Sarah Morgan
How you identify yourself on a handset can be extremely important in determing how your customers react when they receive your message.
When you send an SMS you can choose from several ways to do this, depending on what sort of response you want to receive (or not receive). In this first blog I will look at the two types of sender ID you can choose and the role they play in determining the success of your campaign.
Name:
You are able to enter your business as the sender name/alphanumeric ID (Identification). The sender name is limited to 11 characters as this is the international standard for SMS. This is more useful when you are not looking for responses; otherwise you will need to include the number for people to reply to in the content of the message.
Some of our clients choose this type of ID as the recipient can instantly see who the message is from. Others use a name as a sender ID but still invite the customer to respond by adding their shortcode or long number in the body of the text.
Dynmark Direct includes a feature that prevents users from sending out messages with invalid ID’s. These include more recognisable companies and corporations and instances of bad or offensive language.
Number:
If you want people to respond to a mobile phone (if for example you will be away from your computer), you can set the sender ID to a mobile number. This means people will think the message comes from your mobile, and if they reply, the message will be received back to your mobile. This is good if you only expect a small number of individual replies, and will not be at your computer.
The other option is if you want a response to Dynmark Direct, in which case you will normally be allocated a random inbound number that will allow people to reply. This allows your customers to hit reply and send back their repsonse, rather than making a note of the number contained in the message (as above) and starting a new SMS to that number.
Dynmark Direct allows ID’s to be created and edited instantly so different departments within an organisation can choose to each have a different ID. One of our clients who use SMS for both external and internal communication has a company sender ID to allow customers to recognise who the SMS is from, as well as ID’s including “HR” and “Billing” depending on the type of message that is being sent out.
Inbound repsonses (which we will talk about in another blog) which trigger another message to be sent out can also have different sender ID’s to that of the original message.
