Save Your Receipt to Measure Performance
If you’re like a lot of people, you get home from shopping and throw away all those cumbersome paper receipts ASAP (only to regret it when you need to return something!). Unlike some receipts, a messaging “DLR” – or Delivery Receipt – serves several important functions for messaging campaign senders.
What’s a Text Message DLR?
Delivery receipts are issued by messaging carriers (carrier DLR), and typically expanded by the message recipient’s carrier/mobile operator – assuming the phone number is valid – for every message you send as part of an application to person (A2P) campaign.
A DLR with details from the mobile operator is also known as a final or handset DLR. Unlike P2P receipts, which might or might not show up as a word on the sender’s messaging app as delivered or read, a DLR is forwarded from your messaging provider with critical information to help you assess the quality of your list and the success of your campaign.
Delivery receipts are provided for every type of messaging campaign:
- Short code
- Long code
- Toll-free
- SMS
- MMS
On the surface, a DLR doesn’t look like much – just a few snippets that will vary a bit from one carrier to the next; between short code vs. long code vs. toll-free; and an SMS vs. an MMS message.
Commio enhances our DLRs with time data before forwarding them to customers. They’re essentially lines of code that can be fed into an analytics program for campaign-level parsing.
The main piece of information on all the DLRs is Delivered, Undelivered, or Rejected. They might or might not have an error code that can be deciphered.
How Do You Use Them?
1. Delivery Rates
First and foremost, you need to know if your messages are being delivered! If, for example, you’re sending password reset information or two-factor authentication, it’s critical for your customers to receive that data.
2. Proof of Delivery
Although a DLR can’t tell you if someone read their text message, it can provide proof that it was delivered to them. If there’s a communication issue or customer complaint, you need to be able to pinpoint what’s happening.
3. List Evaluation
More than one company has been unhappily surprised to find out that a significant portion of their list was invalid. Although texting campaigns are the most reliable and cost-effective way to communicate with prospects and customers, like any mass campaign they are only as good as your lists. An undelivered message costs as much as one that is!
4. Campaign Conversion
These days, profit margins are tight and any SaaS platform owner or marketer can tell you that you need to justify the value of any given campaign. If half your texts aren’t being delivered or rejected, you’re spending twice as much, and your campaign is half as effective.
5. Optimizing the Process
If you’ve ever done A/B testing on a campaign, you’ll sometimes find significant differences in the outcome. Sometimes the reason is obvious, other times not so much. If you’re finding discrepancies you can’t explain, a good support team can often help pinpoint issues you might not even guess at.
As mentioned previously, all carriers provide DLRs – for all types of messaging campaigns. And best of all, most messaging providers will forward this information for free! So take a look at your DLRs and see how you can put them to work toward more effective campaigns–at better margins.
See also: eBook Introduction | Short Code | Long Code | Toll-Free Messaging | Opt-In Lists | Messaging Rules | Delivery Receipts (DLRs) | Messaging APIs
