We have appointed our first ever Operations Director at Esendex- Bryan Brunt. His main responsibilities will be improving and driving the development of our operational changes and services, aligned with our global business plans. Bryan says;

“It’s a really exciting time to be joining Esendex with their ambitious plans to be global leader in business communications. Prior to joining Esendex, I spent two years as VP for a software company. My experience will help me to understand how best to support and provide a great service to our global customers, whilst adding significant business value to both our client base and Esendex.”

Even though Esendex already has an excellent service level record for almost 10,000 customers, Bryan still believes that there is room for further improvements. He is also aware that the infrastructure and operational services need to be really strong and scalable in line with our global expansion plans.

“All of our clients need to experience “excellence” in our solution and service offerings. This will mean that all operational systems, services and associated activities are ensured to be reliable and efficient. I have been extremely impressed since joining Esendex with their approach to providing good quality service to their customers. A goal of mine will be to make it a exemplary service.”

We had some fun in the office yesterday, creating videos and getting back to our roots learning about SMS messages.

Please take a look, it would be fantastic to hear what you think!

The power of the mobile channel is something that every business needs to appreciate. If you think about it, it’s a marketer’s dream. When was the last time you left home without your mobile phone? As long as the golden rules of marketing are observed – relevance, convenience, timeliness, then the possibilities are almost endless. With that in mind, here are 10 ways marketers can utilise this channel.

1. VIP preview campaigns
   This is a great added-value service you can offer to a select group of customers by alerting them to new stock arrivals, exclusive viewings or personalised offers and if you encourage your VIPs to forward the SMS to a friend in order to expand your customer base.
2. Launching a new product?
   Send customers the latest information about your new product, including their nearest point of sale. Give your customers the opportunity to reply in order to receive bonus packs or free samples.
3. Sale campaign promotions
   Why not tell your customer database about your latest sales promotions in advance via SMS. You can send a simple text message to inform customers of upcoming sales, a new store opening in their area, limited offers etc straight to your customers, regardless of where they are.

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We have appointed our very first Marketing Director – Geoff Love,  formerly Customer Marketing Director of HomeServe plc.  Geoff’s position will help us achieve our ambitious growth plans.

Julian Hucker, Esendex CEO explains; “Geoff helped grow HomeServe from 1m to 3m customers and this is just the type of growth that we’re also planning, so his experience will be vital.”

Geoff’s responsibilities will include setting and executing Esendex’s global marketing strategy and says;

“It is great to be joining Esendex at such an exciting time. The launch into the US along with the new products and services that we have in the pipeline represent huge opportunities. There’s also still loads of potential in Europe and Australia. We will need to work closer with our existing clients, really understand their requirements and see how we can help add even more value to their businesses.”

Whilst Esendex has almost 10,000 clients, Geoff has clearly pointed out that there are even more companies out there who are still not using SMS to talk to their customers and staff.

“Our challenge will be helping them to understand how the use of SMS can grow their businesses, provide better customer service and cut costs – particularly in the current economic climate, when everyone’s looking to make their business more efficient.”

C# SMS SDK has been released to support customers who are integrating with the new Esendex SMS API.  C# SMS SDK is available on open source and has been published on CodePlex under a LGPL licence. We have made the source code available free of charge because we believe that developers that can benefit greatly and that by consuming our services we can continue to develop and enhance our C# SMS SDK.

Our C# SMS SDK includes examples of integration with a range of the key Esendex features, including; Inbox, Contacts, Messaging and Sent Items. Associated unit tests have been carried out on these examples, in line with TDD (Test driven development) an approach used by the Esendex development team.

If you wish to start sending messages immediately, there’s a comprehensive documentation for the C # SMS SDK and a quick start guide within the developer area of our website. All resources are explained here and you can interact with in detail.

If you would like to try C# SMS SDK and if you are an existing customer, simply log in to your account as usual  and visit http://esendex.codeplex.com/releases. If you don’t currently have an account with us then please sign-up for a free trial now – it would be great to hear what you think.

Congratulations to Leanne, Customer Support Assistant, as she wins the Esendex Employee of the Month.  Paul Spencer, Commercial Manager Northern Europe Region, awarded Leanne with the trophy last week.

Leanne’s gone beyond her daily tasks and responsibilities by putting herself forward for extra work, completing everything effectively.  She has also shown alot of dedication as she’s recently commited to a computing course to increase her skills and knowledge of VB/ASP.net and also SQL.

Once again well done to Leanne!

