Many retailers have turned to SMS marketing and messaging to build connections with potential and existing customers, and ultimately build a community and lasting loyalty.
With customer spend shifting from in-store to online, SMS marketing is becoming top of mind for retailers. Now during this global pandemic, it’s important that the retail industry utilizes digital channels such as SMS messaging to help maintain connections with customers.
Messaging is a cost effective and powerful way to communicate with customers as part of the retail marketing and engagement experiences. Data shows that up to 75% of consumers are happy to receive text messages from retailers, but only 11% of retailers send them.
Consider the following examples of how SMS messaging can allow retail organizations to keep their customers up to date and increase sales.
Consider the following examples of how SMS messaging can allow retail organizations to keep their customers up to date and increase sales:
• Special offers – particularly on products they are interested in
• Delivery notifications – to track when online purchases will arrive
• Loyalty Programs - highlighting discounts and offers
• Text Out Coupons & Discounts
• Product updates – including new arrivals.
• Promote events – such as sales or featured brands
• Abandoned cart recovery – as reminders or to offer help
• Customer onboarding and welcome – to promote loyalty
• Compliment your social media strategy – and keep customers engaged
• Customer service – to enhance the experience
• Reply to buy – to drive sales
Building SMS into your retail applications
Use the sample reference applications that we built for you below to showcase the capabilities of the AT&T API Marketplace SMS messaging APIs and SDKs. These provide a useful reference to help you build better communications experiences into your apps by sharing our best practices and easy to read code examples.
Click on the Developer Community links below to get more details on the one you want to use:
- SMS-Chat using React Native for Android
- SMS-Chat using React Native for iOS
- SMS-Chat-Multimedia for Android
- SMS-Chat-Multimedia for iOS
- SMS-2FA using Ruby Server-side SDK
- SMS using Python Server-side SDK
You can build text messaging capabilities into your websites and applications using the following languages and SDKs:-
JavaScript REST-API Android Python Ruby iOS .Net Java PHP Node.js Node-RED
Features
These applications will show you how to use the following SMS messaging features:
• Fetching SMS Messages
• Sending SMS Messages
• Receiving SMS Messages
• Subscribing for the SMS services
• Creating a SMS Conversation
• Real-time outbound SMS sync
• Inbound subscriptions
• SMS history
Get started
You can freely download and deploy the sample applications above from Github, there are links within the posts. Check the project README for configuration information.
Use of the API Marketplace APIs, account setup and developer documentation is free. You just pay for the messages you send every month. See the Pricing page for more details. Remember, every new API Marketplace free trial account starts with a $16 credit you can use towards sending messages.
If you are new to the AT&T API Marketplace and don’t have an account yet, simply click the Get Started button. You can be up and running very quickly. If you want help, check out the Getting Started videos. They will show you how to sign up on the API Marketplace, manage your Account, create Projects, add Users, and access credentials that allow you to use the APIs.
Quickstarts and API References
You can find more information on the SMS messaging APIs, and review further code samples, by checking out all the Quickstarts available on the Developer documentation page on the AT&T API Marketplace.
Use these Quickstarts, together with API Reference docs, to help you build your own apps. In the process, you will learn about the features and capabilities of the SMS messaging APIs. By using the available code snippets, you can minimize the effort to write code from scratch and save valuable time.
Go to the Developer Community API & SDK category to access code samples and apps for other APIs such as chat, voice, video, and 2FA. You can also check out other innovative use cases here in the Developer Community for other industry verticals .
We love developers!
We enjoy collaborating with API Marketplace developers to help you build exciting and innovative real time video experiences. We would love to hear about your project on the Developer Community. Just create a topic, write a short post and tell us about it! We also want your feedback if you need help, have issues, or want to make suggestions. You can also go to Support on the API Marketplace itself for help with APIs and SDKs.