Launch A Premium Rate SMS Service in Kenya Using Bulk SMS

Why you should start a Premium Rate service Send text messages to subscribers

More than 16 million people use mobile phones in Kenya. You can reach millions of people who are looking for information and are willing to pay for it via bulk texting. You would earn more than Kes 2.78 shillings per sms, which is a good return if you add the numbers.

How to SMS with Premium Rates SMS How to SMS messages with a Premium Rate SMS

Suppose we set you up and showed you how to text Gujarati language lessons to your subscribers:

(a) To introduce a customer to your service, simply ask him to text your chosen code word, say "Gujarati" to 5242.

(b) As soon as your customer sends an SMS with the word "Gujarati" to 5242, he is automatically registered to receive the daily Gujarati SMS messages you provide;

(c) You have given us a list of text messages from Gujarati lessons (say 30 text messages, 1 text message per day for 30 days);

(d) Every morning your client will receive one lesson per text message for the rest of the month;

(e) Depending on the number of SMS messages per month, you make a discount of Kes 2.78 for each SMS message received by your customer;

(f) For example, if you have 5000 clients, you send 5000 text messages per day. With a speed of Kes 3 per text message, you earn Kes 15,000 per day or Kes 450,000 per month. Kenya has 16 million plus mobile users. It is not difficult to secure more than 10,000 users for your service. Do the math;

How to text business tips using premium rate service or bulk texting

Tips for companies

Kenyans are increasingly enterprising with what is unfortunately called "dwarfism in the informal sector" in the huge amount of transaction volume and the claim to the people of Kenya.

With an unemployment rate of 40% (a figure that I believe is a gross underestimate, especially when the government considers considering self-employment as unemployment), many Kenyans, secondly, only want to find a job , receive education.

The richest Kenyans are not employees but politicians with business interests and businessmen with or without political interests. Kenyans are therefore in love with things anyway. This makes them very wary of tips on how to be successful in business.

Outside the books of formal education, the best-selling titles on the book market are management and self-help literature. While Kenyans are getting busier, tips about what they would have read from these books. There is a huge gap between the desired and possessed business knowledge. You can close this gap with premium rate SMS.

Setting up the premium rate SMS channel

1. The first step is to contact a service provider with a premium rate.

2. In the first stages of completing the online registration form you must enter a keyword of your choice. If you are going to send high-quality text messages with business tips, select a relevant keyword, such as "Biz" or "Tips," or provide an indication of what the service is about. This is the word that subscribers send via SMS to the short code that we provide if they want to subscribe to your service.

3. The second phase of the online registration process is to read and understand the terms and conditions of the service provider with a premium rate. These are very important because they explain how you will relate to Viva as an agent. It is important that at the bottom of these general terms and conditions you will find the table with the revenue share you would receive. Section 4 of the terms and conditions provides two ways in which you can be paid. Read them carefully so that you can understand them.

4. The third phase of the online registration process is to contact the service provider with a premium rate.

5. As soon as the premium service provider confirms that it is available, you pay the monthly amount for your first month.

6. Once payment has been made, Viva will proceed to liase with our premium rate service provider to set the keyword on our shared short code. Set-ups are usually done on Monday and Thursday.

7. Once the keyword has been set to the short code, we will send you an email confirming that the keyword has been set. We will also ask you to send us an e-mail message in MS Excel with 14 - 30 text messages that you want us to send via the short code. Each message cannot be longer than 160 characters (including spaces). We will also offer you an online platform where you can monitor who has subscribed to your service, the number of subscribers, the number of text messages sent daily and other important information.

8. The next step is marketing. You must start by advertising your short code and keyword for the public. For example, you can place print ads with the text "SMS Biz to 5242 to get a daily inspiring doctrine from the New Testament".

9. There are many ways to advertise, including radio, newspapers, advertisements, TV, or pay-per-click advertisements.

10. When people see your ads, they text the keyword to the short code and the short code system records their numbers.

11. Every day, the system sends one text message (or two, depending on how you want it) to all numbers registered on the premium rate payment system.

12. At the end of the month, calculate the amount of money that you owe by visiting the part of your online platform about successfully delivered messages. Once you have received the number of successfully delivered messages for the relevant month, multiply this by the amount per sms owed to you. This amount per SMS varies from Kshs 2.78 to 3.89, depending on the volume.

My name is David Lime and I work as an IT Manager at SMSala. We as a company Dealing with Bulk SMS provides SMPP connectivity which is highly scalable Store and Forward Platform for Operators and SMS Aggregators.