How to Choose the Best SMS Gateway for Your Business?

Choosing the right SMS gateway has a great impact on the performance of your SMS marketing campaigns.

To choose an SMS gateway that meets your requirements, you must consider many factors, including location, language, cost, and technical features.

If you’re a beginner, you might get frustrated when choosing and working with SMS gateways. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through choosing the best SMS gateway provider for your business. Also, we’ll explain how WP SMS can help you integrate an SMS gateway into your WordPress website.

What Is An SMS Gateway?

First, let’s see what an SMS gateway is and why you need to choose one for your marketing strategy.

An SMS gateway is a tool or service that allows you to send and receive SMS messages via your applications, websites, or software.

In fact, it enables computers to communicate with mobile carriers. This way, you can send bulk messages programmatically with minimal manual tasks.

Types of SMS Gateways

It’s good to get familiar with various types of SMS gateways before choosing one:

1. SMPP Gateways: This gateway uses the Short Message Peer-to-Peer protocol. If you need a high-throughput SMS delivery, it’s a great choice for your business.

2. REST APIs: Representational State Transfer is a type of API that offers simple and flexible integration with modern applications and allows them to communicate using the Internet. It is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses. HTTP/HTTPS gateways are a type of these APIs that allow you to send SMS through web requests.

3. Email to SMS Gateways: This type of SMS gateway can translate emails into SMS messages. This is helpful for basic transactional purposes.

4. SaaS-Based Platforms: These gateways offer versatile dashboards and tools to manage your SMS campaigns easily.

Key Benefits of SMS Gateways

Now, let’s see why your business needs an SMS gateway:

• Wide Reach: SMS is the most widely used communication channel. Over 5 billion people send and receive SMS messages worldwide, far more than any other channel’s users. An SMS gateway lets you reach out to these audiences and convert them into loyal customers.

• Speed: SMS is a fast communication channel and text messages are usually delivered within seconds.

• High Open Rates: The majority of people read their incoming messages while many of them don’t check their emails.

• Engagement: SMS is the most personal communication channel. So using an SMS gateway, you can build a long-lasting partnership with your customers.

• Simplicity: People can use SMS without needing an Internet connection, any app, or even a smartphone. So you can reach out to almost everyone using an SMS gateway.

How to Choose the Best SMS Gateway?

Selecting the right SMS gateway is difficult as there are hundreds of options out there. That’s why we’ve tried to list the most important factors in choosing the right SMS gateway for your business:

1. Reliability and Uptime

First and foremost, you need to make sure that your SMS gateway offers a consistent service.

Downtime, especially during time-sensitive campaigns, can disrupt your SMS marketing strategy. Please bear in mind that if you lose the limited-time period of the campaign, you’ll face missed sales opportunities and also frustrated customers.

So consider the following points when choosing your SMS gateway:

• Industry Standard Uptime: You need to look for a provider with at least 99.9% uptime.

• Redundancy: Choose a gateway that has backup systems and multiple carrier routes. This will bring a piece of mind about message delivery even during server failures.

2. Delivery Speed and Success Rates

If your text messages take too long to deliver, they won’t be helpful in your last-minute campaigns or transactional messages.

Imagine if you want to send a 2FA to your customers when they want to log into their accounts. If it takes too long for them to receive the password, they can’t enter the site.

So look for an SMS gateway with an average delivery time of under 10 seconds to prevent these problems. 

Also, SMS gateways that offer detailed delivery reports can be useful in such situations because you can be sure about the delivery of your messages on time.

3. Coverage

Before embarking on your SMS campaign, you need to determine where you can target. Your SMS gateway should support the regions and countries where you aim to connect with citizens.

So you must check the SMS gateway provider’s network coverage. If you want to run an international SMS campaign, you need to choose an SMS gateway with global coverage and multilingual SMS capabilities.

4. Ease of Integration

You’re probably using some systems right now so your SMS gateway should easily integrate with them.

For example, you might use a WordPress website song with WooCommerce. So you have to choose an SMS gateway with APIs and pre-built plugins compatible with these platforms.

Also, the SMS gateway should provide comprehensive API documentation so that your developers can easily integrate it with your existing platforms.

