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!

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!

Well they’re all describing the same thing – users can send an SMS message to a handset, to either a landline number or mobile phone, and have the message read out over the phone by recorded message.

Something hard to comprehend is that Voice SMS has been available for several years.  So why now is it becoming more popular?  I guess this could be because of several reasons…. the increase in mobile penetration, the overall acceptability of SMS, the realisation that Voice SMS has additional benefits over and above SMS ?  These are just a few points to think about.

At Esendex, we have seen many uses for Voice SMS.  Hospitals, pharmaceuticals and chemists use Voice SMS, to send to high risk patients for dosing reminders.  In this instance, when messages are particularly important, SMS to voice is a fundamental feature because you are able to confirm with the “acknowledged” status that the message has been listened to.

At Esendex, we have seen a large take up in Voice SMS by debt collection companies. We have a client who began using SMS to voice, at the beginning they were sending thousands of messages each month, unfortunately for us, it has been so successful in collecting debt that they now only send a small proportion of what they had started sending as they no longer need to send follow up messages.

There are a variety of reasons why you might choose Voice SMS over SMS. To name a few,  it could be that you provide services to people who are partially sighted, blind or elderly and therefore find SMS to voice a quick and easy method to communicate information?  It could be that the message you need to send is quite long? (Text messages are charged in multiples of 160 characters)

The key factors to think about with SMS voice messaging is the speed of the message and the retry costs.  If this is something that you are thinking about, then my advice is to check the speed that the messages are read, if they have an Australian accent,  whether or not there are automatic retries on the account and are they free?

If you are an existing customer and would like to try Voice SMS simply visit your account to enable.  If you don’t have an account the please sign-up for a free trial – It would be great to hear what you think!

Let’s start at the start, what is a Virtual Mobile Number? Generally speaking mobile numbers are attached to a SIM card, which we put into our mobile phones. Virtual Mobile Numbers, or VMN, are mobile telephone numbers that aren’t attached to a SIM card, so don’t go anywhere but exist within the network.

A virtual mobile number is an 11 digit number that allows you to receive SMS back to the number you sent your SMS from. Yes in most cases you could supplement the originator with your own mobile number, however the replies will go back to your mobile, and whether that’s scalable for your business is then I guess you need to decide.

Many of our customers offer 2-way SMS services to their customers, employees and suppliers as they can see the benefits of getting replies directly to their SMS account. In fact, many start with a send only SMS service then move on to a send and receive SMS service later on.

Web SMS providers do different things, such as offer dedicated virtual numbers, which just means you’re the only company using it. Alternatively they will suggest a dynamic virtual number which means that every SMS message goes out with a different number as the originator than the last.

Here at Esendex, we offer dedicated virtual mobile numbers. We feel that dedicated virtual mobile numbers have a number of distinct advantages over dynamic virtual mobile numbers.

You effectively “own” the number, so you can use it for advertising and to publicise it to your staff, customers and clients. With dedicated virtual numbers you can be confident knowing that your replies are getting through, as only respondents to your SMS business campaign use that number. Recipients will also see the same number every time so they know who the message is from.

Our prices for our VMN’S are $25 a month and SMS replies are free. Get in touch with us at sales@esendex.com.au and we will add a 2-way SMS messaging facility to your Esendex account straight away.