SMS Marketing Made Easy With Textuate
April 6, 2010 by Gwendolyn Regina T
If you want to go into SMS marketing or want to experiment with a new vendor, you might want to try out Textuate. Textuate is a simple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for sending bulk SMS messages. Brought to you by the same man behind HomeSpace, RentSpace and SmartLoans, you can be assured of the same nice, friendly user-interface that has become the hallmark of Vinod Nair’s work.
(Of course, we must not forget that HomeSpace and RentSpace was a result of not just Vinod’s hard work, but of several of his teammates in now-defunct The Real Group Pte Ltd as well.)
Features of Textuate
Textuate allows you to manually add contacts or upload your contact list via CSV. You can also group these contacts to make it easier for you to send SMSes to just a specific group.
Composing a message is also really easy. I can choose to have the “From” field show my number or any text I want as well as easily view the number of recipients by the Recipient Count below the “To” field:
Composing a message in Textuate.
One nifty hidden aspect of Textuate is this, even if you enter the same number twice (or more) in the “To” field, though it will show your number of recipients as the number of times you entered the number, your message will only get sent to that recipient once. This will immediately be apparent in the Delivery Report presented to you after you have sent that message.
Check out more screenshots in the Textuate Tour.
Coming Soon
Scheduling has become almost a necessity when you manage many things in your company at the same time. For Textuate, the SMS scheduling feature, though can already be seen in the system, will only be ready in a bit.
Another good feature coming soon that I am sure marketers will love is the “Textmerge” capability. Essentially, this is like Mail Merge, where you can personalize the recipient’s name and up to 3 custom fields. Eg. Hi John, you got an A+ for English.
The Company
Textuate is brought to you by Catapult Ventures Pte. Ltd., a new company helmed by Vinod Nair. Don’t worry, he’s still working on SmartLoans – for those worried about the potential abandonment of what is a very good service.
Find out more about HomeSpace (here and here), RentSpace (here) and Smartloans (here, here, here), and check out our interview with Vinod on HomeSpace.
About The Author
Gwendolyn Regina T - Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Apart from SGE, Gwen is also a Partner at Thymos Capital, where she focuses on early stage investments in technology firms. She has had two exits out of her investments via the firm, one of which is iHipo. A frequent judge for business competitions both locally and overseas, she graduated from the National University of Singapore. Gwen also spent some time in Silicon Valley and studied in Stanford University under the NUS Overseas College programme. Gwen is a mentor at Spanish incubator Tetuan Valley, Polish incubator Gamma Rebels, the Singapore Ambassador for the Sandbox network and the Singapore curator for StartupDigest. She enjoys languages, travelling, dance and adventure sports. Gwen can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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