Hosted Messaging: Explained

In case you haven’t heard, Telnyx has added hosted SMS to our suite of tools that expands numbering options for our SMS API users.

What is hosted SMS, and why is it useful?

Hosted messaging is a service that allows Telnyx customers to enable SMS/MMS on phone numbers that may not be present in a customer's Mission Control Portal, numbers that have existing voice services from another provider, or landlines that traditionally have never had SMS capabilities.

In order to leverage this product, Telnyx will require number ownership verification to ensure that our customer has the right to use this particular number for messaging.

The voice services of a number are unaffected when you host a number, and hosted messaging allows you to get all the benefits of our easy to use, SMS API while keeping voice capabilities with your current service provider.

Some advantages of hosted SMS include:

Tapping into the preferred channel for your target audience

It’s no secret that SMS is a great way to reach your audience -- while email open rates hover around 20%, 98% of text messages are opened, and 95% are read within 90 seconds. Hosted SMS allows businesses to broaden their channels of engagement with their target audience to include messaging, while keeping the same provider for voice. This makes it easy to take advantage of messaging, even with landline numbers that traditionally are non SMS-enabled.

Keep your number consistent

Another key advantage of hosted messaging is that it allows you to enable SMS with Telnyx while keeping the same number -- not only is this convenient, but it can also be beneficial from a branding perspective. For example, if you’re a small auto shop business that calls its customers from a business number to notify them that their vehicle is ready for pick up, it’s less confusing for the recipient to receive SMS notifications from the same number.

Now that you’re aware of the benefits of hosted SMS, are you ready to get started? For a comprehensive how-to on using Telnyx for hosted messaging, check out this step by step guide.