Data247 business texting services

DATA247 BUSINESS TEXTING SERVICES

Reduce the cost of sending text messages

Our Text@ service retrieves Email to SMS and Email to MMS gateway addresses of client's wireless phones. Businesses then use these addresses to send SMS and/or MMS text messages to their clients via regular email.

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Mobile Messaging

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Four tips to keep your customers engaged throughout the sales process with text messaging.
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"It just works..which is exactly what we were looking for! We've had thousands of phone numbers needing quality validation every day to ensure we were sending our clients SMS messages in the most efficient manner. Leveraging the Data247 API set was a breeze and we've seen outstanding, consistent results. We've saved substantial dollars by avoiding sending messages to invalid numbers."

GovDelivery Jeremy GreeneDirector of Product Management, GovDelivery

O ur Text@ service doesn't send text messages but provides businesses with phone data that facilitates the sending of text messages to their customers. It does this by retrieving Email to SMS and Email to MMS gateway addresses of client's wireless phones. Businesses then use these addresses to send SMS and/or MMS messages to their clients via regular email.

Just like all Data247 services, Text@ service provides multiple ways to look-up phone numbers; real-time API, XML, batch file uploads, FTP server, Browser extensions, and manual data entry.


  • FILE UPLOAD UTILITY Upload a file of phone numbers to process, and we'll send you back a new file which contains the carrier names and email addresses for each phone number.
  • MANUAL TRANSACTIONS You can also enter phone numbers manually through our website.
  • SIMPLE API For integrating our service with your software application, we provide an API which uses standard HTTPS protocol (you can test our service from your Internet Browser). The response data is returned in standard XML format.
  • NUMBER PORTABILITY AWARENESS When your client ports their phone number from one carrier to another, we know about it almost immediately. We guarantee that our records will be updated within one business day, although they're usually updated within an hour.
  • 99.99% UPTIME SLA PER CALENDAR MONTH We guarantee no more than 4 minutes of downtime per month.
  • OVER 99% HIT RATE FOR USA & CANADA PHONE NUMBERS This means that we fail to return the complete set of information for less than 1% of valid US and Canada phone numbers.
  • EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SUPPORT Whether by phone or email, we'll give you the attention you need to get our service up and running.


  Try Our Text@ Service For Free

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business texting services

Text@ For Business

See how Text@ can benefit your business

COST SAVINGS

Businesses can use gateway addresses retrieved from their customers’ phone numbers to send multiple text messages to those phones without having to pay each time a message is sent.

IMPROVES EFFICIENCY

No more guessing whether a customer phone number belongs to a landline or wireless phone when conducting message marketing campaigns. Our Text@ service provides carrier type data for your customers' phone numbers.



STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

View all of our helpdesk articles


Standard Return Fields:
Phone - The phone number queried
Wless - Either "y" for wireless or "n" for non-wireless
Carrier_name - carrier name of provided number
Carrier_id - Carrier id of carrier
SMS_address - SMS gateway address of number
MMS_address - MMS gateway address of number


Optional Return Fields:
Billable - Indicates whether customer was charged for this query
Cost - Cost of this query
Type - Either "M" for mobile phone, "L" for landline, or "V" for VOIP
GIT - Voicemail greeting interrupt Tone
OCN - The operating company number
Timezone - The timezone in the area specified by the phone number's NPA
Tz_offset - The offset from UTC time in the area specified by the number's NPA
IANA - IANA timezone of the area specified by the number's NPA
Last_port_date - The date the phone was last ported to a new carrier
DBA - Standard name for carrier
MNO - Mobile Network Operator
City - City where NPA/NXX is located
State - State where NPA/NXX is located
Country - Country where NPA/NXX is located
Zip - Zip code where NPA/NXX is located

$0.005 per look-up*

*$12 monthly membership fee
*Volume discounts available

Once you sign up, you have three options to access our Text@ service:

  • You can type-in the phone numbers one-by-one via your account on our website.
  • You can upload the phone numbers to us in an Excel (.xlsx) or .csv file.
  • You can use our API to integrate our service into your software application.

Data247 also offers a browser extension for Microsoft Edge, Chrome and Firefox which automatically highlights phone numbers on web pages and allows you to look up information about them with a single click.

No, we provide you with the SMS and MMS Gateway email addresses so that you can send the messages yourself.

The maximum SMS length is 160 characters. MMS messages can be much larger.

While most people realize they can send text messages via a carrier's email gateway, most don't realize that they can send multimedia messages as well. Many carriers have two separate email domains; one for SMS and one for MMS. Others use the same email domain for both.

Sending MMS has several advantages. First, the character-count limits which exist for SMS messages (which vary by carrier) don't exist for mms messages. Second, you can attach pictures or sound files to your email messages (the same way you'd attach them when sending to regular email addresses), and your customers will be able to receive them along with your text message.

Note that different carriers have different requirements for pictures, and if a picture doesn't meet the criteria, it won't get displayed. We've found that making your jpg file as small as possible is important (Linux users: convert -quality 2 inputfile outputfile). Also, we've found that 320x240 pixels seems to work well for most carriers.

Text messages sent to wireless phones via email (SMTP) are covered by the Can-Spam act of 2003. This act prohibits sending unwanted commercial email messages to wireless devices without prior permission. The second link below offers a really great explanation, including a good description of what constitutes a commercial message:

Stop Unwanted Robocalls and Texts
CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business

The free services (and many of the pay services as well) don't take number portability into account. As a result, when a subscriber for carrier A decides to change to carrier B and keep their same number, most services won't know about the change. For USA numbers, our services will be aware of the carrier change almost instantly.

We've found that when people aren't receiving text messages, it's usually because the phone carriers are blocking them. Unfortunately, each carrier has it's own set of criteria for determining which messages are SPAM and which are not. But usually it's because of one of the following:

1. Message content - it's possible that certain words in the message are raising flags, and are making the carrier mark the message as SPAM.

2. Messages sent per hour - If a large number of messages are being sent out at once, this could also raise red flags. If you have a lot of messages to be delivered which are not time-sensitive, it's best to throttle the sending of them as much as possible.

3. IP address - Sometimes the IP address that is sending the message can be blocked by some carriers. For Data247's Text@ service, the IP address doesn't matter because you're sending the message via email.

4. Email address - Carriers may block an email address, or an entire web domain if they believe SPAM messages are coming from them. If you're using a business email account (as opposed to a free Yahoo or Gmail account), there are things you can do to increase your email's reputation. Here's a link to an article which may be helpful for this:

How to improve domain reputation for better email deliverability

If you are using a free email account, you may want to try using a different one, or switching to a business email account and following the suggestions in the above article.

No, we don't offer any guarantee. But, we get the carrier-lookup information from the carriers, so the carrier data should be extremely accurate and up-to-date.

As for the SMS and MMS Gateway Addresses, we do our best to keep these up to date. However, there are some carriers we do not have the information for. In fact, a few of the smaller carriers don't even offer email-to-SMS/MMS Gateway Addresses.

Business Texting Services at your Fingertips!

Use Data247 services from within your web browser!

Data247 now offers a web browser extension for Microsoft Edge, Chrome and Firefox which automatically highlights phone numbers, email addresses, and IP addresses on web pages and allows you to look-up information about them with a single click!

Read the Blog

browser extensions