Inbound (MO) Message Handling and Other SMS Enhancements

We’ve added three new features to Airship’s SMS solution:

1. Inbound Message Handling — Gather data and send custom responses to your audience using a webhook.
2. Sender ID Selection — Select and sort your audience by sender ID.
3. MMS media upload — Use Airship as your CDN for MMS messages.

Inbound (MO) Message Handling

With Airship’s new Inbound Message Handling feature, you can set up a webhook to receive, process, and respond to inbound messages from your audience. Airship forwards inbound messages from your audience to your webhook, where you can process messages and curate custom responses.

You can take advantage of this feature to interact with your audience in sophisticated ways, like:

• Routing incoming messages to live agents.
• Responding with account balances for banking or loyalty programs.
• Issuing unique contest entries when users send a keyword.
• Sending unique coupons or promo offers for individuals using the same keyword.
• Providing a method for users to pull information at their own pace.
• Collecting and updating user data, like email addresses or zip codes that users might send you.

For more information about SMS webhooks, see:

• SMS Webhook Setup
• Custom Response API

Sender ID Selection

Now you can select a specific sender ID when composing SMS/MMS messages. Users subscribe to messages from individual sender IDs, and your project may have multiple senders for different types of messages, different locations, etc. Users in your audience can subscribe to multiple sender IDs in the same project, making it important that you send them the right message from the right sender.

Selecting an audience by sender ID makes it easy for you to determine the sender ID you want to send your message from and helps you quickly narrow your audience to users belonging to that sender when sending SMS messages. You can also apply additional audience filters when targeting users by sender ID, so you can send messages to subsets of subscribers to each sender ID.

You can select a sender ID when sending SMS messages.

MMS Media Upload

You can now upload your MMS media directly to Airship. Previously, you had to host and provide URLs for media when sending an MMS message. Now you don’t have to worry about hosting your media. You can upload your files directly to Airship when you compose an MMS message.

For more information, see: Send an MMS Notification.