How to integrate bulksms?

How to integrate bulksms

How to integrate SMS with any app, website or business system

SMS is an effective tool for quickly communicating with customers, employees and suppliers and extremely easy to incorporate into any business environment.

Its simplicity is one of the main factors as it can be quickly and easily integrated with any business system, website or application by utilising basic API code or dedicated SMS automation software, which is a major benefit to any business.

ToucanText’s SMS API is completely vendor, platform and language independent, enabling multiple methods of connection. The .NET API is available for both the .NET Framework and .NET Core flavours allowing use with lightweight .NET Core applications. It also supports asynchronous calls with async/await for optimised threading.

We have even created a set of libraries to allow you to integrate our API into your code in minutes, whether you are programming in C#, C# Async, HTTP, Java, PHP, VB.NET or VB.NET Async.

Simply sign up for a ToucanText account, download your chosen dynamic-link library (DLL) file, call the file, purchase credits and then start sending. It’s as simple as that.

Automated SMS

For more advanced SMS services, it might be worth considering our SMS Automation software. As you may derive from the product name, this software enables you to not only integrate SMS capabilities into your business systems, it also provides the ability to automate key functions surrounding the sending and receiving of text messages.

Our SMS Automation software is market-proven and can be used within a wide-variety of business systems, from high end ERP systems (Access Dimensions, Epicor, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage or SAP Business One) and popular CRM systems (Agile CRM, Dynamics CRM, Infor CRM, Sage CRM, Salesforce and SugarCRM) to bespoke applications, marketing tools and web services.

The software can be used to monitor these systems, following your business rules/logic, and automate the distribution of text messages when certain triggers are initiated following an event or defined condition, or when particular schedules are set. The software is especially useful for monitoring and responding to inbound SMS.

By dynamically monitoring all your business software solutions SMS Automation can automatically create and send SMS messages to employees, prospects, suppliers and existing customers at the exact moment the communication is required. This can help:

  • Speed up and improve communication to all relevant stakeholders
  • Enhance consumer marketing campaigns
  • Improve risk management — stock level warnings, financial KPIs or sensitive data

SMS Automation also includes a queuing mechanism which means that when messages are sent from your software or system they are immediately added to a queue and sent when possible. The benefit of this is that if your internet fails for any reason or you have run out of credits then the messages will not have been lost they will just wait in the queue. Additionally, if the text message is incorrectly formatted, it is possible to go into the queue and edit the message, then added back to the queue and the message re-sent.

The benefits of automating SMS

Automated SMS customer communications:

A key factor in customer service, retention and engagement is the organisation’s ability to deliver personalised communications. SMS is an ideal technology for this purpose but its effectiveness is still depending on an employee’s ability to manage the timing and relevance of the message. ToucanText’s SMS Automation software can intelligently monitor all your business applications and automatically send personalised SMS messages such as purchase notifications, delivery updates or event reminders.

Automated SMS marketing to drive revenue:

SMS is powerful marketing vehicle when used tactically and can yield significant financial returns for any type of organisation. However, the biggest challenge with SMS marketing is timing and relevancy as both these criteria are dependent on employees having the time and skills to identify the correct audience and message content. The software can automatically identify prospective SMS campaign targets e.g. customers who have not purchased for six months or recently bought a related product and send them a promo code or other call to action via SMS.

Automated SMS management alerts:

It is the responsibility of management to monitor and prevent business exposure to risk and this can take many forms such as managing stock level thresholds, financial KPIs or sensitive data. Yet manually monitoring critical information can be time consuming or in many cases impossible. The software can automatically monitor your business applications and send SMS alerts when your exact business rules are breached. In short, you get complete piece of mind.

How to integrate with the SMS API from PHP

If you can put together a Web page with a form, backed by a scripting language (e.g. PHP), you already have what you need to send SMS messages. For PHP API integration, follow these simple steps:

  • Sign up for an account on BulkSMS.com.
  • Select ‘SMS API’s’ under the Products tab.
  • Select the PHP code sample and download the code sample onto your desktop. Alternatively, click here to download our pre written code sample.
  • Open the code sample and replace the username and password variable with the credentials used to register your account.
  • Enter the msisdn number you would like your messages to be delivered to. This can be done by changing the msisdn variable to the number you wish to send to.
  • Run the script from your application or software, 3 SMS messages will be delivered to the msisdn number you provided above.
  • Now that you have integrated the PHP code into your application, you can change the bodies of the messages to send 7bit, 8bit and 16bit messages as desired. Note that you only need to use the one required for your specific type of messages. The functions that you won’t be using should be removed from the script. If you only require 7bit message you should remove the $unicode_msg variable as well as the $eight_bit_msg variable. You should also remove the code for sending the Unicode message and the 8-bit message.

Once the PHP API has been integrated into your software, these protocols will allow for automated SMS messages to be sent from your application. Here are some examples of what SMS API integration can do:

  • Send automated SMS notifications when enquiries are made on an online directory.
  • Notify clients via SMS of progress made on repair work.
  • Send automated SMS messages directly from your bespoke CRM software.

We offer a sophisticated SMS gateway platform for sending text messages to over 800 mobile networks. Our stable geographically redundant platform is backed by NetApp and IBM BladeCenter hardware.

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