Understanding SMS Delivery
This section presents some information about SMS delivery, including but not limited to the different message states and their meaning, the reasons for the non-delivery of SMS, and some advice on how to improve deliverability.
Understanding Message States
Every SMS message request has a status value that describes the current state of the message.
- Sent to Operator Status reflects a status when a message is processed by the Unifonic platform.
- Delivered to Customer Status reflects the delivery status after a message was submitted to the mobile operator.
Sent to Operator Status
| Operator Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Sent | The message is successfully submitted to the mobile operator. |
| Not Sent | The message is not sent |
Delivered to Customer Status
| Message State | Description |
|---|---|
| Delivered | Unifonic has received confirmation of message delivery from the mobile operator or where available - from the destination mobile device. |
| Undelivered | The message has NOT been delivered to the mobile device, for one of the following reasons: The message has not passed validations within Unifonic platform. Unifonic has successfully submitted the message to the mobile operator but received a delivery receipt indicating that the message was not delivered to the mobile device. |
| Pending | Unifonic has successfully submitted the message to the mobile operator, but neither received confirmation of successful delivery nor an indication of non-delivery. This may happen because of various reasons such as mobile operator settings blocking delivery receipts and connectivity glitches. Normally the user wouldn't see many messages with this status, but if you do - please contact Unifonic customer support to investigate with the mobile operator. |
How To Improve Deliverability
Deliverability is the percentage of messages that reach the intended recipient and it’s one of the most important criteria when deciding on an SMS provider either for marketing campaigns or for transactional message delivery such as one-time passcode. There are a few best practices to improve the likelihood of the message being delivered to the recipient.
- Make sure the recipient's phone number is correct. Regularly clean your customer phone number database to make sure each SMS recipient's phone number contains a valid country code (such as 971 for UAE), operator prefix and the correct number of digits. Unifonic will be performing phone number validations based on the operator prefix and the number length. If the number is wrong then the message will not be delivered.
- Make sure the SenderID is registered in a country where your recipient numbers are located. SenderID registration is required in some countries like Saudi Arabia and not required in some others, please contact Unifonic Customer Support for details if you need to register your SenderID in a particular country and refer to Getting a Sender ID guide for more details on the process.
- Craft the message to avoid filtering. Filtering is when a mobile operator blocks messages from going through because the content within that message is believed to be against acceptable use policies or regulatory rules (e.g. contains profanity language, phishing or SPAM). If you have to use a URL in your message make sure to avoid using public link shorteners such as Bitly or TinyURL – please use your branded URL or Unifonic Link Shortening.
Validate API request before sending production traffic. Make one or two requests before sending production traffic over API to make sure all parameters are included, you receive 200 OK responses from the Unifonic API and the message is actually delivered on the mobile device.
Updated 6 months ago