But, this can be avoided with a simple text message reminder the day before.

A recent real-world case study posted at Mobile Marketing Magazine illustrates the point beautifully;

“Global Hair Limited, in Peacehaven, near Brighton, has 4,700 clients. The company was experiencing issues with client missing appointments, creating an increasing amount of spare time for the salons stylists and costing the business lots of money in missed revenue. To address the problem, the salon deployed a text messaging solution with dramatic results, as Global Hair Director Emma Fulgoney explains.

She says:
“SMS reminders have improved our amount of no-show clients who may have forgotten the date and time of their appointment, therefore leaving a stylist in the salon with sometimes up to two and a half hours of down time, which is clearly bad for business and profits. We calculate that our number of no-shows has been reduced by approximately 70% since we’ve been using TextMagic and we expect this number to improve further as we obtain more clients’ mobile numbers.”

GET YOUR FREE SMS ALERTS SOFTWARE TRIAL

Using Text Marketer’s ‘designed for users, not technicians‘ online SMS software (a free trial account with 10 free credits is available), it can take as little as 20 seconds to copy and paste a list of numbers, write a quick reminder message and hit the send button. Texting reminders costs around 3p per message.

In addition to this, using Text Marketer’s revolutionary txtUs product means you can also receive instant replies to the messages you send (to confirm yes to the appointment or no and re-book for example) and receive all the responses in your email inbox & reply via email too.

The 2 easiest methods of integrating Goldmine with our SMS Gateway are using;

1) The email to SMS gateway – http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/email-to-sms-gateway/email-sms.htm
Or
2) The HTTP gateway – http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/blog/2009/05/sms-gateway/text-marketer-apigateway-spec/

Text Marketer have specialised in providing our lowest costs SMS Gateway to the recruitment sector for over a decade. Now, we are pleased to announce that we have developed a plugin for the industry-leading Bond Adapt software, allowing any Bond users to effortlessly change to our SMS Gateway and save up to 50% on their Bulk SMS costs.

There is no change in functionality using our SMS Gateway, just lower cost.

Our gateway also supports all other recruitment software packages so all recruitment consultants and agencies can benefit from our lowest cost SMS Gateway.

You can get going immediately by simply opening a free account and contacting us for integration options.

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 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

In addition to our simple HTTP SMS Gateway API, explained here, we also provide a ‘RESTful’ SMS API to give you access to information about your SMS marketing account (don’t have one? Create a free account).

If you are familiar with REST APIs, you may wish to jump to our REST API specification document.

WHAT’S A ‘RESTful’ SMS API?

REST is a term used to describe a type of two-way communication via the Internet. It is an architectural style, not a standard, but makes use of well-known web technologies such as HTTP, XML and MIME types. For more information about REST APIs, read this great description of REST.

At its most simple, our RESTful SMS API allows you to request (‘GET’) information. For example, from this ‘resource’

http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/credits

you can access the number of credits available in your account. The response is an XML document that looks like this:

<response processed_date="2010-03-19T09:37:26+00:00">
<credits>37</credits>
</response>

The SMS REST API is that simple!

WHAT ABOUT SECURITY?

Although it’s not apparent from the example above, the interface does require authentication using your SMS API account username/password. We provide two ways of passing this information to the server.

The first is via HTTP Basic Authentication, which is demonstrated by the login box that appears if you click on the resource link above. HTTP Basic authentication can of course be handled within your code. However if you prefer a simpler method, you can pass the parameters via the URL as GET arguments, e.g.

http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/credits?username=myusername&password=mypassword

It is also recommended that you use encrypted communication with the REST Web Services by accessing resources via the HTTPS protocol (https://… etc.).

HOW DOES THE RESTful API HANDLE ERRORS?

An advantage of using a RESTful API is that the underlying technologies already do a lot of the work for us. All responses via the HTTP protocol include headers that give us some information about the response. The headers in the above example would look like this:

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:11:40 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 ZendServer/4.0
Content-Length: 272
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/xml

200 OK

The MIME type (Content-Type) is set to application/xml which identifies the type of content in the response. It is followed by the response status code ’200′ and the status message ‘OK’. This is a standard response to a successful request.

If we had tried to access a resource which didn’t exist, e.g.

http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/anotherResource

we would get the following response headers:

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:18:23 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 ZendServer/4.0
Content-Length: 549
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/xml

404 Not Found :  (ERR101)

The status code is 404, which is the HTTP protocol’s standard code for ‘resource not found’. The status message also contains some additional debugging information (ERR91) which you can ignore.

