The definition of SMS promotion has gone under a drastic transformation over time, and so has ways of using it, but the primary objective has always remained the same – creating awareness for different services and products, and sending important notifications and alerts.

Part of this transformation is the rise and importance of transaction SMS. Transaction SMS is a type of SMS between businesses and their consumers. These messages contain information essential for the use of the business’ services or products. For instance, if you implement two-factor authentication in your system, then you must send an OTP (one-time-password) to your users.

Not long ago, businesses and organizations only had promotional SMS to push to their customers; but with the rise of transactional SMS, businesses now have the opportunity to push SMS items such as confirmation and reminders alerts.

Difference Between Transactional SMS vs Promotional SMS

Transactional and Promotional SMS are sometimes used interchangeably, and one might wonder about their differences. The difference is that while Transactional SMS are triggered by events, and sent by automated systems – for example, an order placement triggers an order confirmation message, Promotional SMS are manually sent by campaign personnel at random times and for random reasons.

A transactional SMS might be something like: “Dear Jane Doe, your order was successfully placed.” While a Promotional message might be: “Dear John Doe, Great summer offers for all brands.”

As stated above, transactional and promotional SMS are sometimes used interchangeably, and rightfully so. A transactional SMS can be structured to convey a promotional message. Think of this hypothetical SMS: “Dear customer, your Netflix subscription was successful. Upgrade to premium to enjoy more content.”  The first part of the message is a transactional SMS - notifying the client of a successful subscription. While the second part carries a promotional message - creating awareness for the premium package.

Benefits Of Using Transaction SMS

Although there are numerous benefits of sending transactional SMS, a few major ones are listed below:

1. Prompt delivery of information - The biggest benefit of using transactional SMSs as a means of promotion is that quality information can be delivered promptly to the customers without any sort of delay. This comes in handy especially when urgent immediate information needs to be sent to the customers.

2. Useful for industries for sending alerts - A wide range of industries can use transactional SMS templates for their benefit. For example, railways can send PNR status messages to people, an e-commerce website can send a message based responses to the e-commerce transactions, Banks can send urgent notifications to their customers, SMS in educational institutions can be used to send immediate alerts to parents and students.

3. Ability to send SMS 24×7 - One of the major benefits constituting transactional SMS is that they can be sent anytime, anywhere. There is no time restriction on these messages as a result of which users get notified about every single alert and information on time.

4. Reach out to DND service listed customers - With transactional messages even DND (Do Not Disturb) service listed customers can be reached out and sent timely information.

5. Template-based SMS - Since transactional messages are template-based, numerous templates can be created - for example, promotional SMS templates ande-commerce SMS templates. The sender only needs to get the approval of the SMS provider, after which he is all set to deliver informative messages to a large set of audience.

Best Practices For Sending Transactional SMS

For Transactional SMS to have a positive impact on your business, you must know how to structure the messages and deliver them to consumers. Here are a few best practices to get you started:

1. Keep customers informed – Transactional SMS are meant to inform, so be sure to communicate everything your customers may need to know. Keep your customers informed of their transactions and interaction with your business. Don’t let them guess if their order placements or payments were successful.
2. Send Marketing SMS in the same queue – SMS promotion template can be placed in the same queue with transactional SMS. So, for every transactional SMS send, a marketing message follows. The addition of promotion SMS templates helps to boost customer engagement and encourage the customer to transact with your business again.

Uses of Transactional SMS

Transactional SMS can be used in many ways, from confirmations to notifications. The following are some of the uses:

1. Multi-factor authentication – Two-factor authentication involves the use of two means to confirm login or transaction. One of the means is through OTP, sent via SMS to a user's mobile phone. The mode of SMS used is Transactional SMS – due to its effectiveness.
2. Order and Payment notifications – Businesses keep their customers informed of the status of their order placements. For instance, when a customer successfully places an order or pays for it, s/he is sent an SMS to notify him of the success. The mode of SMS used in this case is the Transactional SMS. And with SMS templates for e-commerce, you can implement such.
3. Triggered messaging – You can also set custom triggers on when to send messages. For instance, you can set a custom trigger to send a welcoming message to your new clients. Also, you can set custom triggers to send out reminders. For instance, a reminder to pay on a certain date. This kind of message is based on Transactional SMS templatesthat are filled with customer data.
4. Real-time alerts – For a time-sensitive alert, you need a reliably fast means of communication and one that has a high read rate. SMS is the best choice for this task, more specifically Transactional SMS.
   Sending bulk transactional messages with the user-friendly panel of MSG91 is simple, convenient and easy to use. And with our MSG91 transactional SMS API; integration into the existing system software has become a lot simpler.

For more details on MSG91 transactional SMS API integration, contact us.