The movie “Field of Dreams” made popular the saying “If you build it, they will come.” Sadly, for ecommerce businesses, just building it won’t bring in customers, no matter how strong your SEO mojo is. If you want to sell stuff you have to go tell people about what you sell — and that’s called marketing.

SMS marketing in particular involves sending promotional materials via text message — in contrast to transactional messaging, which encompasses things like delivery updates and one-time passwords.

SMS is the best communication channel for marketing. It’s highly available — consider how many people have cellphones and how high open rates are for text messages. It doesn’t require anyone to download a mobile app. And according to research by SAP SE, “70% of respondents say that SMS is a good way for a company to get their attention and 64% say that organizations should use SMS-based engagement more often.”

Build your subscriber base

Having said that, however, you can’t just buy a list of phone numbers and send unsolicited text messages to individuals with whom you have no business relationship. You must gather opt-in consent from message recipients first. Once you have that consent, you can add the contact information to your subscriber list.

How do you gain subscribers? Offer customers and potential customers incentives to be contacted. Typical incentives include cost savings, time savings (such as faster shipments), and early access to information, such as insider priority for sales.

Here are six ways to gather opt-in consent.

• Put a signup box on your product pages.
• Let customers tick a box to opt in to messaging when they first provide their phone numbers as part of their purchase information.
• Display an exit intent popup when someone’s about to leave your site, asking for consent.
• Offer a link to the subscriber signup page in email newsletters.
• Give people a short code they can use to subscribe by texting a keyword.
• Promote signups in social media campaigns.

Whatever methods you use, make it clear that you’re asking consumers to consent to receive marketing messages via SMS. Provide a link to your terms and conditions page, and let people know how they can unsubscribe from your list should they choose to in the future. Keep a record of their agreement in case you need to provide it for audit purposes.

7 types of SMS marketing offers

Marketing isn’t simply telling potential customers why they should buy your product, although you can certainly do that. Here are seven SMS marketing tips to help your ecommerce business boost revenue.

• Promotion alerts: Tell consumers about sales and new product launches. With this and other SMS marketing tactics, be sure to include a link to a web page that recipients can click on to see the deal and, hopefully, spend money on it.
• Exclusive deals: Create a loyalty program that includes an SMS promotions list and offer subscribers deals that they can’t get elsewhere. Send customers updates on their loyalty points and information about how to earn more.
• Personalized recommendations: If you have the ability, use customer data to create personalized recommendations for products or services that customers might like given the fact that they’ve already bought some other service. Think Amazon’s “You might also like” recommendations, but delivered directly to customers’ mobile devices.
• Abandoned cart reminders: Remind customers of items they left in their shopping cart, and consider offering a discount if they complete the purchase.
• Review requests: Ask for positive reviews on relevant websites, such as Amazon, Google, and Yelp, as well as whatever review sites are popular with customers in your sector. Positive reviews serve as objective evidence of the value of your product, and asking customers to share their feedback can help foster brand loyalty.
• Replenishment reminders: If you sell products that run out or get used up (such as food, beauty products, or health supplements) send SMS reminders to drive repeat purchases.
• Product tips and guides: Are how-to tips marketing? Arguably — but giving customers information on how best to take advantage of the products they’ve bought can be valuable both to them as consumers and to you as a way to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Winning with SMS marketing

If you like these 13 tips, you might want to download our ebook guide to SMS marketing or look at our getting started guides for bulk messaging. Or you can skip straight to trying Plivo’s SMS API Platform by signing up for free.

If you’ve ever made a call and heard “For English, press or say 1,” you’ve encountered an interactive voice response system. IVR allows callers to access information by speaking a word (thus the “voice” part of the name) or pressing a key on a phone’s Touch-Tone keypad. IVR can serve up prerecorded messages, route calls to specific departments or individuals, or pull data such as bank balances from systems — all without the need to speak to an agent. IVR systems benefit consumers by getting them the information they want quickly, without having to wait on hold.

