Step 1

Convert mobile numbers to an email address.

Basically, you just need to append “@textmarketer.biz” to the end of each mobile number to convert it to and email address to use with our system, so 07777888999 becomes 07777888999@textmarketer.biz for example. Here’s a handy Excel sheet where you can paste the mobile numbers in column A and the conversion will happen automatically in column C for you to copy and paste into your email program’s address field.

Step 2

Create the email message.

It’s mostly like creating any email message; – Enter the recipient, if you need to send the message to more than one person you will need to use the extended method.  In the subject line, use your Text Marketer username and password in the format “myAPIusername%myAPIpassword” – Write your message and simply ensure you finish the message with ##. This tells our system this is the end of the text message so it doesn’t send your signature, etc. Here’s an example;

That’s it. Hit the send button and all your text message will be sent out to the recipient immediately. Of course, you’ll need a Text Marketer account first with some credits and to get a username and password.

Note: You can change the authentication method to that of your domain instead of putting the username and password on the subject line for example if your email address is “me@my_company.com” you can authenticate against “my_company.com”. You can also change the message termination string ## to what ever you like or disable it, these changes can be made by logging in to your account and navigating to “Settings” => “Account Settings”.

SPECIAL OFFER

If you’re new to this and want to try it, use Promo Code EMAIL50 and you’ll get 50 Free Credits when you open a free account, no commitments, so you can try 50 Email to SMS’s free on us to see how easy it us. Why not give it a try? PS. There are more detailed instructions on our Email to SMS Gateway here if you want to use more advanced options.

If you don’t like reading, simply try our demo to see how this works;

Text INFO and your email address to 88802 and see what happens (no charges of course!)

For existing customers, this facility is now available in your account & the instructions and screenshots have been updated.

For new customers wishing to trial the service for free, sign up for a Text Marketer account and add a free week’s trial of a keyword when you’re signing up.

The marketing applications for this unique service are endless. Imagine you can automatically send any email you like including offers, vouchers, job information, etc. to people who text to you. You also capture their mobile number and email address for future use.

Have you tried the demo’ yet? We think you’ll be impressed!

What you need to be able to do this:
1. A Text Marketer SMS account
2. A keyword on your account (you can get any keyword free for a week to trial this), configured to copy incoming SMS’s to your email address.

Once you have these, the process is very simple.
Let’s take the example of a hairdresser, Zaks. Their keyword is ZAKS on our shortcode 88802. So, any message starting with the keyword ZAKS sent to 88802 will go to their account and be sent by email to the address/es they set.

Zaks send out a campaign with their Sender ID set to 88802 so people can reply, such as, “50% off all cut & blow drys this Monday & Tuesday. Reply with name, day & time to book yours, starting your reply message with the word ZAKS.”

All replies will then be sent to the email address Zaks have set up.

When an email response is received they can simply hit the reply button as normal and type a return message to the client. The only difference from a normal email reply is that you must type ## at the end of the text reply you want to send (otherwise it will send all the text in the email).

So, their email reply might look something like, “Thanks Joyce. I can confirm your appointment for Monday at 10am. See you then. Zaks. If you want to reply to this message remember to start your message with the word ZAKS.##”. This will go straight back to the client.

In essence, so long as the person starts any message with the keyword ZAKS you can continue to have a text conversation with them using solely your email program.

For more advanced options on replies please see our email to sms instructions.

FAQ’s on replying to SMS’s using Email

Q. How many characters can I have in my reply.
A. Up to 612 characters including spaces.

Q. Does it cost anything to reply.
A. It simply uses the credits system of your account, so whatever you’re paying per credit at present.

The Mobile Marketing Association recently released data on the ‘read rates’ of SMS, 97% of text messages are opened, 83% in one hour but typically within 4 minutes.

So, if you want your customers to get your messages – texting is the way to go.

Using our Email to SMS Text Message Gateway you can simply reformat your alert emails from your system/s so that they go out by text message.

Here’s some great examples of using Email to SMS:

1. Ecommerce order confirmations - sending a text doubles confidence rates in the order process.
2. Despatch confirmations – when a package is sent, send a confirmation text with tracking info. This can reduce ‘where’s my order’ calls by 50% or more.
3. Email merge – send personalised text messages in bulk using simple email merge tools freely available (such as this one).
4. Staff alerts – if the alert is urgent to your staff or colleagues, send it by text, it’ll be there immediately, wherever they are.
5. Systems alerts – many different online systems have email alerts when there are problems. Great if you’re sat at your computer but if you’re not, also configure systems to send an Email to SMS alert for backup.
6. Customer/patient appointment reminders – many companies, health services, gyms etc. send appointment reminders by email and many just don’t get read and the appointment is missed. Using our Email to Text service ensures your reminder is read, hugely increasing the chance the appointment will be kept.

