15 posts categorized "Web/Tech"

To help kick off the New Year we're releasing the first version of our WordPress SMS Notifications Plugin. You can install the plugin now, using any recent version of WordPress.

We know that a lot of people have been waiting for this plugin, so we wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible - even if it doesn't do everything we want it to do just quite yet.

Let's cover what the plugin does right now, in version 1.0, and what you can expect it do in the next major release:

What The Plugin Does Right Now

• Adds a signup widget to your WordPress blog that allows you to collect phone numbers of your visitors
• Allows you to automatically send customizable 'New Post Added' text messages to everyone who signs up for them
• Allows you to send one-off messages to anyone who has signed up to receive messages using the widget on your blog
• Stores your contacts in your WordPress database
• Stores a list of your outgoing messages in your Ez Texting account on the Scheduled / Sent tab
• Collects replies to the messages you send in your Ez Texting Inbox
• Uses the API to send text messages, so you'll need to contact us get API enabled on your account

As you can probably tell, the contacts you collect using the WordPress plugin will not be added to your Ez Texting account just yet. That brings us to the next major release:

What The Plugin Will Do Soon

• Automatically add contacts collected using the plugin's signup form to your Ez Texting Contact List
• Will not require you to contact us to enable API on your account to send messages

We're excited about the plugin and hope you find it useful to building your SMS Marketing efforts. Updating the plugin to sync contacts with your account is near the top of our development list, so expect an even better plugin soon!

Check out another screenshot below:

Last year we worked with the team at Zabbix SIA to integrate Ez Texting's SMS Services into their popular server monitoring solution, which we announced back in April. Today we're pleased to announce that we're extending our partnership. Over 100 Zabbix clients quickly adopted seamless text messaging alerts and this year we expect many more to do so as Zabbix continues to grow with major releases planned, and we continue to build out our APIs.

Read the entire release to learn more about server monitoring using Zabbix and text messaging.

7 Great, Affordable Web Apps That Small Businesses Use To Communicate With Their Customers is the sixth in a series of articles that we'll be posting this fall. Small Business Marketing Tips To Build Sales In A Down Economy will teach you how to use do-it-yourself tools like SMS, email and social media to effectively market your business.

Entry By Zack Miller

In an increasingly wired world, businesses are reaping huge profits by automating many parts of their business. It’s enticing — providing service breadcrumbs for your customers to help themselves. If you’re automating customer service, though, bad move.

In this market, customer service is the new sales.

Marketing analysts point to online shoe store, Zappos, as the paradigm of how good customer service can build a huge company — no matter what you’re selling. The 8-year old company that was bought by Amazon last year for almost $1 billion has service as its #1 core value. By continuously surpassing customer expectations, Zappos has been able to create a raving pack of customer evangelist lunatics.  

Zappos sells shoes online. It has nothing short of a cultish following.

New customer service tools make it easy for companies of any size to delight their customers. Once the domain of only the largest companies, these technologies put the service muscle of the Fortune 500 in the hands of small and medium size businesses — easy to implement and on the cheap.

Here are seven easy and affordable tools that business can use to offer world class customer service:

1. Customer chat: Online businesses have improved their ability to help customers find what they’re looking for, but they still fail 28% of the time. Services like Olark allow website operators to fully engage via chat with people browsing their sites. Reaching out to prospects poking around a website — in a gently, guiding way — can be a great way to fill the empty space between supply and demand. Olark’s also decently priced, has a ton a features, and can be set up in minutes.

2. Email marketing: Many successful online businesses are using outbound email marketing to stay in front of their customers with great communication, offers and service. Mailchimp has become a customer favorite because it’s hard to beat in price (free, up to 2,000 subscribers) and it’s a pleasure to use. Email marketing is effective in converting prospects to customers.

3. Text messaging: SMS is kind of like the sleeping giant of customer service. Few companies are really doing this effectively — yet. Ez Texting provides a cost-effective SMS marketing platform that firms can use to customize how they ping their clients on their phones. Businesses can fine-tune who they target and create auto-replies for specific keywords

4. Support ticketing: Turnaround time on inbound requests and questions is key to keeping customers happy and satisfied. Zendesk enables firms to focus on what’s core to their business and automate an email ticketing system. These systems used to cost tens of thousands of dollars to build and manage. Now, you can get in for less than $10/month.

5. Social media monitoring: Research shows that customers want answers delivered via social media as well. Hootsuite is a marketer’s favorite tool to monitor and communicate over social media in real time. Its dashboard allows firms to monitor multiple social profiles, track brand mentions, and schedule outgoing messages.

