At InspireTech, we believe in empowering our customers with the right tools to achieve your communication needs.
We see a constant need to educate our customers in responsible messaging and helping you achieve the communication goals without irritating your recipients. Here are some best practices that we encourage our customers to go through before using the system. Communicate responsibly and reach impactfully!
1. Identify your organisation.
You can always put a header or footer on the SMS with your organisation’s name as sign-off so the recipient knows where your SMS is coming from. We have observed some recipients asking “Who are you?”, “Where is this?” after receiving broadcast from our clients.
Tips with our system:
Tips with our system:
- Add either a header or footer. Just go to Edit Profile and type in either on header or footer with your organisation name or abbreviation which you think your recipients can identify with.
- For every SMS sent out, this will automatically put in front or at the back of the message. However, we need to highlight the limitation on the SMS message count. If you have set any header or footer, the SMS count does not include that, and you must remember to take note of the characters added. If it takes up 5 characters, remember to budget it into the SMS count as the program will not count header or footer at the point of creating your SMS message.
2. Advertising messages.
Put <adv> in front of SMS messages which are advertising in nature. However, if you are sending to your organization members, you may be exempted.
Tips with our system:
Tips with our system:
- To avoid misunderstanding, especially from members who refuse to receive messages from you, do check your Inbox & Admin>App Inbox each time you login for replies which tells you “Remove me.”, “Stop sending me.”, etc.
- Turn on the “Notify me when there is incoming SMS” option in your Profile and make sure your email address is correct so the program can forward you any incoming SMS which is directed at you.
3. Provide channel for unsubscribe.
In your outgoing SMS, it is good to end with a statement like Reply UNSUB to unsubscribe. This is very applicable for organisations which are sending out promotional and marketing oriented messages.
Tips with our system:
Tips with our system:
- You can always use our automatic unsubscribe feature to manage unsubscribe request if you do not wish to manually manage the list.
- Go to the Admin>Manage Application Settings and turn on the Unsubscribe feature.
- Put in the correct keyword e.g. UNSUB and a customised autoreply for your organisation
4. Update your mailing list regularly.
Read incoming SMS and react to it. Though most of you are interested in sending out to customers, please check your Inbox or App Inbox for feedback towards your broadcast. Some people will tell you that you have sent the message to the wrong number. Should you receive such a message, do investigate and update your mailing list as soon as possible.
5. Avoid late hours messaging.
We have noticed that people get very annoyed receiving an SMS late in the night even if the messages are well-meaning reminders and notices. We would discourage customers from sending out SMS after 9 or 10pm as most recipients dislike being disturbed during their sleep.
Tips with our system:
Tips with our system:
- If your broadcast list is huge and potentially the broadcast may flow into later hours (the average sending speed is about 600 SMS per hour), you can use our Operating Hours setting in Admin>Manage Application Settings.
- Set the OperatingFrom to 0800 and OperatingTo to 2100.
- When you set that, the system will stop sending out SMS between 2100 – 0759. This means even if you try to send SMS at 10pm, you’ll see the messages still get stored in the Outbox. The messages will only start going out at 0800 the next day.
