Introducing: SMS notifications via Zoho Subscriptions

Introducing: SMS notifications via Zoho Subscriptions

Dear customers,

We hope you are doing well! We are happy to announce that you can now send SMS notifications to your customers right from Zoho Subscriptions. To facilitate this, we've integrated with Twilio, a leader in the business communication space.



Previously, to send SMS notifications for invoices and payment reminders, you had to connect Zoho Subscriptions with an SMS provider using either webhooks or cloud connectors like Zoho Flow or Zapier. While this works, we wanted to offer something that's better and easier to set up. 

How can SMS notifications benefit your day-to-day finance operations?

There are plenty of situations where you'd like to communicate some information to your customers—such as a reminder for an overdue payment, a notification that a subscription is about to be renewed, and so on. It's okay to use email as the primary communication channel for these events, but half your emails are going to be read on mobile devices anyway. So why not deliver these notifications directly via SMS? Studies show that the average open rate for emails is 20-30%, while SMS notifications have a whopping 98% open rate. And nearly 90% of SMS recipients open their text messages in the first three seconds.

Simply put, SMS notifications can help you expedite your payment collection and close your books faster, while also improving your customer relationships by keeping customers up to speed on all their subscription-related activities.

How customizable is this?

The integration is designed so that you have control over what goes out, without having to spend a lot of time on it. You can simply choose the events in Zoho Subscriptions for which you'd like to send SMS through Twilio, and Zoho Subscriptions will take care of the rest. You'll still have options to customize the system to your specific business needs. Here's how:

1. Choose an SMS template of your choice
For each event you choose to send SMS notifications for, you can select one of the three pre-defined templates: Brief, Short, and Detailed. While all of them retain the key placeholders necessary for communication, they have different character lengths, allowing you to choose the one that fits your brand's communication style the best.

2. Disable SMS notifications for select customers
You might want to send SMS notifications to most of your customers, but not all of them. If that's the case, you can simply disable SMS notifications for any customers you wish with just a click.

3. Send manual SMS notifications when needed
There may be times when you want to send SMS notifications to your customers manually. For example, a customer might contact you and ask you to resend an invoice so they don't have to dig through all their emails to find it. You do want to make it easier for them to pay you, so for those cases, you can trigger an SMS with a link to the invoice manually.

Check out our help document to get started.

Note for our Indian edition customers: In addition to the Twilio integration, Zoho Subscriptions also offers an in-built SMS service for organizations in the Indian edition. You can purchase this as an add-on to start using it. To learn more about this solution, refer to our help document.

If you have any feedback on the integration, feel free to post it as a comment. We'd love to hear from you!

Cheers,
Harikrishna
Customer Relations | Zoho Finance

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