Businesses across the world have multiple choices of sending push notifications to their customers.  Most popular are Bulk SMS notifications, Voice SMS, email notifications, app notifications, browser notifications and now increasingly WhatsApp business API notifications.  This article presents a short comparison of these methods and hopefully provides help to corporates in choosing the right medium.

Bulk SMS–  By far this is the most popular and widely used form of notification when it comes to A2P (application to person) notifications.  Enterprises across the world continue to use this form of notifications for sharing critical information with their clients.  The prime reason for usage continuity and popularity stems from the reasons of simplicity of deployment and ease of use at the customer end.  Mtalkz provides a wide array of services like Voice OBD, Voice SMS, SMS Gateway, Email Notifications, and Virtual numbers to support strategies around Bulk SMS gateway usage.

Voice OBD–  Voice SMS is similar to Bulk SMS except the data format is replaced by voice.  This medium is more popular for generating DTMF response from users who are not likely to respond to text SMS.  

Email Notifications–  Email notifications are used for various purposes, including back up medium for Bulk SMS OTP or for sharing other information like, bank statements, purchase information, invoices among other informations that corporates may want to share.  Key difficulty here is in setting up the services in a fashion so that emails do not land in spam folders of recipients and are delivered promptly.  Mtalkz provides these services in a very efficient manner for a larger number of corporates.

App Notifications–  App notifications are the push notifications that are sent by the app owners to customers within the app.  It has several forms of advantage in terms of captive audience but is ineffective when users stop notifications or uninstall apps.  So unless you have a cohort that is using the application on a daily basis you are likely to land up with a problem of reducing the percentage of active users and the easiest alternative to creating churn will be the transactional SMS notification.

Browser Notifications–  These are push notifications that can be sent through the browser but are more annoying than pleasing hence the medium has found limited success.

Whatsapp Business API–  This is a very interesting form of communication and engagement coming up for A2P messaging.  Once set up correctly it enable the enterprise to design multiple user experience journies and enable users to choose and interact more effectively with enterprises.  Mtalkz has enabled multiple large organizations to get on to WhatsApp business API within 2 weeks of set up time.

To summarize, enterprises will continue to use various methods of interacting and engaging with customers, however, the ease of usage will be key to success.  At Mtalkz you will have support from our business consulting advisors who can help you to choose from among the methods of messaging and communications.