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Introducing transactional SMS: A new way to reach customers

Agathe Brusset Agathe Brusset
· 4 min read · New features and updates · September 6th, 2022
Transactional SMS gives your customers another way to interact with your business. And now you can enjoy SMS as part of your transactional messaging strategy with our new SMS API!

While email is undoubtedly the most popular way to deliver transactional messages, more and more customers are favoring additional channels like SMS to receive these communications. This is why we’re super happy to announce that you can now send high-volume, toll-free SMS using MailerSend.

Are you ready to reach more customers and increase overall satisfaction?

View of MailerSend's phone numbers page.

Use cases for transactional SMS

Just like with transactional email, transactional SMS messages are purely informational and cannot contain any marketing content. What’s more, recipients must opt-in to receive transactional messages via SMS. That being said, there are many use cases for transactional SMS. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do with transactional SMS:

  • One Time Passwords (OTPs): Improve user experience by making logging into your app effortless

  • Two Factor Authentication (2FA): Increase security of your app and customer accounts

  • Order status updates: Keep customers in the loop about how their order is progressing

  • Shipping and delivery alerts: Ensure customers have ample information to arrange for deliveries

  • Booking/reservation confirmation and cancellation messages: Optimize the management of bookings and cancellations

  • Payment and billing alerts: Ensure customers are always aware of upcoming payments and aren’t charged without an alert

  • Appointment confirmations and reminders: Reduce the number of missed appointments

  • General alerts, notices or updates: Avoid your support team being inundated with requests about general updates to your service

  • Emergency alerts: Send SMS alerts to mobilize people quickly in emergency situations

Enjoy the same commitment to deliverability

Our email and SMS API are built with the same mission to deliver and scale transactional communications with ease. SMS are automatically encoded and segmented, while our robust and redundant network of carriers enables you to send timely and important messages that always get delivered to your customers' mobile phone numbers. 

What’s more, real-time delivery receipts combined with MailerSend’s smart delivery system increase deliverability and reduce costs, making for a highly scalable solution. 

View of MailerSend's SMS activity page.

Schedule Bulk SMS

Use the bulk sending endpoint to schedule multiple SMS for a more optimal time—either to avoid peak sending times, increasing deliverability, or to sync delivery with an event. Bulk sending also enables you to make your sendings more efficient. By sending bulk text messages when necessary, you’ll benefit from our higher bulk message sending limit.

Send custom SMS that fit your brand

The new transactional SMS feature includes plenty of tools to personalize your messages. You can tailor them to fit your brand identity, drive customer engagement and build stronger relationships.

Get inspiration from our professionally crafted SMS templates (coming soon), add a touch of your brand flavor, and insert personalization using customer metadata for messages that are unique to them. Plus, you’ll soon be able to attach media files in rich media formats such as PNG, GIF, JPG, WAV, and more to make your messages more engaging.

Use inbound routing to converse with recipients

That’s right—our inbound routing feature extends to SMS so that you can allow recipients to reply and engage in conversations via SMS. This feature allows you to offer an exceptional level of customer service by automatically receiving, filtering and parsing text messages straight to your application. For now, inbound SMS routing is only available in the US, but stay tuned because extended availability is coming soon!

Try out the SMS API now!

You can now start sending and receiving transactional SMS in minutes thanks to our regularly updated official SDK libraries, including PHP, Python, Node.js, Ruby and Java. Premium plan users will receive a free trial phone number to test out the feature.

There is also the option of using a Zapier integration to send SMS combined with email triggers from over 4,000 apps. Don’t forget to check out our comprehensive API documentation.

Currently, SMS is limited to US-numbers only, but we're planning on expanding this functionality to additional regions in the coming months. Subscribe on the form below to be notified when international SMS is available!

How do you think your business could use transactional SMS? We’d love to hear more about your use cases—let us know in the comments!

Agathe Brusset
I'm Agathe, Product Manager at MailerSend. When I'm not busy rolling out new product features, I'm planning my future mud-brick farmhouse complete with farm animals and a vineyard!