According to David Ogilvy “Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand” and that’s been very much in our minds for the preparation of rolling out our new brand.

Why change? Our old logo has worked well and it’s difficult to prove that we have ever lost business or a customer because they have disliked our branding.

The prompt for change was the realisation that the logo’s composition is not at its best for online use (too much space is taken by the chevrons) and this was a limitation as we looked to improve our online navigation. We had considered just making a few tweaks but Esendex had changed: despite the recession we had grown significantly and a number of things were being puled together:

• The company’s vision had been refined and we were developing our positioning;
• Our Echo portfolio of services were well underway;
• We had committed to a strategy of continued growth and had planned to launch into the US.

We therefore decided not just to change the logo but also to rebrand the business and the whole of our online portfolio, in place for the next five years.

We made a decision after a lot of research to work with a local design agency, Alight to aid us along the way.  This was a relatively easy process, doing our homework and being clear on what we wanted to achieve really helped.

The new branding conveys the ambition and maturity of Esendex. It’s serious, modern but clean and professional.

And this is just the beginning.  We have completely redesigned our brochure sites, our online services will also be rethought and redesigned, there’s invoices, stationary and of course our online exposure.

The first tangible evidence will the launch of the US website……coming soon.

“B” or Branding Day is now set for the 1st August when we start the rollout across the rest of the organisation. This includes a plan to update all of our sites in the months to come and also all of our applications. It’s a huge task for everyone involved, in particular the marketing team who have been working on something that they are justifiably proud of and the devlopment team who’ll need to rework all of our online tools.

In the months to come, i’m looking forward to the identity coming to life.

Recently we’ve seen loads of customers using Web SMS to communicate with customers to encourage customer loyalty and retention.  Here is just one example of how SMS has been used to build this loyalty.

HopShopper has unveiled an iphone application that provides consumers with a convenient way to manage their loyalty cards. This will replace the old card and stamp system that has been used for many years. The mobile revelation in loyalty programs is to lead the way as a technologically advanced solution.

Through the incorporation of the Esendex 2-way SMS service, HopShopper can send notifications and offers to users, and users can ‘share’ offers, receive download instructions and also submit feedback.

Consumers can download the HopShopper application free to their iPhone, and when they next buy a coffee at a participating café, they can collect a virtual ‘stamp’ by using their iPhone’s camera to register the HopShopper QR code shown on a countertop display. They can then show the redemption screen to collect their free coffee.

Consumers can manage all of their coffee and loyalty cards on the iPhone application, providing a convenient alternative to carrying around multiple cards and cluttering up their wallets.

HopShopper identified that offering a Web SMS service as part of the iphone application would be crucial at the outset.

With the fast adoption of 3G smart phones within Australia, and the meteoric rise of mobile application use, (400% application traffic increase between 2008 and 2009 in Australia and Oceania – AdMob 2009) SMS marketing is expected to grab an increasingly larger share of overall advertising spend.

Web SMS is an inexpensive and important tool for customer loyalty and promotional advertising and adds considerable value to HopShopper’s service offering.

If you would like to try Web SMS please sign-up for a free trial now – we’d love to hear what you think!

We’ve recently started categorising our blog posts (see right) to both aid navigation and to allow visitors to read about the topic area they’re most interest in. One of the new categories is a technical category which will include support updates, product improvements and anything developer/API related.

We know some customers use the blog to receive support posts or technical updates (such as info on our API, or product improvements) only. Consequently, we’ve created a technical category with its own RSS feed so you can just subscribe to these types of posts if you’d prefer. Simply click on the RSS icon on the right to subscribe. 

All our blog posts will also go out via Twitter automatically too so if this is your preferred communication method, make sure you are following us!

We hope you find these improvements useful and if you have any further recommendations, send us an email to marketing@esendex.com.au.

Our new SMS API – named the Esendex API – is now live. This new SMS API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive SMS messages, manage contacts and contact groups, and your accounts.

The Esendex API is built on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries - which can be necessary with SOAP services for example.

The ‘REST’ style forms the basis of how the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a page (resource) to perform an operation and gets a response back. E.g you are viewing this blog post because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this web page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.

Instead of providing services with a list of commands, our new SMS API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. E.g. contacts, message headers and contact groups.

To perform an operation on these resources, create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.

One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. Just navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser. You will receive a paged XML response of your inbox messages.

The Esendex API is fully documented, and available to download as a pdf file now from our Esendex API page. Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new SMS API is such that our new Web SMS application, named “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.