There are of course many other examples of how you could employ Email to Text within your business.

You can try it out all automatically online. First set up a free Text Marketer account (includes 10 free text credits) then read the Email to SMS instructions and send your first text out through the gateway. ‘Simples’.

More information on pricing, etc?

If you have any general questions about pricing, setup, payment or almost anything else, try the Text Marketer Help Centre.

Our email-to-SMS service provides a simple way for you to send text messages via email.

This is in addition to our simple HTTP SMS Gateway API, explained here, and we also provide a more complex ‘RESTful’ SMS API to send SMS messages and give you access to information about your SMS marketing account (don’t have one? You need to have an account).

There are 3 main ways to use the email to sms gateway;

Option 1 – To send single emails/messages using domain authentication
Option 2 – To send single emails/messages using username/password authentication
Option 3 – To send messages to multiple recipients with a single email (and advanced features)

Option 1 – Send single emails/messages using domain authentication

This option is used when you cannot or do not want to transmit your username and password in the subject field of the email. You set your sending domain in your account, e.g. mycompanyname.com which is what we use for validation when the email comes in. Only emails sent from the domain you set will be accepted (no generic email accounts like hotmail or gmail are acceptable).

Step 1 – enable domain authentication in your Text Marketer account. Go to Settings | Account Settings as shown below.

Under “Email Gateway Settings” enter your domain name (e.g. if your email address was richard@greens.com then your domain name is greens.com) in the field and press submit (do not include the @ sign). The system will return an ‘updated’ message.

Then, click change next to your domain name and make sure it turns from disabled to Active (in red).

Step 2 – now you are ready to send a test message. Format the email address as [mobilenumber]@textmarketer.biz (for example, 447777111999@textmarketer.biz) and send it our gateway. Make sure you add ## to the end of the text in the body you want to send (this tells our system that this is the end of the text to send out and avoids sending things like signatures etc). You can change the message termination string by logging into your account and navigating to “settings” => “Account Settings”.
You don’t have to put anything in the subject line as it’s not used.

Here’s an example message (note the ## added at the end of the text to be sent):

Option 2 – To send single emails/messages using username/password authentication

This option is exactly the same as option 1 apart from you do not need to turn on domain authentication in your account and instead you use your API username and password in the subject field (formed like username%password) of the email for authentication. You can find your API username and password in your  account on the ‘Settings’ | ‘API Settings’ page.

So your email would look like this:

Option 3 – To send messages to multiple recipients with a single email (and advanced features)

1. Create an email to the address shown above
IMPORTANT: this must be the gateway[at]textmarketer.co.uk address, not a [number]@ style address or it will fail.
2. Put your API username and password in the subject field with a % symbol in between (no spaces). You can find your API username and password in your  account on the ‘Settings’ > ‘API Settings’ page but it is usually the same unless you’ve updated your login details.
3. Type the text message you want to send and at the end put two hash symbols “##”
4. Put 1 or many numbers in a single column underneath (it’s always best in international format but UK numbers starting 07…… are OK too).
5. Send the email!

Expanded Instructions / Additional Features

The Email-to-SMS (or email-to-text-message) service allows you to send SMS text messages via email. You must have an SMS marketing account (you can create a free account here) to send text messages via this service.

The actual email address of the email-to-SMS gateway is shown in the screenshot above (gateway@ and the domain is textmarketer.co.uk).

To send a text message to one or more mobile numbers, you will specify the message to send, and the numbers to send to, in an email. You then send the email to our email-to-sms gateway email address (using a specific format/structure).

Let’s say you want to send a text message containing ‘Call us for a quote’ to the UK mobile number 07777123456. To do this your email contents would look like this:

Call us for a quote##
07777123456

The ‘##’ characters simply tell us that this is the end of the message to be sent. And it’s followed by the mobile number. That’s it!

IDENTIFICATION

Your email will contain your account’s API username and password in the email subject. This allows us to verify your identity and deduct credits for the text messages sent from your account.