A good IVR system is particularly useful for financial institutions, as many customer inquiries can be answered without taking up a representative’s time. Typical information for a bank’s IVR menu might include:

• Choice of languages in which to hear the menu
• Directory of departments, including technical support
• Account information, including balance checks
• Automated bill payment
• Appointment booking
• Callback option, if all representatives are busy
• Informational recording on topics such as
• Services offered Business hours Email addresses Website URL Social media handles Directory of branch locations

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IVR menu best practices

Whether you’re a bank, mortgage lender, stockbroker, or other financial services professional, following these best practices for IVR systems can help you create a better customer experience.

• Menu options — Don’t overwhelm customers with too many options at each level. Fewer choices make things easier for callers, as they have to remember the ones they’re hearing. Use a maximum of five items at each prompt.
• Special keys — If any keys are reserved for special functions, tell callers about them up-front. For example, “At any time you can press or say 9 to return to the previous menu, or press 0 or say ‘operator’ to speak to an operator.” And that’s another best practice — at every level, give customers an option to speak to a customer service representative.
• Menu order — Put the most popular options first in the IVR system, so callers have to spend less time listening for what they want.
• Option order — Present a task followed by its associated action rather than the other way around, so callers can recognize what they want to do and don’t have to remember “what number was I supposed to press?” For example, “To hear your account balance, press or say or say 1.”
• Accepted input — Allow callers to respond not only via keypress but also via voice. Some customers prefer one way, some the other; give people what they want.
• Pauses — Include a pause of a second or so before giving the choices on a submenu. That allows time for people who have the phone up to their ear to shift it back there after pressing a keypad key.
• Confirm menu level — Start submenus with a short message that confirms the caller has reached the place they intended. For example, “OK, balances. Press or say 1 for your checking account balance; press or say 2 for your savings account.”
• Allow barge-in — Allow callers to select an option at any time — don’t force them to listen to an entire menu before they can make a selection.
• Repeat as necessary — By default, repeat the menu if the caller doesn’t make a selection within a few seconds.

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We offer more IVR best practice suggestions in a blog post, including our favorite: Don’t start off by telling callers, “Listen carefully as our menu options have changed.” No one cares.

A sample bank IVR

Every organization is different, so every organization’s IVR menu will be different too. We put this simple two-level menu together to give you some ideas. Undoubtedly your menu will require more levels. Also, there’s no single right way to map out a menu. In this example, we start out asking for a kind of account, but you might prefer to ask for a kind of task first and prompt for the account afterward.

Plan the entire menu tree before you start coding and before you start recording prompts.

Here’s our sample.

Thanks for calling Our Bank. How can we help you? You can press 0 or say “operator” at any time to reach a representative during business hours.

For personal banking services, press or say 1.
For business banking services, press or say 2.
For account inquiries, press or say 3.
For credit card services, press or say 4.
To apply for a new credit card, press or say 5.
For information on your card’s interest rate and other terms and conditions, press or say 6.

1: OK, personal banking.
For account balances and transaction history, press or say 1.
To transfer funds between accounts, press or say 2.
To make a bill payment, press or say 3.
To open a new account, press or say 4.
To report a lost or stolen card, press or say 5.

2: OK, business banking.
For account balances and transaction history, press or say 1.
To transfer funds between accounts, press or say 2.
To make a bill payment, press or say 3.
To open a new account, press or say 4.
For commercial loans and financing, press or say 5.

3: OK, account inquiries.
For account balances and transaction history, press or say 1.
To report a lost or stolen card, press or say 2.
To dispute a transaction, press or say 3.

4: OK, credit cards.
To check your outstanding balance, press or say 1.
To make a payment, press or say 2.
To report a lost or stolen card, press or say 3.
To dispute a transaction, press or say 4.

How to create an IVR system with Plivo

Plivo makes things easy for businesses that want to implement IVR. We’ve written IVR use case guides that show exactly how to create an IVR program in any of seven common web development languages, including annotated code samples.