In addition to the status code, the response body contains XML detailing the error. In this example it might look like this:

<response processed_date="2010-03-24T14:45:54+00:00">
<errors>
	<error code="404">Not Found :  (ERR101)</error>
</errors>
</response>

Thus, you can check the header status code for an error code, as well as the response body.

WHAT RESOURCES CAN I ACCESS THROUGH THE REST SMS API?

At the moment, the resource URIs available to you are:

• http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/credits – to get the credits available on your account / transfer credits between accounts
• http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/deliveryReports – to list your delivery reports
• http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/deliveryReport/a_report_name – to access the details of a specific report
• http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/sms – to send an SMS
• http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/keywords – to get the availability of a given keyword (see Short Code SMS Service)

More will be added in the future.

Here are 2 walk-through examples for using the REST SMS API.

EXAMPLE REQUEST 1 – GET CREDITS

Make an HTTP GET request like this:

http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/credits?username=myAPIusername&password=myAPIpassword

Obviously, replace ‘myAPIusername’ and ‘myAPIpassword’ in the URL with the ones you received when you signed up.

When you send this request using your favorite programming language, you should receive the following HTTP headers in response:

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:17:28 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 ZendServer/4.0
Content-Length: 272
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/xml

200 OK

Using your programming language, you can easily extract the status code (200 in this case), which indicates success (200) or failure (not 200). The status code of 200 here shows us the request was successful, i.e. the response contains the number of credits in your account.

Thus the HTTP response body that you receive will contain XML similar to this:

<response processed_date="2010-03-24T15:17:28+00:00">
<credits>10</credits>
</response>

In your programming language you can parse the XML to extract the value of the credits, in this case 10.

But if, for example, you use an incorrect password, the response headers will look like this:

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:30:10 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 ZendServer/4.0
Content-Length: 377
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/xml

403 Forbidden : Your username/password combination did not match an account. (ERR145)

The 403 status code shows that an error occurred (all codes except 200 indicate an error). And the XML response body will also contain:

<response processed_date="2010-03-24T15:29:22+00:00">
<errors>
	<error code="403">Forbidden : Your username/password combination did not match an account. (ERR145)</error>
</errors>
</response>

EXAMPLE REQUEST 2 – SEND SMS

In your programming language, create an HTTP POST request to this URL:

http://www.textmarketer.biz/services/rest/sms

Since this is a POST request, you cannot pass the username and password via the URL, so you need to use HTTP Digest Authentication, or simply include these parameters along with the other POST parameters you’ll need:

• message=’my message’
• originator=’me’
• mobile_number=’447777777777′
• username=’myAPIusername’ (replace with your own – or skip this parameter and use HTTP Digest Authentication)
• password=’myAPIpassword’ (replace with your own – or skip this parameter and use HTTP Digest Authentication)

POSTing an HTTP request using the above as POST parameters would send an SMS message of ‘my message’ to the mobile number 447777777777 from “me”.

NOTE: It will not work to pass these parameters as GET arguments (e.g. by appending them to the URL); this is the principle of a REST API.

Your HTTP POST request should return something similar to the following response headers:

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:17:28 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 ZendServer/4.0
Content-Length: 272
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/xml

200 OK

…the ’200′ status code showing that your request was successful. The HTTP response body will consist of XML containing the ID of the SMS sent as well as the number of credits used to send it:

<response processed_date="2010-03-23T10:31:39+00:00">
	<message_id>4172870907</message_id>
	<credits_used>1</credits_used>
</response>

If, however, there was a problem with your request parameters, for example you set mobile_number to ‘garbage’, you would get similar response headers to this:

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:30:10 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 ZendServer/4.0
Content-Length: 377
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/xml

404 Bad request

And the response body would contain XML detailing the precise problems with your request, like this:

<response processed_date="2010-03-24T14:37:41+00:00">
<errors>
	<error code="10">invalid number or not an integer</error>
	<error code="9">invalid number or too short</error>
</errors>
</response>

See the specification of the sms resource for more details of the possible error codes.

TESTING/SANDBOX

A sandbox service is available for testing your code without changing your account or using any credits.

MORE INFORMATION

For detailed information about our RESTful SMS API, please see our REST API specification document.

For reference, a list of the DTDs that correspond to the resources available can be found here.

Would it be good if you could double your response rate? What if it was free to try so you could see if it’s really true?

Here’s how it works …
If you add a text response mechanism to your advertising it improves response rates by 100% on average! Even in business-to-business markets.

Why do you think all the big companies that advertise on TV allow people to respond by text message? …. Quite simply because they have tested this and it works!