Your email subject should contain your API username, followed by ‘%’, followed by your API password (You can find your API username and password in your  account on the ‘Settings’ > ‘API Settings’ page.), e.g.

myAPIusername%myAPIpassword

Example

So the complete email (subject and body) would look like this:

Email Subject:

myAPIusername%myAPIpassword

Email Body/Contents:

Call us for a quote##
07777123456

MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS

You want to send a text message via email to more than one mobile number? No problem! Simply list the numbers on separate lines, like this:

Call us for a quote##
07777123456
07777123457

Or put them on the same line, with commas in between to separate the numbers, like this:

Call us for a quote##
07777123456,07777123457

MESSAGE WITH MULTIPLE LINES

A message sent using the email-to-SMS gateway can contain more than more line. Simply ensure the message still ends with ‘##’, e.g.:

Special offer this week on:
- black tights
- green shoes##
07777123456

FROM/SENDER ID

The sender ID is the number/name that your text message will appear as being sent from. When using the email-to-text API this defaults to the sender ID that is set in your account settings (see the ‘Send SMS’ > ‘Default Sender ID’ page). For example, you might want to set the sender ID as the name of your business, or perhaps to your own mobile number.

The sender ID can be any 16-digit number, or any text of up to 11 alpha-numeric characters.

Example

Let’s say you want to send the message ‘Special 2-for-1 offer this week’ to the UK mobile number 07777123456, with a sender ID of ‘Fast Pizzas’. Your email body (contents) would look like this:

Special 2-for-1 offer this week##
Fast Pizzas#
07777123456

The sender ID is ‘terminated’, i.e. ends with, a single ‘#’ character. It can appear before or after the message, so this works too:

Fast Pizzas#
Special 2-for-1 offer this week##
07777123456

ERROR REPORTING

If your email-to-SMS request is successful, with no errors or problems, you will not get any response (unless you’re using the Sandbox service). However, if there are any problems with the format of your email, or problems sending to any of the numbers you specify in the email, you will get a verbose email response with details of the problem(s) encountered.

Note that you will not get any response if your API username or password (included in the email subject) were incorrect, or did not contain the ‘%’ character to separate them.

TESTING/SANDBOX

If you want to test the service without actually sending any text messages, there is a different email address to use for this purpose:

gateway-sandbox@ followed by the same domain: textmarketer.co.uk

It works in the same way as the normal service, except that no text messages will be sent and therefore no credit will be deducted from your account. Also, unlike the normal service, you will get a confirmation email telling you what message would have been sent, and to what numbers, if you had used the normal live service.

We have built a nifty little Excel worksheet which takes care of this. Download the file here.

INSTRUCTIONS:

When promoting your campaign, it is important to ask people to text in in a specific way which is:
[KEYWORD] space [FIRSTNAMEONLY] space [EMAILADDRESS]

Then, once all the autoresponses are in simply copy and paste them into the yellow part of column A of the Excel sheet. It will remove the keyword and split out the name and email address into separate columns for easier importing into other applications.

Paste your autoresponse data into the yellow section to strip out the name and email address. Handles up to 10,000 records at a time.

We also have a EMAIL to SMS GATEWAY product, the link provides full details.

Integrating Email to our SMS Gateway

You will require some programing knowlege to configure your systems to send email to the SMS API. We will be using email piping to achieve this goal.

Step 1. Configure email piping.

In this example we will be using Postfix (the common open source SMTP server).

First configure an email account (from the sms user account) you wish to send the SMS mail to, for example sms@mydomain.com. This email address will receive all the emails that will get converted into SMS. Then:

• Edit alises
• # nano /etc/aliases
• Add the alias with piping to the file:
• sms: “|/var/www/scripts/emailGateway/processEmail.sh”
• Save and exit and update aliases database:
• # newaliases

Next is to set up the routing in postfix to point to the “sms” alias.

• Edit the virtual file of postfix:
• # nano /etc/postfix/virtual
• Add the routing info:
• sms@mydomain.com sms
• Save and exit.
• Now edit the postfix config file to use the virtual database:
• # nano /etc/postfix/main.cf
• Add the following line:
• virtual_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
• Save and exit.
• Note: This is only needed if postfix hasn’t been configure to work with the virtual database yet, if you find the above line already in the config file just ignore this step.
• Reload Postfix:
• # postfix reload

Step 2. Read and process the email data

Next up is to create the file processEmail.sh this is the shell script that will get called when email arrives at the SMS account. In our example we are going to get it to call a php script like this:

php /var/www/scripts/emailGateway/send.php

$FileHandler = fopen("php://stdin", "r");

if ($FileHandler > 0)
{
	while(!feof($FileHandler))
	{
		$RawEmailContent .= fgets($FileHandler, 120);
	}
}

This will read the email data into a string which you can then parse and send to our API, see our API documentation