipient received your message unless they respond. SMS-Magic, however, tracks long-code message delivery for you for both technical and legal purposes.

By comparison, short codes are country specific and always provide delivery receipts that are useful with two-factor authentication and when SMS delivery is critical. Short codes are considered reliable for both technical and legal purposes.

Myth #5 – It Takes Weeks to Get a Short Code

If you’re dealing directly with the telecom carriers, acquiring a short code could take up to six weeks. SMS-Magic, however, already holds pre-approved short codes that can be assigned to you, shortening the time to a week or two. We have long term relationships with the carriers and will manage that relationship for you. You can leave the details to us.

Let SMS-Magic Help You

The SMS-Magic team helps clients with short- and long-code decisions every day. We would be excited to share our experience and help you decide which one is best for you. Or if you’re already sure which would be best for you, we can help you implement your choice.

Does the SMS-Magic team sound like the partner you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how SMS-Magic can help you build and automate your text messaging campaigns!

The problem: Failed SMS delivery across carriers. This problem is inconvenient for personal texting. For business text messaging it causes significant issues.

With text messaging, you pay for every message that you attempt to send, not just the ones that are delivered. Managing SMS delivery is just as critical as your messaging strategy. If your audience doesn’t receive your messages, your strategy fails. You don’t want to be unaware of undelivered messages and then run into problems in the future.

Controlling SMS Delivery impacts more than just getting a message to a recipient.

• You need to check on individual SenderIDs as well as aggregate information.
• You need to track the budget given that failed messages are charged message credits.
• You need to create your own alerts around volumes, budgets, trend changes and other behaviors that warn you of coming issues

That’s a lot of things to keep track of just to make sure your messages get delivered. The good news is that the right SMS partner can simplify this for you, so you don’t have to spend extra time and stress on deliverability.

What your SMS Delivery Service Should Do For You

Your messaging vendor’s delivery service should make it simple for you to quickly track and control all of the above metrics. Here’s how:

Interactive vs Automated Messaging Delivery

The numbers used to send automated campaigns vs have interactive conversations carry different rules for how many messages and at what speed you can send. Your vendor should:

• Know the difference between short and long code rules.
• Be able to proactively manage traffic to meet these rules.
• Also be able to track different SenderIDs and unique delivery trends.

Monitor Individual and Aggregate SenderIDs

Your vendor should provide dashboards that you let you monitor and aggregate at a granular level. The dashboards should allow you to:

• Gain insight to know how you’re doing overall with message delivery.
• Gain insight at an individual sender ID level – for example, you need to know if a certain rep is sending messages that contain content that triggers SPAM filters or if a campaign is sending too high of a volume too quickly and is breaking carrier rules – resulting in failed deliveries. These types of activities affect your SMS delivery, but if you have the right dashboards in place, you can quickly correct any problems.

Track Budgets

Every time a message fails, you are charged a message credit or credits. That means SMS delivery impacts your overall budget control. Your vendor should provide:

• Dashboards that provide real-time status of message credits used and trends for message credits.
• Ability to compare budget to actual spend for planning purposes.

Alerts

Your vendor should offer simple ways to send alerts concerning delivery based on what matters to your business, using pre-defined rules. You should be able to:

• Track message delivery over time, changes in delivery, and other trends.
• Track message budgets and credits used over a specific time, changes in budget over a certain threshold, and when budget gets low.
• You should be able to easily instrument an alert for any result, or combination of results, that you need to know about.

The Bottom Line

SMS delivery is critical. Messages need to get to recipients and you should know right away if that’s not happening. You need budget tracking for missed deliveries so you know when inappropriate content triggers SMS failures. That way you are quickly able to correct the problem.

Be sure to find a vendor that offers what you need. Don’t fall for SMS delivery reports from carriers. They simply aren’t enough.

If you’re interested in learning about how SMS-Magic provides optimized SMS deliverability, reach out and we’d be happy to chat!

As Vonage notes in this article, many different factors can cause an SMS message to fail. Did you know that when your messages fail, carriers still charge you for message delivery? That means a single messaging campaign that’s marked as SPAM can eat up your budget and never be seen by your audience.

That’s one of the reasons you need to ask the right questions about your messaging vendors’ infrastructure and its capabilities. Not all vendors offer the features you need to optimize SMS delivery with your carrier, or carriers.

Let’s take a look at how you can proactively optimize delivery, with the right vendor.

What You Need to Know About Your SMS Delivery Report

First, let’s clear up some confusion about SMS delivery reports and what they mean. An SMS delivery report is the message you receive from an SMCS (Short Message Service Center) that notifies you that your SMS message sent from your device was delivered to the intended recipient. In other words, an SMS delivery report shows the current status of the text messages that you submitted to the carrier.

Contrary to popular belief, text delivery reports do not actually mean that a text message sent by you was successfully delivered to the recipient—rather, it just confirms that the message was sent successfully from the device.

Once the carriers SMSC receives the message, there are many reasons that message delivery can fail. A few reasons include:

• Using the wrong type of number (long vs short code, for example) to send prohibited message types
• The volume of messages sent and at what velocity
• The content of your messages
• The timing of your messages, and more

Those reasons vary by carrier, which makes it even more complex to assure message delivery in a global environment.

That’s why you need a vendor with an intelligent SMS Infrastructure to proactively manage your messaging traffic in a way that conforms to your specific carrier or carriers requirements.

To learn more about how messaging works with global carriers, check out this guide.

What to Expect from Your SMS Infrastructure

Your SMS infrastructure includes an SMS Gateway that acts as the traffic manager for computers to send and receive SMS text messages to and from devices over different carriers that form the global telecommunications network.

A basic SMS infrastructure contains a gateway that translates the message sent, and makes it compatible for delivery over the network to be able to reach the recipient.

Intelligent SMS Infrastructures do much more to proactively optimize your message delivery. Some important abilities include: 

• Controlling volume and velocity by code type. Smart infrastructures know which type of number you’re using, and what the limitations are for that number type with a specific carrier or carriers. Message traffic is managed for both volume and velocity to assure the traffic stays within the boundaries of the carrier’s rules so that messages are delivered.
• Enforcing business hours. Some carriers restrict the timing of message sends. For example, in some countries you cannot send automated SMS messages after business hours. Your vendor’s infrastructure should proactively manage the timing of message sends to avoid message failure outside of allowed hours.
• Avoiding SPAM filters. If you send repetitive content, for example, a message marketing campaign, carriers will flag your messages as SPAM and block your send. Your vendor should support merge fields to customize each message, along with velocity management, to avoid SPAM filters failing messages and worse, blocking your SenderIDs.
• Delivery reporting, alerting and problem resolution. Your vendor should offer real-time dashboards that show the status of every message send at any point in time. These dashboards should also provide the reporting you need to analyze effectiveness of delivery for discussion with your carriers. Your admins and allowed users should receive alerts to any delivery issues, as well as have easy access to the detailed data they need to quickly resolve any issues with the carrier or message constructs.

The Bottom Line

Every carrier has different rules concerning different number types (e.g,codes or SenderIDs,) as well as differences in how their SPAM and time of day filters work.

When you are reviewing potential SMS vendors, you need to be sure to ask the right questions about their messaging infrastructure, including their SMS Gateways and APIs, to assure they can proactively manage your message sends to optimize delivery, save your budget and provide the details you need to report on delivery success.

To learn more check out our guide on How Messaging Works. And of course, reach out if you want to learn more about choosing an SMS vendor that has Intelligent SMS Infrastructures!