Messaging Flashcards
What does SMS & MMS stand for?
SMS - Short Message Service
MMS - Multimedia Messaging Service - pictures and videos
What are 3 Twilio Messaging use cases for Marketing?
- ) Text Marketing - increase brand awareness and engagement
- ) Lead Alerts - SMS (and phone calls) can alert sales reps about new inbound leads
- ) SMS Surveys - ensure customer see and respond to phone surveys
What are 3 Twilio Messaging use cases for Operations?
- ) Alerts & Notifications - dispatch & account notifications, appointment reminders, order confirmations, shift scheduling, billing alerts, arrival alerts, service alerts, incident alerts
- ) Masked Phone Numbers/Anonymous Communications
SMS Messaging Use Cases
Coca-Cola - technician dispatch
TaskRabbit - alert local on-demand workers of new jobs
Remind - teacher - student anonymous communication
StubHub - order confirmations
AirBnB - hosts receive sms alerts from Twilio when they have a request to book their home
Dell - sends SMS notifications to customers about the status of their orders
What are top Discovery questions for business stakeholders?
- ) What’s the need you’re solving for by using us for SMS?
- ) Do you operate domestically? Internationally? Where would users of this messaging solution be located?
- ) What does your ideal solution with us look like? Describe your perfect world scenario
- ) What bottom line business metric do you hope to improve by using us SMS?
- ) What’s your timeline for building this?
What are top Discovery questions for technical stakeholders?
- ) How important is deliverability of SMS to this project?
- ) What markets are you currently in? Domestic or International? If international, what countries?
- ) What volume of SMS are you sending or expecting per month?
- ) What is the content of the messages you’d be sending?
- ) What databases or CRMs do you work with that would interface with Twilio?
- ) What do you feel is working well - and not so well - with you current provider?
What are some Disco questions for Alerts & Notifications?
- ) How do you currently alert customers about urgent information? What is the cost to you if they don’t receive this alert in time?
- ) Can you walk me through how a current alert would be sent out?
- ) How effective are your current channels? Do you know the current open or action rate?
- ) What’s the most crucial problem for you to fix today in regard to alerts & notifications?
- ) How do your customers currently respond to your alerts or notifications?
What are some Disco questions for Masked Numbers?
- ) How are your users currently connecting to each other? Through which channels?
- ) What are some examples of message content that users might send back and forth?
What are some Disco questions for SMS Marketing?
- ) How would customers end up on your marketing outreach list?
- ) How effective are your current channels? Do you know the current open or action rate?
How many SMS does Twilio send per month?
Billions. Twilio manages 20% of all North American short codes.
What is Twilio CoPilot?
Set of features that you can enable in your messaging service that allows you to take advantage of complex logic that you would otherwise need to build, such as load balancing or geo-matching.
Sticky Sender, Alpha Sender ID, Scaler, Geomatch, short code reroute, smart encoding, MMS converter
What is the per second message limit for long codes?
1 per second
What is the per second message limit for short codes?
100 per second
What is a long code?
Standard phone number used to send and receive voice calls and SMS messages (10 digits long)
Used for Person-to-Person messages
Available in 50+ countries and inexpensive
What is a short code?
Special 5 or 6 digit telephone number that’s shorter than a full phone number.
Pre-approved by carriers to avoid spam label (8-12 weeks). Officially, short codes are the only carrier-sanctioned way of delivering application-to-person (A2P) messages
Available in U.S., Canada, and UK and expensive
When are short codes used?
Marketing and promotions
Alerts & notifications
Two-factor authentication
What are the 2 types of short codes?
Vanity - specific number you choose
Random -
How many data points are analyzed per day for quality?
800 Million
How many carrier partners are on 1 route?
4
How many calls does Twilio save per month with redundancy?
14 Million
Who are Twilio’s 2 biggest SMS competitors?
Nexmo
Bandwidth
What are Nexmo’s SMS strengths and weaknesses?
Strengths - Competitive price, more countries with phones numbers enables for SMS
Weaknesses - More complex APIs, weaker support, works with fewer programming languages, limited out-of-the-box reporting
What are Bandwidth’s SMS strengths and weaknesses?
Strengths - Cheaper rates, group messaging support
Weaknesses - No other channel offered besides SMS/MMS, no short codes, no international reach, frequent maintenance outages, limited SMS queuing functionality, they maintain no recording of messages sent, works with fewer programming languages.
