During the holidays, it’s common to allow extra travel time when making a journey - not because there’s anything wrong with the roads themselves, but because there’s a large volume of traffic using them. The same can be said for our messaging gateway - heavy traffic can result in delivery delays.
There are various times during the year where there's a large increase in SMS traffic across the gateway. The most common increase in traffic is during key retail sale periods (such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and end of financial year), as thousands of businesses send promotional SMS messages to their customers. To make sure your messages get to your customers on time during times of increase message traffic, we recommend following these helpful tips:
Schedule your broadcasts
By scheduling your messages ahead of time (we encourage pre-scheduling your campaign in advance), you are effectively “beating the traffic” by pushing your messages to the gateway early. Depending on the size of your broadcast, this can help reduce the risk of your messages being delayed.
- If you’re sending through our app, you can select ‘schedule for later’ when following the process for setting up a campaign. Read this article for more information.
- If you’re scheduling through our plugin, take a look at the campaign sending process in this article, and schedule in advance
Avoid peak times
Since SMS messages are typically opened within 90 seconds of receipt, provided the message is sent within sociable hours, there’s no big difference between sending on the hour or a few minutes after. A lot of businesses will schedule their broadcasts to send on the hour or half-hour - so to reduce the risk of your messages being delayed, try scheduling yours for a few minutes either side of those instants (e.g. sending at 9:10am instead of 9:00am).
If you would like to talk to us about your communications strategy during peak times, please reach out to us at support@messagemedia.com and one of our experts will gladly get in touch with you.