We first noticed that textburst pages would occasionally freeze a few days before before Christmas and released a temporary fix that solved it for 99% of users.

Unfortunately as with most temporary fixes it wasn’t 100% effective so we’ve been investigating the root cause since getting back from the holidays.

After many, many hours digging through tens of thousands of lines of log files (it’s amazing how much logging a debug mode can create) and tweaking code here and there we at last found the cause yesterday afternoon. And two lines of code later it’s fixed.

For the technically inclined here’s a little more information:

Textburst runs on four web servers, these are set up as two load balanced pairs, one in Derby and one in Manchester. To ensure users stay logged in when switching between servers we store our session data in a MySQL database.

Our MySQL based session store is a slightly tweaked version of the MySQL session state provider which is in turn based on the Microsoft sample session state provider.

Unfortunately it turns out both of these have a bug when handling concurrent connections.

How things are supposed to work

When a page is requested it should should check to see if the session is currently locked by another page, wait until it’s free and then obtain the session data, along with a lock if the page wants write access and then increment an internal Lock ID by one which is used to make sure the same request is locking and unlocking the session.

What was actually happening

Requests that wanted read/write access to the session worked exactly as expected, however read-only sessions missed the all important step of waiting until the session was free and simply incremented the Lock ID. This meant that if a read-only request was processed in between the lock and unlock phase of a read/write request it would never be unlocked causing the next read/write request to freeze.

Luckily the ASP.NET session code is designed for this eventuality and after 110 seconds the stuck lock is forcibly removed, unfortunately our users were stuck waiting for this to happen while everything appeared to be frozen.

Our fix

We’ve updated the session provider to always wait until the session is free. To help out others with similar problems we’ve added this as a comment on the Microsoft sample and will be filing a bug report with MySQL shortly.

The fools way to get better results from SMS marketing campaigns is to push for more subscribers, it’s a valid strategy but the intelligent man can do much better.

If you currently manage a 4% response rate (4% of people who get the SMS take advantage of your promotion), a better approach is to think about the 96% who didn’t take advantage, how can we motivate these people?

For example, if you send 1,000 SMS promoting your new range of designer sunglasses, a 1% response rate is equivalent to 10 sales. At £100 a pair your 10 sales could be worth £1,000.

So, let’s think about increasing that 1% to 2% and getting another £1,000 without increasing your database of subscribers.

1. Divide up your database

First thing to do is stop sending to all 1,000 people in one SMS broadcast.

Split the database into smaller units of 250. It doesn’t matter where or how you split your data, do it completely at random, but split it down into smaller chunks.

If you’re sending via textburst make 4 groups of contacts. That way we have 4 defined groups to test with and monitor the results.

By using smaller chunks of data you can test more variables and see what has the greatest effect.

2. Send at different intervals

For this test use the same message, but send it at different times. Different times of day, different times of the week, different times in the month.

It depends a little on what you’re promoting but instead of sending 1,000 SMS once a month, send 250 SMS once a week.

If you’re sending SMS once a week, try sending once a day.

Then watch the results closely. Do you get better results if you send on a particular day, or perhaps during a particular week?

If you get really poor results at certain times, stop sending at those times. If you’ve worked out the perfect week then try and work out the perfect day.

And don’t stop testing, different days, different times, you get the point.

3. Change the copy

I’ll assume you’re beginning to get the feel for the best time to send a text message. Now let’s try different copy in the message.

Following on from my Sunglasses example, let’s assume the original copy is:

“The new designer range of sunglasses is now in stock, get down to Sunglasses world and check em out.”

Some variants you could try are:

“Check out the new Designer Sunglasses range at Sunglasses World”

“Just in, New Designer Sunglasses at Sunglasses World, get them before the sun goes down!”

“Come to Sunglasses world this weekend and try our new Designer Sunglasses range”

I strongly recommend you read this article on How to Write Bulk SMS.

Your objective is to drop the messages that get the worst response. Then tweak the messages that get the best response, even a single word can make the difference.

It’s an iterative process that doesn’t stop, just keep dropping the ones that do the worst, and tweaking the ones that do the best.

