Help - SMS messaging to Customers

[Q-Ball]

Hi Guys,

I have a small customer base which i would like to start doing some direct marketting via sms messages. Has anyone done this before? I would appreciate some advise on what i need to do/buy and the likely costs. I have oracle database experience so hopefully that should be relevant!

many thanks
Q

[Mr.James]

Not done anything like that but I have set up text alerts from temperature monitoring software. It's in case our server room air conditioning packs up. We just bought a z-text message modem, plugged it in to our server and got one of the developers to write a program that sends the messages.

Messages can be sent using a command line utility too... I don't remember the actual command line but it's something along the lines of sendsms.exe com3 07890123456 this is my text message.

If I was in your position I'd get an excel spreadsheet. put sendsms.exe in column a, the com port your modem is installed on in column b, the phone numbers in column c and the message in column d. Then export it as a .csv file and open it in notepad. Do a find and replace on the ; and replace it with a space. Save it then change the extension from .csv to .cmd and you have your own batch file that will send all the messages all for you...

[Q-Ball]

Thanks MrJames, looks good. The z-text modem is no longer available, but there is a equivalent. Didnt realise that you would have to pay full whack for the sms also, thought it'd be cheaper going via the net or something!

[akimba]

I would use http://www.clickatell.com/
We use them at work, you can write your own app to send messages thru their gateway, it works out about 6p a text I think

[Sanj[UK]]

We use SMS our VIP's during outages and stuff. I'll find out what we use sometime this week when Im in the office.