If you’re not already a Plivo customer, sign up for free today and get started now.

Building truly intelligent voice applications often means grappling with technical limitations such as: 

• Lack of real-time audio access
• Difficulty integrating with AI models
• Limited flexibility for scaling advanced use cases

Plivo’s audio streaming makes this easier. It lets you send real-time call audio to your applications, enabling AI-powered voice agents to respond dynamically. It also comes with features to analyze customer sentiment during calls, and automate tasks like call routing or transfer calls to human agents whenever necessary.In this blog, we’ll explore how audio streaming solves voice infrastructure challenges and help you to deliver next-level customer experiences. Let’s dive in!

How Does Audio Streaming Work?

With audio streaming, businesses transmit the raw media of a live call in real time to their applications or third-party systems.

This illustration shows how a call center might use audio streaming.

Plivo lets you stream audio by using XML instructions or APIs. First, you get a number with Plivo (by signing up on the console), then connect it to an XML application.

Here’s how it works:

XML instructions

With the XML element, you can stream raw media from a live phone call over a WebSocket connection. To begin streaming, return XML like this during the call.

<Response>
<Stream streamTimeout="3600" keepCallAlive="true" bidirectional="true" contentType="audio/x-mulaw;rate=8000" statusCallbackUrl="https://yourdomain.com/callbacks">wss://<yourstream>.ngrok.io/audiostream</Stream>
</Response>

See our XML reference documentation for complete details.

API integration

Alternatively, you can use Plivo APIs to initiate and manage audio streams.

curl -i –user AUTH_ID:AUTH_TOKEN \\
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \\
      -d '{"service_url": "wss://.ngrok.io/audiostream"}' \\
      https://api.plivo.com/v1/Account/{auth_id}/Call/{call_uuid}/Stream/

See our audio streaming API reference documentation for complete details.

Audio Streaming Use Cases 

Businesses can use audio streaming in multiple ways, especially in tandem with machine learning-based engines and AI voice agents, to enhance value and improve customer experience.

Call centers can leverage Plivo’s audio streaming to extract insights from raw audio data, perform sentiment analysis, implement speech recognition, and analyze voice-related data, enhancing operational efficiency.

You can integrate Plivo’s audio streaming with AI/ML-based tools to provide real-time transcription services.

Similarly, you can integrate audio streams with third-party tools to facilitate live translation of audio content, enabling effective communication across different languages during conferences and meetings.

Here are some key use cases of Plivo audio streaming: 

Smart IVR with dynamic call routing

Core Use Case: Transforming traditional IVR systems into smart, AI-driven IVRs that enable natural language understanding and intelligent call routing.

Example: A telecommunications company implements an AI-Powered IVR where customers can state their concerns naturally (e.g., "I want to upgrade my plan" or "I have a billing issue") instead of navigating menus. 

The system interprets their input, evaluates sentiment, and routes the call to the appropriate team or provides immediate automated assistance, such as sending payment links or resolving common queries. If sentiment analysis detects frustration, the system escalates the call to a specialized agent for de-escalation.

24/7 customer support

Core Use Case: Maintaining consistent customer service quality beyond business hours using AI voice agents.

Example: An e-commerce platform deploys an AI Voice Bot to assist customers during off-hours. If a customer calls at midnight to track a delayed order, the bot retrieves real-time shipping updates from the database, informs the customer, and resolves their issue without human intervention.

Real-time speech recognition, transcription, and analysis

Core Use Case: Transcribing calls in real time by converting spoken language into text for immediate analysis, record-keeping, and automated processing.

Personalized training and real-time coaching for agents

This helps you leverage live call analysis to provide actionable feedback to agents for skill enhancement.

‍Example: During a customer call, the system evaluates the agent's tone and adherence to protocols, offering real-time coaching tips, such as suggesting a more empathetic response or adjusting the script to align with customer sentiment.