In summary

Keep changing things, keep it fresh, keep trying different combinations of message content and times. Things change, people change, so too should your SMS Marketing.

Upload contacts from Excel spreadsheets

We’ve listened to your feedback about uploading CSV files, now you can upload Excel files directly into textburst without having to convert them.

As with most things there are a few caveats:

• You must be using Excel 2007 or Excel 2010, older versions save in a different format which we can’t process.
• All your contacts must be on the first worksheet.
• Numbers need to start with 44 or 0, if you can’t see either of these at the start in Excel it won’t work in textburst.

Delete sent messages

We want to make sure you’re always in control of your data, so on this note, we’ve added delete buttons to the sent message page.  Simply click this button and it’s gone forever.
Just to make this clear though: The delete button deletes the message, there isn’t a way to get it back.

Works in Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft are well on their way to releasing the new version of Internet Explorer.  Surprisingly, from a web development point of view, it seems like a reasonable browser.   We’ve made a few tweaks to our styling and scripting to remove work arounds previous versions needed, making sure textburst always looks its best.

This first demo was a simple affair, we manually copied the page HTML, output by textburst, into a few new files and then ran them through a shell script which called sed a dozen or so times to replace anything that didn’t work without the full application behind it.

Since putting the new design live we felt we needed to show off all the features to prospective customers. What really surprised us was just how much work is involved to create a fully featured demo.

Our requirements seem simple at a glance:

• Look and feel like textburst
• Include all major textburst features (except payments)
• Be easy to update
• Don’t really send text messages

For various internal reasons the demo needed to run on the same server as this website, this left us needing to run a C#, ASP.NET web application on a server running PHP and Linux. To make this work we came up with the following steps:

1. Log in to textburst on our development platform
2. Grab a copy of all the relevant pages
3. Run some standard find and replaces to remove ASP.NET specific content
4. Add PHP include files at the top of each page
5. Add in page specific PHP includes
6. Remove any development data
7. Copy this altered page and any includes in to a directory ready for release
8. Create some demo contacts and sends using PHP Sessions for display to users

Just over 800 lines of perl later we have a wonderful jumble of regular expressions and a dozen or so php files that make textburst into the simple demo you can see today.

By automating this step we can just re-run the perl script each time we do a release keeping the demo perfectly up to date and preventing any surprises once you’ve signed up.

We do still have to create page specific include files for some of the pages to show how the product actually works. For example, we add an include to the send message page which displays either a sent successfully or failure message depending upon whether all the form fields were completed. It also adds the sent message to your session so it shows on the sent messages page.

We do provide some excellent Delivery Status information in our Online SMS service textburst and even more if you send via our SMS API. By understanding and using this data you can cut down on undelivered messages and make some good cost savings too.

SMS API

Users of the API can get some pretty detailed information on the delivery status of each message, the full table is in our SMS API documentation.

They 2 key parameters to be concerned with are DELIVERY_STATUS and ERR_CODE.

If under DELIVERY_STATUS you receive UNDELIV or REJECTED (undelivered or rejected) then it warrants further investigation using the ERR_CODE parameter.

ERR_CODE numbers 5 or 9 indicate no matter how many times you try you simply cannot send a text message to this number. Most likely because the number has been cancelled or less likely the phone does not support text messaging. If you get a 5 or 9 we suggest you remove this number and try other means of contact.

ERR_CODE numbers 4, 6, 7, or 10 indicate a Temporary error and chances are it’ll clear given time. We suggest you hold off sending to this number for a week or so, maybe they are on holiday or having technical difficulties with their phone.

It’s also likely you’ll see some of the less decisive error codes including the unhelpful network error code of “unknown – no details provided by the network”.

By doing a periodic review of all your undelivered or rejected messages you can help reduce these errors. Look for the number of occurrences you tried to send to any one given number, if it’s always failing for whatever reason then chances are this is no longer a valid contact number for your customer.

Textburst

If you’re using textburst then the error code information is summarised and we suggest a periodic review of the information to identify bad data. Warning: you might need someone handy with a spreadsheet.

Once you have logged into textburst go to Sent Messages.

Click the small pie chart next to each batch of sent messages.