We’ve been in the text industry since 1999 and we know it works but many, many companies in the UK are just missing this opportunity and as a result simply not getting the best ROI on their advertising spend.

FREE TRAIL
We want to prove to you how effective it is. So we offer a FREE TRIAL to all new customers with a full system & their own unqiue text response keyword so they can try it in their next ad.
It would be something like "Text ENQUIRE to 88802 and we’ll call you back" … these responses would then be emailed to you or your sales team as a new enquiry within a matter of seconds.

You can try it free for 7 days. When you are delighted with the results it is only £25 plus VAT per month after that to keep your keyword live – no long term contracts, you can simply cancel it whenever you like. This is the cheapest text response system in the UK, back by our Best Buy Guarantee.

Try it today. We can virtually guarantee it will uplift response rates to your advertising and if it doesn’t, it’s cost you nothing in any event.

Just think how often you would have rather sent a text to a company rather than call, email or write – over 80% of customers are asking for UK companies to offer this service …. be one of them.

The Cineworld Group, which has over 75 cinemas nationwide has launched a new sms ticket confirmation service. Customers buying tickets online can now choose to get a booking confirmation text containing film booked, date and time, venue, number in party and credit or debit card used.

The new text alert initiative provides customers with a useful reminder and receipt for their booking.

Using Text Marketer’s SMS gateway API service, Cineworld are able to send out unique messages to individuals merging an unlimited number of data fields. Their confirmation message uses 7 separte pieces of information.

“Thanks for booking with Cineworld. We hope you enjoy District 9 at Crawley on 21/09/2009 18:45 for 2 Adult paid £16.80 with card ending 1234.”

Text Marketer’s SMS Gateway is an ideal way to send SMS messages from your own software application, server or web site. You need a little technical knowhow, but we have helped as much as possible with a number of articles on how to integrate an SMS Gateway which should help you along. If you have any technical queries we are always happy to provide you as much support at you need. (0117 9249207)

The Cineworld Group is one of the leading cinema groups in the UK and Ireland. It has a portfolio of 75 cinemas and 775 screens operating under the Cineworld brand which stretches as far north and south as Aberdeen and Jersey and as far east and west as Ipswich and Dublin.

Simple really, study after study has shown that you if you give people the opportunity to respond by text message, they do! In fact, on average, around half of people will respond by text who otherwise wouldn’t – resulting in a 100% uplift in advertising response! That’s why all the big companies do it.

Isn’t it expensive?

Traditionally, yes. But, here’s the good news – we offer this text response service to any UK company 100% Free.

Why would you do that!? Surely there’s a catch?

For over a decade we’ve been helping businesses benefit by adding text message marketing into their mix and we’ve found that once companies find out how effective it is they increase their activity and volumes of Bulk SMS.

As the UK’s lowest cost, dependable Bulk SMS supplier (we even produce a Bulk SMS competitor price comparison chart to show price differences) we therefore hope that if you choose to have a free text response keyword and it works for you, you’ll naturally use us for Bulk SMS (although there’s no commitment to do so).

What could I use a free text response service for?

There’s the obvious for advertising purposes to gather responses but once you have the free platform you’ll discover a whole host of other uses as well as being amazed how much customers enjoy interacting with you by text message.

For example, on a free keyword HOLS for a travel agent one could consider;

• “Text HOLS and your email addres to 88802 and we’ll e-mail you our latest holiday offers”
• “Text HOLS and your favourite country to receive text alerts on holiday deals for that country”
• “Text HOLS OFFERS to receive text alerts on all our holiday deals”
• (From a simple question), “Text HOLS then A, B or C and receive a £50 discount voucher if you get the right answer”
• “Text HOLS and your planned next holiday date and we’ll contact you then to advise of our best deals”
• “Text HOLS WIN to enter our prize draw for a free holiday”
• and so on …..

If you’d like to see how quickly and efficiently the service works, text DEMO to 88802 and you’ll receive on of our standard welcome Text Marketer messages.

How do I get the data from people responding?

You get all the incoming data, their mobile number, date and time of the message and the full content of their message.

There are 3 ways to retrieve that data;

• You login to your free SMS account and download all the data to a spreadsheet
• And/or, you can have each and every response emailed to as many email addresses as you like
• And/or, if you’re a bit more technical, you can integrate into our SMS Gateway to receive the data directly to your web application. This will allow you to do clever things with the responses.

I hope that gives you enough information for now and some ideas.

Why not try a free keyword on our shortcode and see if it works for you, there’s nothing to lose and a huge amount to gain!