Outbound call automation with AI voice agents

Core use case: Automating outbound communication to improve engagement, gather insights, and provide proactive assistance to customers.

Promotional messages

Example: A retail company uses AI voice agents to inform customers about limited-time discounts and exclusive deals, personalizing the message based on purchase history.

Customer feedback surveys

Example: After a service interaction, the system calls customers to collect feedback through a quick, automated survey, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Proactive customer support

Example: An insurance company proactively calls customers to remind them of upcoming policy renewal deadlines, reducing the likelihood of service lapses.

Post-delivery feedback and assistance

Example: After delivering a product, an AI agent contacts customers to confirm satisfaction and offer assistance if issues arise, such as initiating returns or troubleshooting.

Automation of Voice Channel Operations

Core use case: Streamlining routine voice-based interactions to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Appointment booking

Example: A healthcare provider uses voice agents to schedule, confirm, or reschedule patient appointments via calls, reducing the need for manual coordination.

Service-related queries

Example: A telecom provider deploys voice agents to answer common service queries, such as "How can I change my plan?" or "What’s my current data usage?"

Delivery status updates

Example: A logistics company enables customers to call and inquire about shipment statuses, with the bot providing real-time updates from the system.

Accepting orders on calls

Example: A restaurant uses voice agents to take orders over the phone, confirm details, and provide estimated delivery times without requiring human intervention.

Get Started with Audio Streaming with Plivo 

By integrating audio streaming with AI voice agents, businesses can provide advanced customer support, gain valuable insights into conversations, and improve customer interactions. 

Couple it with speech recognition, AI call analysis and dual channel recording and have a kickass customer support toolkit.

But, to make the most of all these features, you need a CPaaS solution with superior voice infrastructure. Plivo offers superior voice network to launch context-aware voice agents and voice assistants trained on your proprietary knowledge base that transform the customer experience

Here’s why Plivo should be your first choice:

• Superior call quality: Plivo ensures superior call quality through its partnerships with Tier 1 carriers and optimized routing
• Low latency: Global Infrastructure enables low latency communications. Our PoPs are located in seven locations (California, Virginia, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, São Paulo) across five continents
• High availability and uptime: With a redundant infrastructure across multiple geographies and at least three local carrier connections across countries, Zentrunk promises 99.99% uptime
• Full redundancy: Redundant links reroute traffic over backup networks in less than two seconds in case of backbone failover 

We can integrate with all top players in the market from STT providers, LLM models and TTS providers. 

The best part? You get started by paying 40% less than all competitors. 

All you have to do is:

1. Sign up with Plivo.
2. Procure a number via the API or console.
3. Associate the number with an application responsible for initiating a call to the agent and establishing audio streaming over the WebSocket to your application. A sample reference is shown below.

At Plivo, Audio streaming is priced at $0.0040 per minute per stream, over and above the expected charges for voice minutes associated with a call. 

Note: Pricing is subject to change — check our pricing page for the most up-to-date information.

If you don’t already have a Plivo account, sign up today for free.

You can also connect with team Plivo to find out how we can help with your use case and get volume pricing for the same.

Supercharge your customers' interactions through audio streaming with Plivo powered AI voice agents.

We’re constantly and continually improving Plivo services, with particular attention paid to enhancements suggested by our users. Today we’re happy to announce two new APIs for Zentrunk, our SIP trunking service: the Trunk Properties API, which lets businesses create, modify, and update their SIP trunk configurations programmatically, and the Call Object API, which lets users retrieve Zentrunk call details records (CDR).

Trunk Properties API

Zentrunk users can already use the Plivo console to manage SIP trunk configuration and subresources such as credentials lists, IP access control lists, and origination URIs. But working in the console can be time-consuming when you have a lot of resources to manage. With the new API you can fetch and manage trunk properties programmatically, saving you time and effort. Our API documentation provides all the information you need to get started.