Then select “List View” in the main heading.

You’ve now got a list of each message, the mobile number and delivery status. You’ll notice on the right hand side an option to download the complete information to a spreadsheet.

We suggest downloading all your sends and searching for those numbers that regularly or never deliver, using this data you can either delete contacts or follow your own path to correct the data for future sends.

I hope this is helpful, if you need any more information or guidance then just ask.

This is the “Users” feature that allows you to setup and manage other users from within your own account.

With this feature only a single person in an organisation need sign up. Once signed up they can share the application with their colleagues.

This works particularly well for say, a call centre environment where the individual employees wouldn’t want to sign up and purchase credits, or indeed where the company wants to retain control.

With Users, one person (the admin user) signs up and purchases credits then sets the others up as sub users. The admin user has control of who can send SMS and how many they can send. If you get a new employee, simply create a new account. Someone leaves, just suspend their account.

As always we’ve tried to make it as simple as possible. The users tab is in the main menu, and the link “Add a new user“ is fairly self-explanatory and guides you through the setup.

Finally, an email is automatically sent to each new user, welcoming them to the system and providing their initial logon information.

I admit it has taken us a little longer than anticipated to get this live but the mechanism is very smooth. We hope you like it.

Big sends, instant response.

Rather than making you wait around while we process large bulk SMS sends, the send page now responds instantly. 

We now process the send in the background. It means you can keep working while the send processes.

Manage scheduled messages

In the past if you wanted to cancel scheduled message you had to call us and we’d do it for you. 

You’ll now find a list of all scheduled messages within the application and can cancel them up to a few minutes before they’re sent.

Up to date groups

If you schedule a message to a group we’ll now pick up the list of group members at the time of send rather than schedule.

This means you can continue to manage your groups and the send will be up to date with your latest contact list.

Additionally, to make this change work we now deduct message credit when we process the send.

Faster uploads

We’ve made a few behind the scenes tweaks to how uploads are processed.  In our tests an upload of 50,000 contacts now completes 10 times quicker than before.

Bigger uploads, bigger sends

There used to be a limit of 10,000 people in a single upload or send. 

With the speed improvements above we’ve removed this limit and so far have tested with groups of 100,000 contacts with no speed issues what so ever.

Summary

So there you have it hopefully you’ll enjoy the benefits, but as always contact us if there  is something we can improve.

Step 1 Listen to client

The first stage in redesigning textburst was purely investigative. It involved listening to mediaburst staff and trying to gauge what it is this product of theirs did; along with what it did wrong and what they would have liked it to be able to do.

Step 2 Stop listening, start thinking

Once I’d gauged in my mind how I thought mediaburst wanted their new app to work; I thought about it for a few days. Sidenote: Thinking time is so important; diving straight into creating a working model may make the client happier but in the long run it can lead to more design revisions later in the process.

Step 3 Create interactive ‘wireframes’

This was the first stage where the something actually tangible was produced. A wireframe is simply a stripped down version of the website/app. With a web app (as opposed to web site) it’s more important how it works than how it looks so creating these simple mock-ups of how the app will work gave mediaburst a great idea of how the new textburst would work.
In textburst’s case, the idea was very much to strip back any excess features therefore making it easier to use. Luckily, this was mediaburst’s philosophy too.

Step 4 Get client feedback

Once wireframes had been produced it was time to go back to mediaburst and see if what I’d produced matched their needs. I knew how I wanted Textburst to work in a perfect world but the world isn’t perfect.; Textburst sends over 4million SMS a month and they have a lot of clients to keep happy.

Wireframe for the textburst send form (First version)

Wireframe for the textburst send form (Final revision)

The mediaburst team printed out every screen of the wireframes and stuck them on the wall and checked that all key functionality was still present. It’s all every well stripping back features and simplifying but alienating existing users wasn’t part of the plan.

Step 5 Start design work (in a sandbox)

The wireframes were finally approved and it was time to commence designing the textburst Initial designs which incorporated the ‘textburst green’ were eventually thrown away in favour of a more corporate looking blue which we all felt would attract more customers.
I was very interesting in making sure this design looked and worked like web apps people are used to. With this in mind I studied Facebook, CampaignMonitor and tried to mimic what made them so simplistic and obvious.