What types of phone numbers can send SMS?
Long Code
Short Code
Alphanumeric Sender ID
Can customers port existing short codes to Twilio?
Yes
What are 2 workarounds to paying for short codes?
- ) U.S. toll free numbers - higher throughput than other long codes and can add on “High Throughput Toll Free Numbers”. (still subject to carrier filtering)
- ) 10 DLC (Digit Long Codes) - access to Verizons solution to filtering
What is the open rate for SMS?
98%
What % of customers want order notifications, delivery notifications, and appointment reminders?
75%
How are SMS messaged charged?
Type of number sent - short, long, alpha
Length of SMS
Country sent to
What % of customers keep SMS notifications on?
82%
What is A2P messaging?
Application To Peer - 2FA, ETA
Any business to customer communication
What is P2P messaging?
Peer To Peer - call tracking, masked phone
What is an Alphanumeric number?
Region dependent, 150 countries (No U.S.), 2-way not directly supported
Instead of number, it will be a word
What is the message throughput for Alphanumeric, Short Codes, Long Codes, and Toll Free?
Local Numbers - 1 MPS
Toll Free - 3 MPS
Alphanumeric - 10 MPS
Short Codes - 100 MPS
What is a message segment?
How Twilio (and SMS industry as a whole) count messages. Messages sent in 140 byte chunks.
What’s the difference between GSM-7 & UCS-2 encoding?
- ) GSM- 7: Encoded using 7 bits per character, so you got 140 * 8 / 7 = 160 characters.
- ) UCS-2: Use 2 bytes per character (16 bits) so you got 140 * 8 / 16 = 70 characters. It is used as a fallback on many GSM networks when a message cannot be encoded using GSM-7 or when a language requires more than 128 characters to be rendered.
What is carrier message filtering?
Carriers filter messages (like email) to:
- ) Protect from unwanted spam, fraud, abuse
- ) Enforce rules on what messages are allowed to that country
You know message got filtered if sent a “Error 30007”
What is 10DLC?
10 Digit Long Code that can handle the high traffic of a short code.
What are the limitations to MMS?
Size Limit - 10 images and 1600 characters as long as message under 5MB
MPS - 1 MPS
What are good use cases for MMS?
Coupons, marketing with pictures
Why do developers use all channels?
Twilio makes it easy with a consistent, normalized interface.
What is Twilio AutoPilot?
Autopilot lets you build, train and deploy AI-powered bots on any communications channel (messaging, slack, Alexa, whatsapp)
What happens to an MMS that is sent to a non-compatible number?
MMS gets sent as a link
Why do carriers care about messaging traffic on their network?
- ) Knowing what to charge
2. ) Keeping quality high/preventing spam
What are some indications of SMS SPAM?
Hyperlinks
Unsubscribe
Certain Subject Lines
Angry Replies
What is SPAM and what are some indications?
Any message a customer did not opt in to
Where do they get their numbers? Did they buy lists?
What does a tier 1 SMS provider mean?
Example - Ericsson, OpenMarket, Sybase 365
- Tier 1 has a direct connection to at least 4 of the 5 mobile operators
- Low cost but low support
What is hosted SMS?
A way to leverage Twilio for it’s programmable functionality with numbers they already own. Cannot host mobile numbers, only landlines.
How does Twilio combat the fact we’re not Tier 1?
Super Network pitch
How does Twilio SMS work under the hood?
Incoming SMS to Twilio Number –> Twilio Number sends Webhook to Customer App to ask instructions –> App Server sends Twiml instructions to Twilio –> Action by Twilio
How many different ways can Twilio respond to an SMS?
Webhooks, TwiMl bins, Functions, Studio, or Proxy
What is a TwiMl bin?
Serverless solution that helps you provide Twilio-hosted instructions to your Twilio applications (no need to ping your own server for instructions)
What is a webhook?
Webhook is like a waiter bringing food back from the kitchen. Passing back and forth communication/actions.
What are some TwiML verbs or nouns?
Play, Record, Say, SMS, Voice
How does blacklisting phone numbers work for LC and SC?
LC - Twilio takes care of it
SC - Customer takes care of it
Keywords include STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL
What is the Feedback API?
Mechanism for customers to provide info about whether or not messages were delivered based on customer action. Used for confirming messages delivered (re: passcode, pw enter, reply with call or sms).
Nothing trumps live collective data of our customers - helps Twilio improve the service.
