Business Messaging - Best Practices

How Can I Improve SMS Delivery?

SMS has a mission-critical role in modern business— many high-priority applications, alerts, and content depend heavily on an SMS being delivered in a timely manner. SMS is considered to be one of the safest channels for the transmission of critical information to a phone. It works on any handset, in any country, and it is still used often by recipients than many other channels.

But it’s deliverability is not flawless. The telecom industry is not fully interoperable and the optimal path for delivery is not always the one you are using. However, there are proven techniques that you can use to improve SMS delivery.

Use Numeric Sender IDs: Avoid using alphanumeric sender IDs in countries where telecom restrictions don’t allow the use; most carriers spam filters, alphanumeric senders. Instead, use numeric senders in international format (e.g. 397525856425).

Don’t Spam: Not only is it illegal, more often than not, it doesn’t work. Most likely the message will not arrive at the handset and you will still be paying for it. Spam filters have become very effective at detecting spam attacks.

Randomize the Body of the Message: As we have seen with sender IDs, it is better to randomize the body of the message, if you can. If you are sending a campaign or password code, come up with more than one version of the content and change it randomly.

For example:
Message 1: Your Pin Code is 2234
Message 2: Please enter 6765 into your application to verify your account

Randomize Sender ID: Some carriers will block repeated messages from the same sender, be they numeric or alphanumeric. To achieve optimal performance, get enough numeric senders in international format and then rotate them randomly for each message you send. This differs from country to country telecom restrictions.

Provide Opt-Out details in SMS: For any Marketing/Promotional SMS, it’s always good to add opt-out details. This gives more credibility to your messages and reduces the chances of getting blocked by carriers.

To summarize, here are the key points to keep in mind:

• Use numeric sender IDs in international format
• Avoid alphanumeric senders
• Randomize sender and content
• Don’t spam

There are many restrictions placed by Network operators to filter our SPAM messages or to comply with local regulations. The complete list of countries & restrictions is mentioned below in the section “SMS Restrictions”. If a country is not mentioned in the below list, it means that the country does not have any known restrictions for sending messages. However, it’s advisable to follow the best practices mentioned above for all countries.