This class enables you to access your delivery reports in a nice simplified way. You can search for the outcome of a message for a given number, specify the outcome and the number, download all the data for the given date or parse the reports line by line.

The constructor requires the delivery report directory that is shown in your account. To find your  delivery report directory, log into your system click the menu heading “Reports” then select “Delivery Reporting”, you will see a green icon, roll over this and you can find the directory name at the bottom.

If you have sent a message greater than 160 characters you will find multiple entries for that particular number . For instance if your message was 200 characters you will find 2 reports for that number. A message is built from 160 chunks

Download the PHP 5 Delivery Report Class

Example of use

<?

$reports = new ProcessDeliveryReport ( "Kt65CZMtxlIiEU328ilCBgC38" ); // your delivery report directory
if ($reports->setReportDate ( "20-05-09" )) print_r ( $reports->findNumber ( "44777777777", "r" ) ); // print the array of results
else echo "Not found";

?>

This class is designed around the FREE Text Marketer SMS API, you need to sign up here to use it.

SendSMSNotifier is a singleton class design, incorporating listeners. Your class must include the following public functions: creditAlert($credits_remaining) and failureAlert($error,$number,$message,$error).

Download the class from here

Example of use

class MyTestClass
{

        /// simple array of data in: number, message, sender Id (aka originator) format, ideally the data will come from a database
	private $mySMSdata = array(array("44777777777","Hello World!","Me"),
			                             array("text","This will throw an error, mobile number is text","Me"));

	function __construct()
	{
		$sms = SendSMSNotifier::getInstance("myUsername","myPassword"); // your account login details
		$sms->addListener($this); // Your class gets added to the listeners that will get notified on an event
		$sms->setCreditThreshold(5); // You want o be notified when you have 5 credits left

		foreach($this->mySMSdata as $record) // send some data
		{
			list($number,$message,$sender) = $record;
			$sms->send($number,$message,$sender); // send to the api
		}
		echo $sms->getCredits();
		print_r($this->errors);
	}

	public function failureAlert($error,$number,$message,$originator)
	{
		/// Required function for failure messages, you could stop the sending here or log the results
		$this->errors[] = array($error,$number,$message,$originator);
	}

	public function creditAlert($credits)
	{
		/// Required function for credit alerts, this basic implementation stops sending anymore SMS's
		die("I have nearly run out of credits($credits left), abandon sending!");
	}
}

So here’s what happens. You send a bunch of text messages to the gateway using your class (in this example MyTestClass), if you get a failure such as a badly formatted number your function failureAlert gets called with the parameters of the failure and data, you can then decide on the implmentation. In the above example it just stores them in an array, once you have sent all the data you could then use the data to clean your database etc.

If the credit limit (in the above case this is 5 $sms->setCreditThreshold(5) ) your function creditAlert will get called, in this case we think this is bad so we use the hammer of the die() function to stop the sending, obviously you would handle this much more elegantly :-)

Adding SMS as a communication method to a system is often very useful, for instance you don’t have issues with spam filtering, it doesn’t require the person to make an immediate response like a phone call, so it’s great for alerts and triggers. Another good application for SMS (text messaging) which is often over looked is the ability to use it as a method to update a system or retrieve information without needing any equipment other than a mobile phone, any one would work. This is done using a short code.

Consider this example:

You own a fictitious “temporary employment agency” with several hundred people on your books.  Your client has asked you to fulfill a specific job such as a receptionist. You send an SMS:

Receptionist cover required for 2 weeks 4 hr per day @ £10 per hr, location Bristol. Reply with “more 4567a” for more info.

The last bit (more 4567a) is the information that allows us to automate things, the keyword more is used to identify you, and the code would be a reference to the job. The potential candidate could then reply where by (in this case) you could :

1. Send more details from the job description
2. Update the database that this person is a likely candidate
3. The person has expressed interest in the receptionist job, we could make an assumption that they maybe interested in other receptionist jobs so you could start creating groups that could be used for later targeting.

Implementation

So how do we set up the SMS gateway and send messages? Fortunately it’s easy.
First you need an account (it’s free) and automated. You’ll get the user name and password you need plus you get some free sends. You will also need to ask for the API URL.

Next use the out bound API (sometimes called an SMS gateway) for your message. This is a simple HTTP GET request which can either be sent via http or https. You will need to url encode the message.
http://<request the url>?username=myUsername&password=myPassword&number=447777777777&message=Receptionist+cover+required+for+2+weeks+4+hr+per+day+%40+%C2%A310+per+hr%2C+location+Bristol.+Reply+with+%22more+4567a%22&orig=88802
You can try the above in any old browser.

