To achieve high delivery results in your sms campaigns, please follow these guidelines:
- Confirm that your numbers are properly formatted e.g. 234803xxxx or 0803xxxx and not 234083xxxx or 803xxxxxx.
- Do not send SPAM messages as your account will be charged and your sms blocked by the network operators.
- Be sure not to exceed the default 11 characters limit set to be used as Sender ID.
- If you intend sending sms to lots of numbers per time, as a precautionary measure, first send a sample of the exact text you want to send (to these list of numbers) to your own mobile phone. If you don’t receive your text message, Contact Us so we can help you verify from the network operators if they have blocked any of the keywords in your text message. Also, test with different numbers from other networks as blocked keywords vary from network provider to network provider.
- After you have confirmed that your sms is being delivered, still add your test number(s) to the bulk list of numbers you want to send your sms to.
- Avoid typing and copying your phone numbers or text messages in Microsoft Word; do these in Notepad instead. When you copy anything from MS Word, you also copy characters which are not visible to the normal eye and that are not compatible with text messaging technology. You also stand the risk of being billed of extra pages because of these incompatible characters.
- Be careful not to include words like “PROMO”, “Wow”, “Congratulations” in your text message. Your sms will be flagged as spam by some networks like MTN Nigeria and will not be delivered.
- If you want to send any transactional sms or message sent using the name of a bank, be sure your account has been placed on the Financial Route. Do Contact Us for more details on this.
- Always make sure you have enough credit on your account to send your message per time. Also, if you have messages you scheduled to deliver in the future, be sure you have enough credit in your account at the time of their delivery to make sure they get delivered.
If you follow the guidelines above to send your sms and it doesn’t get delivered within (at most)5 minutes, the following are some reasons why this may be so:
- Your local network provider might be experiencing some delays due to a temporarily congested server
- The recipient’s device(mobile phone) is jammed due to its memory being used up or the message space is filled up. In a case where its a memory issue, restarting the device will free up its memory while in a case where it is a filled message space, deleting some old messages or deleting some apps will create some needed space.
Please Note: Your account is charged for submission to the mobile network servers and not for delivery. The only exception to this is when you send a message to numbers with DND activated on them, you will not be charged for such numbers.
We adjure you to visit this page from time to time as we will keep updating it with the new changes and best practices in mobile messaging technology.
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