6. Invert your call center: Instead of asking customers to wade through your service center’s phone tree, identify how important the call is to your prospect or clients. For those really excited to chat with a company rep, they can request a callback by using a callback module like the ones offered by Fast Customer.

7. Customer self-help: There are times where self-service works — especially for customers that are DIY in nature. Consider using a free, hosted FAQ, like the one FaqMe offers. Customers are frequently happy to try and figure things out themselves and a frequently-asked question page is where they’re trained to look for answers. FaqMe’s tools make creating this page easy and the platform has some analytics so businesses can monitor where customers are getting stuck.

You don't need Fortune 500 resources to deliver world-class customer service. With these easy and affordable web tools, small and medium business can out-service — and out-compete — much larger competitors.

This is the second post in a new series, The History Of SMS Marketing. Read all entries here.

As we mentioned in our last post, a few critics are predicting that SMS marketing is dying. However, many believe that this form of communication is here to stay because it provides users with immediate gratification and it’s a great alternative to more expensive forms of marketing.

Molly McHugh of Digital Trends is among the naysayers. "It’s been a long time coming, but cheaper alternatives might be putting the final nails in the traditional text message’s coffin," she reportedly says.

However, Josh Malin of Ez Texting says, "SMS is still a dominate channel over marketing on phones; it is short and to the point and can be accepted by all carriers."   (If you recall, our last post indicated that MMS marketing was limited across multiple carriers and therefore struggled for success).

Malin parallels SMS texting to email marketing.  Noting cynics already have made similar accusations about the death of email marketing, Malin believes each strategy has significant staying power.  While it may seem that e-mail marketing and SMS marketing blew up quickly then fizzled out, that is actually not the case.  To the trained eye, it is clear that e-mail marketing and SMS marketing were so popular that their users grew exponentially – in turn, leaving little room for growth.  They quickly reached a point of no return and, as a result, have remained popular and in demand by their current users.

It also may seem that the advent of smartphones is hurting SMS marketing, especially with the popularity of QR codes. But looks can be deceiving.  Smartphone adoption is growing -- out of cell-users.

"Only 40 percent have a smartphone (and that's being generous)," Malin says.  Furthermore, those who do have smartphones do not necessarily use the phone technological capabilities.  The year 2008 marked the first time text messages outnumbered mobile calls.  And as smart phone users are 7 times more likely to receive text alerts compared to a call, experts feel the technology will be widely used for many years to come, according to Mashable Business.

Here are 3 reasons why businesses should employ the use of SMS marketing:

• Wide consumer base.  SMS marketing can open your marketing campaign and customer service capabilities to a much wider audience.
• Widely accepted.  According to the 2011 Mobile Marketing Association Forum, 96 percent of all SMS messages are read and 90 percent of them are read within 3 minutes.  Consumers want to receive these messages.  Once you have received patrons’ numbers, send them invitations to special events, coupons and various offers. 
• Quick and to the point.  While 160 characters may seem like a limitation, it actually ensures that businesses maintain concise information in each text.  Consumers are able to capitalize on the information provided in their quickly received message.

SMS texting provides marketers the concise, instant gratification plug consumers are looking for.  Marketers understand that the need to be in a hurry has enveloped consumers to the extent that they demand the availability of SMS marketing.  Businesses also understand that cell phones are the first piece of technology that users continuously have in their possession, making SMS marketing the quickest way to contact a consumer. Realizing this and running with it, companies such as Ez Texting have made SMS marketing available to companies, so they too, can appeal to the large, instant satisfaction hungry, crowd.

This is the first post in a new series, The History Of SMS Marketing. Read all entries here.

Some have said that SMS marketing is on its way out. Little do they know that this type of marketing will be very hard to push aside.

With the advent of smartphones and ever-changing technology, it could seem plausible that other forms of marketing could develop and push SMS marketing strategies to the wayside. However, text messaging is such an engrained part of our society, much like email (which some predicted would die as well), that it’s likely SMS marketing is here to stay.

SMS marketing, which also is known as short message service, is synonymous with all types of short text messaging.  It is the most widely used texting application in the world with 2.4 billion users and 74 percent of all mobile phone subscribers according to Wikipedia. As part of the Global System for Mobile Communications series of standards in 1985, SMS was a means for sending 160 characters to another mobile user.  Mobile SMS marketing became widely accepted in the 2000s within Europe and Asia, when businesses began collecting cellular telephone numbers to send content.  Since the characters are limited to 160 characters, advertisements are short and to the point and highly convertible. 

