Do you want to reach customers worldwide by SMS?

In this article:

• Staying in touch with customers around the world
• The process and the basic requirements for sending international SMS

With e-commerce moving as fast as it is, geographic boundaries should not stop you using SMS to get marketing information to your customers.

Your customers may be spread across the world, from Hong Kong to the United States and as far as Greenland near the Arctic Circle. Have you considered that you can still use SMS to deliver timely information to overseas prospects and stay in close communication with them?

So when you choose an SMS provider, look beyond their ability to deliver locally and consider their ability to deliver internationally. We have put together a checklist to help you find the provider that suits you.

Use the checklist below to see whether your current SMS provider meets your marketing requirements.

1. First, the provider must cover more than 250 territories and countries, with unobstructed working relationships with local telcos.
2. Second, confirm your account can actually reach the provider’s full coverage. Otherwise how wide that coverage is has nothing to do with you.
3. Because messages to different regions involve a range of international routes and configurations — and China in particular requires message content to be pre-approved — the provider must offer a smooth approval process and advance notification, so that sending is not disrupted or delayed.
4. Some regions require a virtual number before you can send at all.
5. Finally, international SMS costs differ from local SMS. To avoid nasty surprises on either side, the provider should be able to give you a real-time rate table, so you can adjust strategy, make the right decisions and get the most out of your marketing.

1992: the first SMS was sent. 2010: an estimated 3.5 billion active users were receiving SMS. 2014: the global SMS business was estimated to have created US$100 billion of value. 2019: one survey put daily volume at 23 billion SMS — 270,000 every second.

In Hong Kong, rough figures from local telcos suggest SMS volume grew tenfold over the past decade.

Which is not hard to understand, given the explosion in demand for app verification, online shopping and delivery notifications, cloud service login verification, stock trading alerts, credit card transactions, banking notices and member offers.

SMS may be an old technology, but its one-to-one communication and its delivery of genuinely important information cannot be replaced by social media.

Among our clients, the sector sending the most SMS overseas is securities, along with various kinds of mobile app. Once we understand a client’s requirement, we look at their volume and at the rules in each destination, because some regions do not permit Sender IDs and others require a dedicated virtual number.

One case involved a client sending to the United States, South Africa and Japan. They discovered their previous provider was not actually landing messages in those markets, and that in some regions a single message was being split into several segments with one of them not arriving at all. When they came to us, we explained that — setting aside system integration performance — this was largely a cross-carrier transit problem. Connecting directly to the local telco raises sending stability substantially. We selected some direct routes for that client and the problem was resolved.