Textburst's send SMS form

Textburst's sent messages screen

Textburst's stats screen

Step 6 Think about client needs and change accordingly

The designed got handed over to the development team who then started to integrate the design into the current working version of textburst.
When the system was built it was then time to fine-tune it because it was apparent that the design wasn’t as complete as it needed to be. In particular we found ourselves asking the following questions:

• Was that screen’s purpose clear enough?
• Did we need another option in there and if so where would it go on the screen?
• How can we maintain simplicity when we we’re adding extra features?

This was a very interesting stage as it marked the point when the rest of the mediaburst team started to feel more involved. The engineers started to get really interested in all the small UI decisions and on one day in particular we spent a good few of hours discussing the positioning of micro-copy (and its wording) on one screen.

Step 8 Sit back and launch

Launching textburst was quite a scary proposition – thankfully the engineers did all of the work. Mediaburst had informed all of their clients about the changes before-hand but even so updating a core part of your business like this is no walk in the park. We all sat with baited breath in the office waiting for the deluge of complaints from angry customers but they never came.

We’ve got an exciting year ahead and we’re getting straight into it. The new website will be live later in January and at the same time textburst will take on a whole new appearance.

There’s a demo available so feel free to click around and let us know what you think?

Don’t be fooled though, it’s a demo, it doesn’t actually send messages.

View the textburst demo

At the same time I thought it worth showing off the work that the illustrator Stanley Chow has put in. He’s created us a range of images we can use to identify products and services.

We’ve deliberately steered away from any stereotypical representations of a text message, usually a mobile phones and/or envelope. It’s been done many times and we wanted something that helps us stand out, while at the same time providing cohesion between our products.

So here they are:

mediaburst birds

Textburst

Outlook SMS

Email to SMS

Let us know what you think, are they too bold, are they simple enough, do you like the consistency?

Upload Contacts

Our largest source of customer queries surrounds uploading bulk SMS contacts. This is in part because the current page is not exactly what you’d call intuitive. (click the image)

The sheer length of the page scares users. The instructions are at the top, perhaps logical, but most users forget the latter steps by the time they have completed the first stages. The “select fields” and “groups” sections in particular are confusing.

We’ve made a few tweaks and come up with this draft which we believe will make the process much smother.

You’ll notice the page is now much shorter with clear instructional copy to guide you through the process.

To de-clutter the page we’ve removed the instructions of how to convert excel to CSV. These is no reason to force you to read these instructions, we’ll include a link to a popup window so you can choose.

We’ve also introduced a preview sample of the uploaded data for you to confirm before committing. And, importantly, you’ll now be able to continue working in Textburst, sending and receiving SMS, while the upload is processing. The actual upload will process in the background, no more waiting for the screen to refresh.

A much improved process, I hope you agree?

Timeout Settings

We currently time out a session on 20 minutes of inactivity.

On this point we’ve listened to you, we’ve heard your requests, we know you don’t like this, so we’ve transferred power back to you:

You log in

You stay in

You log out.

Improving the “To” Field

As web technology improves it’s important to include those developments which add to the usability of our products. To make the send message page more fluid the inclusion of a clever bit of coding will certainly help in the “to” field.

I’ve struggled to describe this in a non techy manner but I think this series of images speak for themselves.

On the send an SMS message page, you have the “To” box that you can type numbers, names, or groups into:

As soon as you click in the box a menu appears:

Start typing and the Ajax functionality will automatically find relevant SMS contacts and groups, simply click the contact or group you were looking for.

Personalise

Finally, you may have noticed the addition of “Personalise” in the image above.

The current version of merging fields in a text message is cumbersome and hence frequently overlooked.

Recipients of SMS messages will undoubtedly respond better to a personalised message and hence why we have drawn more attention to this functionality.

As you are typing a message, use your mouse to click the relevant field to insert into the message.

Simple, effective, and helping you improve communication.

Until January

Hopefully you’ll see your feedback is being taken into consideration and an improved product is just around the corner, scheduled for release early January.