What makes SMS marketing so successful is the customers' willingness to receive content.  In order for the marketing approach to work, the customer must willingly provide their information, thus requesting content from the business.  Since customers police their own networks, SMS marketing is going to users who have requested it, and therefore returns a large conversion rate.

SMS marketing is important to businesses and users, because it is simpler than MMS (MultiMedia Messaging Service).  MMS is not accepted by all phones and it is not feasible across all carriers, therefore, it has technical limitations. On the other hand, SMS allows you to reach everyone.  (But we will get into that more in the second part of this series).

When the FCC issued its network neutrality ruling in December they declared mobile data providers exempt from the principal of network neutrality. But apparently this wasn’t enough for some parties; Verizon and MetroPCS promptly sued the FCC in an attempt to force a repeal of the fresh regulations. The FCC responded, noting that regulations need to be published in the Federal Register before you can challenge them. The opponents of net neutrality clearly are not trigger shy.

The FCC expected a court challenge, but another troubling development may preempt the need for a legal fight. On February 17^th the House Energy and Commerce committee will hold a hearing regarding net neutrality. Following the hearing they will hold a Congressional Review Act vote – which if passed would both overturn the regulation and prevent the FCC from ruling on the issue in the future. If the Congress overturns the FCC’s ruling in this manner it will truly be the end of net neutrality.

So what does this have to do with mobile marketing? If the wireless carriers have the right to degrade, throttle and block services on their networks, they have the right to degrade, throttle and block mobile marketing campaigns. Anything would be fair game – restrictions on in-App advertising, mobile search and display ads blocked unless delivered by preferred networks, and mobile commerce forced through carrier platforms instead of neutral parties such as PayPal. The point is not to ponder every possible hypothetical; you either understand what is at stake or you do not. Thankfully, Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group has worked tirelessly to educate Americans about what is at stake.

On Monday they launched ‘The Internet Strikes Back,’ a new campaign to encourage national day of action: 

The Internet Strikes Back is a day - February 17th - where we are asking the Internet to call your Representative and tell them how important Net Neutrality is.

Go to www.TheInternetStrikesBack.org to find out more, get a button for your website, and even sign up to participate in advance.  If you sign up in advance, you will get a text message on the 17th that will automatically connect you with your Representative.

In January, President Obama declared in his State of the Union address how important it is to bring high speed wireless access to nearly all Americans. On Thursday, Obama declared that “we can’t expect tomorrow’s economy to take root using yesterday’s infrastructure.” We can’t expect to see the innovation that will drive tomorrow’s growth if we allow a handful of corporations to cripple that infrastructure.

I urge you to visit www.TheInternetStrikesBack.org and stand up for net neutrality.

The April 3rd release of the Apple iPad has proven to be beyond successful- 2 million units have sold! It looks like Apple is on track to meet the industry’s expectations of selling more than 5 million iPads by the end of 2010. 

How much money is Apple looking at?

RBC Capital Markets, however, predicts that as many as eight million units may ship worldwide before 2011 arrives, a scenario that could generate some $4 billion in revenue for Apple, according to Reuters.

Read all about it at Mobile Marketing Watch.

Does your business have a Facebook fan page? Want to collect mobile phone numbers to add to your text messaging list? We've now get a special widget just for you - The Facebook Signup Widget!

It works just like our regular widget, but it's designed to work as a tab on your Facebook fan page. Learn more here. If you don't have an Ez Texting account already, click to start your free trial.

For the large (and growing) group of developers who have hooked their own apps up to Ez Texting's Group SMS API, we've got some great news. Our new Developer Center is now open for business! We've added lots of new code samples, a partner showcase, a community forum, and more.

If you haven't worked with Ez Texting's group text messaging API in the past, we've got some news for you as well. Our own development team has put together an easy to follow, five step getting started guide. Follow the guide and you'll be sending out messages through our SMS gateway in minutes!

Whether you're an independent developer or you work on a team at Fortune 500 company, we're here to provide you with the right tools and the support you deserve. Ready to partner with us? Visit the Ez Texting Developer Center.

We'd like to take a few moments of your time to announce the launch of the new TellMyCell, now powered by Ez Texting. A little bit about TellMyCell:

At TellMyCell we call ourselves The Mobile Marketing Company, because we've spent the last six years helping hundreds of brands launch affordable enterprise-class mobile marketing campaigns.

With six years of experience in the mobile marketing business we're confident that we can offer an unparalleled enterprise-class platform at an affordable price. Whether you're looking to hook your application up to our SMS gateway using our robust API, or you're getting ready to launch an inexpensive mobile text message marketing campaign, TellMyCell can help you get started.

Visit TellMyCell and learn more!