Are there times that you need to send SMS messages to others? If you are service owners, you might want to send messages to your customers to ask for feedbacks. If you are party organizers, you might want to send messages to remind attendees to arrive on time. If you are teachers, you might want to send message to students to notify something. If you have to do things like these in your life, I believe it is easy to understand the pain of editing the SMS message one by one, changing the wording back and forth, using the wrong information specific to the recipient (e.g., name or address) and inconsistent messages across multiple recipients.
EasyMessaging is a Google workplace Add-on designed to solve these pain points by enabling users to edit and send SMS messages in batch from spreadsheets. The goal of the tool is to simplify the repeated work of sending messages and save user’s time in use cases of digital marketing, SMS remainder, etc.
The Add-on is available on Google workplace marketplace and user is able to install online from the link. To use the Add-on, the only thing one needs to prepare is a spreadsheet with phone number column and customized information as shown in the below. The phone number column is a must to have in order to use EasyMessaging Add-on. Other fields depend on how one wants to customize the SMS message. In the given example, assume that we plan to send SMS messages to patients to remind their appointment with the doctor. As you can see, the user name, doctor name and the appointment date is customizable.
After the spreadsheet is ready, it is as easy as several clicks.
Select the column that has phone number filled in.
Customized your SMS message template. It is the almost same as normal SMS message on your phone, the only difference is that you need to add a column identifier to represent the customizable field, which will be materialized when you preview the message.
If the message looks good to you, click the send button. The sent status is going to be put into the spreadsheet as well for your record.
How message credits are calculated?
The Add-On gives 20 free credits to each new user. 1 credit means 1 SMS message less than 160 chars with GSM-7 encoding or 70 chars with UCS encoding. By default SMS tried to use GSM-7 encoding. However, if the message contains special charsets (like Chinese words) that can’t be encoded using GSM-7, it is going to fallback to UCS2. If the SMS message can be encoded using GSM-7, the maximal size for a single SMS text is 160. SMS longer than that is break into 153 char segment. For example, a message is able to be encoded using GSM-7 and the length is 161. The SMS will have 2 segments (153 char segment + 8 char segment) and 2 credits are going to be consumed. If a SMS message is encoded using UCS2, the maximal size for a single SMS text is 70. SMS longer than that is break into 67 char segments
How to avoid spamming others?
Another core issue is the possibility of spamming. EasyMessaging proactively addresses this issue by taking several approaches. 1. Users are required to sign up the agreement of avoiding spamming before sending any messages. 2.The message content is actively monitored. Machine learning based models are established to make sure that spamming is less likely when using the Add-On.