There is an example class (in PHP 5) that would do this for you

Next we want to use the incoming response from the recipient

This is the bit where we need to speak to or email the company,  a keyword is required  (which is free) on the 88802 short code, in our example we are using the word “more”. You then supply Text Marketer with a URL on your domain that will get notified with the parameters once a response is received. For example www.mydomain.com/myscript.php

If the applicant replied with “more 4567a” you would receive an HTTP GET like this http://www.mydomain.com/myscript.php?number=4477777777&message=more+4567a&network=ORANGEUK

It is then up to you how you use this information, the example gives a few ideas.

It is recommended that you use the  RESTful version of the API which has largely superseded this document (you can do more with it). However if you want to get up and running quickly then it might still be the best way for you.

When you create a free account you can also use the Text Marketer API (sometimes known as a gateway).
The API uses simple HTTP GET requests to communicate with the Text Marketer gateway server. The requests allow you to send SMS’s through the system, you can also retrieve delivery reports discussed here.

HTTP GET Request Parameters

* optional parameter, discussed below.

URL ENCODING
You must url encode the orig and message parameters, if you dont do this you’ll get gateway failures or odd results.

SUPPORTED CHARACTERS
The GSM alphabet is a subset of ISO-8859-1. The SMS GSM characters we can support is documented here

CONCATENATION
If you exceed 160 characters you automatically covert to concatenation sending, this has the following connotations. Each message consists of a 153 character ‘chunk’ (not 160 chars) the extra characters are used to glue the messages together. Therefore a message that is 307 characters long will require 3 messages to send.

An Example HTTP GET Request

http://www.textmarketer.biz/gateway/?username=n&password=s&number=4477777777&message=test&orig=me&option=xml

This would send an SMS to 4477777777 from “me” with the message “test”, remember the username “n” and password “p” can be found un your account under the Text Response => API Settings menu option.

SSL (HTTPS) Support

The API also supports SSL, just use port 443 instead ( https:// )

Gateway Responses

The API or Gateway can respond in 2 formats depending if you have set the option=xml (recommended) or not.

No option parameter (or option blank).  Simple ‘plain text’ response

Once you have made a successful connection (HTTP 200) to our server and sent the request the server will reply in two different ways.

• SUCCESS <new line><number of credits remaining><new line>
• FAILED <new line> <reasons><number of credits remaining if available><new line>

The final line of the response contains the number of credits you have remaining, you get 10 free credits with your account.

A simple PHP 5 class for sending bulk SMS is available here

Using the option=xml (recommended)

A better way of decoding the response is to use the parameter option, this will make the gateway respond in the  XML format which gives room for future proofing and also it’s a better way to interpret / parse the results.

XML Example (success)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE response SYSTEM "http://www.textmarketer.biz/dtd/api_response.dtd">

<response status="success" id="1213465434">

    <credits>1000</credits>

   <credits_used>1</credits_used>

</response>

XML Example (failure)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE response SYSTEM "http://www.textmarketer.biz/dtd/api_response.dtd">

<response status="failed" id="0">

   <reason>invalid message or missing</reason>

   <reason>invalid number or too short</reason>

</response>
 

The DTD for the xml is available here. In reality it doesn’t get any more complicated than the above.

A simple PHP 5 class for sending bulk SMS is available here

Help and an example of our short code API

Help with ASP Bulk SMS

NET Examples

Supported and Unsupported characters in Text Messages – GSM Character Set

PHP 5 Delivery Report Helper Class for our SMS Gateway

PHP 5 SMS Send Class implementing listeners on our SMS Gateway

Using the SMS Gateway API, Automating Delivery Report Collection

Text Marketer short code API options

By integrating with our SMS Gateway you can effectivel ‘text enable’ any software, web site of web service. Also, each message can be tailored to the recipient. For example, banks use this service for bank balance notifications and alike.

One of the most powerful ways we’ve seen it working is forconfirming information to customers automatically. For example, when a package is going  to be delivered or what the status of an order is or a change in flight times, the list is endless. And, unlike email, people always have their phones with them and so the information is to hand.

You do need a certain level of expertise to integrate web systems or software with our SMS Gateway but it isn’t difficult. For the technically minded amongst you, it is a simple ‘HTTP GET’ request.  See our integrating an SMS Gateway document or talk to us for more details.

An easy example of how this can work is password distribution on sign up. To try it, sign up for a free sms account and you’ll see that particular method in action!