SMS Aggregator: How it Works and Why You Should Care
So after you’ve made the decision – you’re entering the fast and furious world of SMS marketing! – that’s the end of the story, right? You can send text messages from your phone using your carrier to customers all over the country, right? Well, not exactly. To manage SMS campaigns and mobile marketing, you need to have what’s called an SMS Aggregator. Just what exactly is an SMS aggregator and what do they do?
When you send a text message to a buddy, friend, or service, that message goes through several hops on its way to reception: from your phone to your carrier to a lookup service (where it checks the switch to see who owns the mobile number you’re texting!), then to the carrier, then to your recipient’s phone. Most of this happens so quickly that you wouldn’t really consider just how many complicated steps it took to receive a seemingly simple 160 character message. After all, it just works, right? It does, but you just sent a single message. What if, between incoming and outgoing, you had 10,000 messages to process? First off, your carrier is going to put a stop to that in a hurry, so don’t try this at home. That’s where AvidMobile comes in.
An SMS Aggregator cuts past several critical, data-intensive, time wasting steps of the process, instead having a direct connection to the major carrier networks. So no single network has to process every single request – they are fed directly to the carriers responsible for the individual numbers, avoiding the “handshakes” that occur when two carriers try to process a request, and where most of the slowdown and inefficiency happens during the process. What does this mean for you as the SMS marketer? It means faster, more reliable delivery … and an entity acting on your behalf to make sure that your shortcode is in good standing with the major carriers. Remember, we’re all at the mercy of the “Big Four” … staying on their good side is a top priority for successfully running your business. Making sure you understand and have the best SMS Aggregator is going to make a huge difference.
Let AvidMobile show you the difference.
