Dental survey concludes SMS reminders reduce missed appointments
Sep0
The March 2009 issue of the Journal of the European Academy of Paediatric Dentistry includes a report entitled “Use of Mobile Telephone Short Message Service (SMS) as a Reminder:
the Effect on Patient Attendance”. The report describes a study where SMS appointment reminders were introduced 24 hours before the appointment for half of the patients studied, while the other half recieved no SMS reminder. The data strongly supports the conclusion that just-in-time reminders can significantly reduce incidences of patients missing appointments. The full article is available here: http://www.eapd.gr/EAPDJournal/2009v10/Issue_1/Vol_10_1_Mar_Foley.htm
Strike While the Iron is Hot: Turn Website Visitors into Customers using Online Text Messaging
Mar0
Text messaging portal LookNoThumbs.com is helping small business website owners to connect instantly with site visitors and transition casual site visits into sales opportunities.
Here’s a typical scenario from a day in the life of a website; perhaps a site not unlike yours.
You drive visitors to your site by publishing your URL at every opportunity and using every means at the disposal of your marketing budget: stationery, signage, press, broadcast media, online advertising, blogging, and word-of-mouth. As visitors click around your site evaluating you and your business, the tyre-kickers lose interest and leave. Others are interested enough to complete your inquiry form, which at some point delivers contact information to you for later collection. Unfortunately, within minutes after completing the form, most visitors will have forgotten who you are and why they were interested. They’ll have moved on - possibly even to a competitor’s website, and you’ve lost your best chance to win a customer whose interest is still fresh.
Here’s the same scenario with integrated site alerts from online texting portal LookNoThumbs.com.
Your visitors arrive at your site as before. Tyre-kickers leave, as they always do. But now when a visitor completes your inquiry form, their experience with your business is only beginning. Within seconds of them submitting the form, you get a text message on your mobile phone containing the contact details they left – usually while the visitor is still looking at your site. You now have your optimal chance of winning that customer: you have their number right on your phone, and you know they’re on your site. Go ahead - PRESS YOUR GREEN BUTTON NOW!
Make no mistake, LookNoThumbs’ website alerts are the online equivalent of your door chime ringing to alert sales staff when a customer enters your shop.
Site integration with LookNoThumbs.com is a simple process. First, you need a LookNoThumbs.com account, which is free and quick to set up at http://www.LookNoThumbs.com. Don’t buy any texts until you’re ready – your free trial will let you try this out just fine. Next, display a special link prominently on your site. The exact link is in the FAQ accessible from your LookNoThumbs.com online texting account. When your visitor clicks the link, a popup form opens, and when they submit the form, you get your text message. It couldn’t be easier, and it’s free to try.
LookNoThumbs.com has brought customer text messaging within the reach of any business. Where LookNoThumbs stands apart is in its simplicity. Site integration is just one example that delivers high value to your business with no fuss and minimal cost. In fact there are no costs other than any text messages you receive after your free trial, and you buy those in small blocks only when you need them.
Remember, in business it’s always best to strike while the iron is hot. Don’t impress your customers with a great website, then lose them to a competitor over something as trivial as not knowing they were ever there.
Online Texting Anti-spoofing Measures, and about time!
Dec0
Bulk text messaging (SMS) supplier Clickatell is now preventing online texting customers from setting the Sender ID header on each outbound SMS message.
It’s a subtle change that many won’t care about or perhaps even notice. But serious online texting services like www.looknothumbs.com welcome this as an important and necessary step towards privacy, security and trust in text messaging; and one that delivers a clean blow on the chin to SMS spammers and would-be fraudsters who threaten this market.
Here’s why.
If you’ve ever opened an email and discovered it’s not what it appeared to be, you may know that you can’t always trust the From: header in email. That’s because any program that creates email messages can insert any value into that header. This is an artefact of SMTP - a protocol developed in a more innocent age but still used today to deliver most Internet email.
Text messaging doesn’t use SMTP, but the principle is the same. The sending software constructs the text message, including a Sender ID header, which is treated as the sender’s mobile number or a text identifier. This is useful because if the Sender ID matches an address book entry in the receiving phone, you might see “From: Bob Smith” rather than “From: 07123456789”.
Note: SMS spamming and spoofing have not been a huge problem in the USA. That’s partly because of limitations with U.S. network operators, and partly because SMS spamming is prosecuted as a felony in the U.S. with serious consequences for convicted offenders. However, spoofing in particular is a problem in other regions, including Europe, where bona fide applications depend on the Sender ID header as an enabler for replies.
So what’s new?
Well last month, Clickatell told customers it was dropping support for ad-hoc setting of the Sender ID header. Sender IDs now have to be pre-registered or pass stringent, auditable, security checks by Clickatell or its security-conscious customers like www.looknothumbs.com.
Why is this a good thing?
This measure eliminates spoofing because sending programs can no longer impersonate Sender IDs undetected. It also discourages spam because the message originator is easily traceable and appropriate action can be taken.
But perhaps most importantly, it discourages bad citizenship in electronic messaging culture. SMS is a cherished child of the mobile industry. It’s beloved by its users and suppliers alike for its convenience, and its seemingly limitless capacity for valuable applications. Nobody wants text messaging to suffer the fate of email, riddled with unwanted content and virtually unusable for many.
With this new measure in place, suppliers are taking the short-term risk of reduced traffic, but the pay-off will be high-quality content and long-term trust in the medium, which will fuel continued growth in this sector.
At online texting site www.looknothumbs.com, all hats are off to Clickatell for taking this initiative.
Online Texting v SPAM
Dec0
The words online texting and SPAM really should not be spoken in the same sentence. However, while stumbling I found this article relating to SMS messaging being received when it is unwanted. It points the finger at Verizon and informs the reader how to opt out of receiving spammy SMS messaging.
At LookNoThumbs.com, a new online texting service, there is a policy where any of its users who are found to be SPAMMING will be removed from the service - immediately.
At this cool web-site, you can use online texting services functions to protect your privacy but still get those updates that are important or valuable to you. Their “Alerts and Subscriptions” service is where the sender creates an Alert with informative and useful messages and users then Subscribe anonymously to the Alert to receive the latest update when it becomes available from the sender. If the recipient gets tired of the updates it is a simple case of unsubscribing from that Alert. No questions asked.
For example, let’s say your favourite store has an alert published in LookNoThumbs.com. As a regular there you don’t want to miss their annual pre-Christmas sale. So you subscribe to their “Pre-Christmas Sale Alert” and when they send it out you immediately receive the text message informing you of the date and time of the sale. You are then first in line to snap up that last minute bargain - along with the other subscribers!
Online texting, and SMS messaging in general, is booming and many important, and fun, uses have been developed for this technology. Maybe the big communications corporates are selling out their users already but LookNoThumbs.com is providing an alternative, allowing privacy to be retained without losing out on new updates. Let’s keep the SPAMMERS out of online texting and SMS messaging alogether.