If you install our SMS plugin, WP SMS, you can use more than 300 SMS gateways without any trouble. We help you quickly integrate the SMS gateway into your WordPress website.

Please add the screen capture from the dashboard showing the list of gateways.

5. Cost and Pricing Structure

SMS campaigns might be costly, especially in bulk messaging strategies. So look for an SMS gateway that offers a fair pricing plan that fits your resources and requirements.

Study all the SMS pricing models like:

• Pay-as-You-Go: This is suitable for startups, small businesses, or occasional SMS usage because you don’t need to pay in advance.

• Monthly Subscription: If you have a business with steady and predictable SMS requirements, you can choose this plan.

• Tiered Pricing: Medium to large enterprises with huge SMS usage should go for this pricing model.

It’s good to create a table of pricing packages offered by various providers to be able to choose the best one.

6. Scalability

When your business grows, you need to send large SMS volumes. So your SMS gateway should offer scalable throughput capabilities. 

When you have a small business, you might need an SMS gateway with a throughput of 100-200 messages per second. For enterprises, 1,000+ messages per second is a must. 

7. Security Features

Data security is non-negotiable in all businesses, and SMS marketing is no exception. This is particularly important when it comes to sensitive information like OTPs or payment confirmations.

SMS gateways offer security aspects such as:

• TLS Encryption
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
• Compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR and HIPAA

You can also check the history of the SMS gateway to make sure there is no precedent of data leakage.

8. Additional Factors

Here are also some additional factors you need to consider when selecting an SMS gateway:

• Two-Way Messaging: If you let customers reply, you can increase the engagement rate of your campaigns. So make sure that the SMS gateway offers two-way messaging.

• Message Scheduling: This helps you automate your messages and has a great impact on the efficiency of your messages.

• Customer Support: The SMS gateway should offer responsive customer support and remove possible issues you face in your campaigns. Check if the SMS provider offers 24/7 support using SMS, live chat, email, or phone. 

Popular SMS Gateway Providers

Now, let’s have a simple comparison between popular SMS gateway providers in the world. The following table summarizes important features of leading SMS gateways to help you choose one of them:

How to Integrate An SMS Gateway with Your WordPress Website?

WP SMS is one of the best SMS plugins for ecommerce stores and any business that uses WordPress websites. 

It allows you to integrate your chosen SMS gateway and API into your website’s dashboard. Here is how to do that:

Step 1: Choose Your SMS Gateway

You need to choose an SMS gateway that is compatible with WordPress. 

Step 2: Install WP SMS

WP SMS offers an effortless installation process:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to Plugins and click on Add New.
3. Search for WP SMS.
4. Install and activate WP SMS on your WordPress dashboard.

Step 3: Choose Your Plan

WP SMS offers a free plan for basic features like SMS/MMS, SMS Newsletter & Subscribers, WordPress Notifications, and Webhooks. 

However, if you want to use more professional features like 2FA, Scheduling, dynamic content, and WooCommerce, you need to buy the WP SMS Pro package and pay for any other add-ons.

Step 4: Configure the Plugin and Integrate the SMS Gateway

1. Go to the plugin settings.
2. Click on SMS Gateway.
3. Choose the chosen SMS gateway from the list.
4. Enter the API key and authentication credentials provided by your SMS gateway.

After that, you need to configure additional settings like default sender ID and message templates.

Step 5: Test the Integration

Before launching your SMS campaign, it’s essential to verify that everything is OK. So we recommend sending a test message to confirm that the setup is working as you want.

Final Thoughts

As you see, it’s a bit difficult to choose a suitable SMS gateway for your business. You need to consider many factors from the size of your SMS campaigns to the APIs offered by the SMS provider. 

We provided a guide to help you choose the best SMS gateway according to your requirements and budget. 

A good approach regarding SMS gateways is to start with economic options and pay-as-you-go plans. 

This will save you money, especially if you have a startup that is out of budget. Of course, you can then go for professional pricing models when your business grows and needs to reach out to more customers. 

If you still have any questions about choosing an SMS gateway, you can contact us to get advice.

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