SMS Deliverability: How to Ensure You Reach Your Customers

When a company chooses an API provider for SMS messaging, one of the critical quality indicators to assess is the delivery rate. This metric measures the effectiveness of your SMS campaigns by showing the percentage of SMS messages successfully received by the intended recipients.

You can clearly see what ratio of your communications is reaching its target audience by dividing the number of delivered SMS messages by the total number of messages sent. Without measuring and optimizing this number, no matter how many messages you keep sending to your intended audience, you will never be able to see any tangible results from your SMS campaigns.

What is SMS deliverability?

SMS deliverability refers to how capable your text messages are of reaching your intended recipients. It’s a crucial metric in SMS marketing that directly measures the success of your messaging campaigns.

Essentially, text message deliverability is the percentage of sent messages that successfully land in the recipients’ inboxes without being filtered out by carrier spam filters, blocked due to invalid phone numbers, or rejected by the mobile network.

High SMS deliverability indicates that your messages are effectively reaching your audience, which is vital for the success of your campaigns. Conversely, poor deliverability can negatively impact your marketing efforts, brand reputation, and return on investment by preventing a significant portion of your messages from reaching their recipients.

Ensuring high SMS deliverability requires a strategic approach, including using reliable SMS providers, maintaining a clean subscriber list, and adopting best practices in SMS marketing.

Regularly monitoring and optimizing SMS deliverability is essential for maintaining effective marketing campaigns and ensuring that your messages consistently reach their target audience.

Key factors that determine your SMS platform’s deliverability

The following are the key factors that determine the deliverability of an SMS platform or service.

• Quality of phone numbers: Accurate and up-to-date phone numbers are essential. Invalid or outdated numbers can lead to failed deliveries, which negatively impact your overall delivery rate.

• Opt-in mechanisms: Ensuring that your recipients have willingly opted in to receive SMS messages is critical. Senders are more likely to mark unsolicited text messages as spam, thus decreasing your deliverability.

• Carrier relations: A strong relationship with mobile carriers can improve message delivery rates. SMS providers with established carrier connections are less likely to filter messages or block them.

• Content quality: Clear, concise, and recipient-relevant messages increase the likelihood of delivery. Avoiding spammy language and excessive use of keywords helps prevent carrier filters from flagging messages.

• Timing of messages: Sending messages at the right time can improve deliverability. Recipients are more likely to ignore or block messages sent during peak hours or at inconvenient times.

• Compliance with regulations: Adhering to local and international regulations, such as GDPR, TCPA, and similar texting privacy laws, ensures that your messages comply with legal standards, reducing the risk of being blocked or penalized.

• Sender reputation: A positive sender reputation, built by consistently sending legitimate and relevant messages, increases the chances of carriers delivering your messages to recipients.

• Delivery reports and analytics: Monitoring delivery reports and analyzing the data allows you to identify and address certain issues, such as high bounce rates or frequent delivery failures, that may be affecting your deliverability.

How to calculate SMS delivery rate

The SMS delivery rate is determined by dividing the number of successfully delivered messages by the total number of messages sent. The formula is:

Delivery Rate = (Delivered Messages / Sent Messages) × 100%

For example, if you sent 1,000 SMS messages and 980 were successfully delivered, your delivery rate would be:

(980 / 1000) × 100% = 98%

A 98% delivery rate indicates that nearly all your messages reached their intended recipients, reflecting a well-optimized SMS campaign. Tracking this metric helps identify potential issues with your delivery process, such as invalid phone numbers or carrier filtering, allowing for timely adjustments to maintain high delivery rates.

Reasons for failure: How can low deliverability affect business performance?

A deliverability rate of 95% or higher is typically considered normal in SMS marketing. You can monitor whether your SMS messages are reaching their intended recipients by checking the administration panel provided by your SMS API provider.

If your deliverability rate falls below this benchmark, it can significantly impact the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Here’s how a low delivery rate can affect your business.

• Reduced audience reach: A lower deliverability rate means fewer recipients are seeing your messages. This lowers your ability to achieve key objectives like increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, and encouraging customer engagement.

• Increased costs: Many SMS services charge based on the number of messages sent, regardless of whether they are delivered or not. A low deliverability rate means you could be paying for messages that never reach your audience, leading to wasted marketing spend.

• Damage to brand reputation: In a competitive market, maintaining visibility is crucial. Effective SMS communication is vital for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. If your messages aren’t being delivered, you risk losing touch with your target audience. Poor deliverability can lead to a weakened brand presence.

Recommendations for improving SMS message deliverability

To fix the problems mentioned above, it is important to monitor the deliverability of SMS messaging for your business. If you see that the indicator is critically low, take the following steps to improve it.

Use the services of a certified and verified API provider or SMS marketing platform

Make sure the SMS provider you're working with is reputable, has solid carrier relationships, and complies with industry standards. This reduces the likelihood of carriers filtering or blocking your messages.

Focus on opt-in management

Send messages only to recipients who have explicitly opted in. This practice enhances deliverability, boosts engagement, and lowers the risk of customers reporting your messages as spam.

Periodically clear invalid numbers from your subscriber database

Remove invalid or outdated phone numbers from your contact list regularly. This step helps maintain a high delivery rate by making sure that your messages are sent out to active and valid numbers only.

Don’t spam your subscribers

Limit the frequency of your messages to avoid overwhelming your audience. Sending too many messages can result in high unsubscribe rates and a bigger risk of getting flagged as a risk.

Determine the best time for delivering SMS marketing messages to users

Analyze your audience’s behavior to identify optimal times for sending messages. When you send messages at the right time, they are more likely to be read and acted upon.

Create clear and concise SMS messages that will be easily understood by recipients

Make sure that your messages are easy to understand. This reduces the chances of recipients ignoring or misinterpreting your content.

Investigate delivery failures

Review your delivery reports regularly to identify patterns or issues affecting your deliverability. Addressing these problems promptly can help improve your overall delivery rate.

By following these tips, you will be able to improve SMS deliverability and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Conclusion

SMS deliverability is crucial for the success of your SMS marketing campaigns, as it measures the percentage of messages that successfully reach their intended recipients.

Factors like the quality of phone numbers, opt-in practices, content relevance, and timing play a significant role in ensuring high SMS deliverability rates. Monitoring these aspects and taking corrective steps, such as using a reputable SMS provider and regularly cleaning up your subscriber database, can significantly improve your SMS deliverability rates. By doing so, you can enhance audience reach, reduce costs, and maintain a strong brand reputation, ultimately driving better results for your business.

Decision Telecom: Your guarantee of message deliverability

Decision Telecom operates on the principles of transparency and accountability. We partner with more than 200 telecom operators around the world, which means that your messages will be delivered without intermediaries in the shortest possible time at an average deliverability rate of 98%. Additionally, you will pay only for delivered messages.

If you want to invest smartly in SMS messaging for business, we are here to help.

Contact our experts for a free consultation.