The Trunk Properties API offers Zentrunk users several benefits:

• Improved developer experience: The API lets service providers and enterprises create, modify, and delete SIP trunks programmatically.
• Access to subresources: The Trunk Properties API lets developers access subresources such as credentials, IP access control lists, and origination URIs, making it a complete trunk configuration management toolkit.
• Ease of use: The API uses standard RESTful web services, making it simple to integrate with existing systems.
• Enhanced security: The API supports authentication via Basic Auth, which enhances security.

Streamlined Zentrunk management

The Trunk Properties API transforms the process of setting up and managing SIP trunks. It offers an efficient and automated way to create, modify, and delete trunks. Its ease of use and real-time visibility features make it an excellent tool for service providers and enterprises. With the Trunk Properties API, users can streamline their SIP trunking service management and focus on delivering a better customer experience.

Call Object API

Our second new API addresses call details.

A call detail record, as you’d expect, contains all the details about a call. Until now you could view and export CDRs only by visiting Zentrunk > Logs on the Plivo console. The new Call Object API lets you retrieve CDRs for any completed calls using a variety of filters, saving you time and effort.

Zentrunk creates a Call object when an outbound call is initiated or when an inbound call is received. The Call object contains all of the information about completed calls. See our API documentation for complete details and code examples.

In brief, the Call Object API lets you retrieve all call records or retrieve calls for a given call UUID. The API supports filters that let you retrieve specific records based on different needs.

By using the Call Object API, Zentrunk customers can gain several benefits:

• Real-time data: The API provides real-time access to call data, allowing businesses to access and analyze information as it becomes available, without having to wait for manual exports or generate reports through the console.
• Improved automation: Businesses can automate the process of fetching CDRs and integrating their data into external systems for analytics, eliminating the need for manual data extraction.
• Improved call analytics: Businesses can use CDR information to gain insights into call patterns, call durations, and call costs, helping them make data-driven decisions to optimize their communication strategies.
• Efficient data retrieval: By using filters, businesses can perform targeted analyses of specific segments of their call data.
• Increased security and fraud detection: CDR information can help organizations detect unusual call patterns and identify potential security threats or fraudulent activities.
• Customized reporting: With data from the Call Object API, businesses can create reports tailored to their specific needs, allowing for more informed decision-making.

Try our new APIs

If you’re already a Zentrunk customer, we encourage you to peruse the documentation for the new APIs and consider how they could help your business. If you’re thinking about exploring the benefits of SIP trunking, we encourage you to sign up for a Plivo account, read our Quickstart Guide, and find out for yourself why people are so excited about SIP trunking.

SIP trunking lets you add phone lines that bypass the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and use VoIP instead. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, while trunking refers to an aggregation of multiple phone lines. Many businesses are moving to SIP trunking and away from traditional telephony to benefit from advantages such as quick provisioning, low costs, and no equipment to procure or maintain. Zentrunk is Plivo’s SIP trunking service.

You can create and manage outbound and inbound trunks from the Plivo console. The Zentrunk menu is the fifth icon on the console menu. When you click it, you’ll see an overview screen that gives you quick instructions on creating trunks.

Following the Overview submenu are choices for Outbound Trunks and Inbound Trunks. Under each, you can see a list of existing trunks and, as on the overview screen, there’s a button to create new ones.

Clicking on a trunk in the list brings up details about it. Here, for example, is what you might see for an outbound trunk.

You can modify trunk details and settings from this page, or delete a trunk you no longer use. The settings are covered in detail in our documentation.

You can get details about inbound trunks the same way by clicking on an item in the Inbound Trunks list.

If you want to set up a new trunk, our documentation guides you through the process and explains all of the fields and settings.

Moving down, the Other Settings menu brings up a screen that lets you set up geo permissions, which you can enable to help curb fraud.

Another Other Settings menu page lets you consent to Plivo storing and accessing logs and media packet capture files, which we can use to debug call quality and DTMF issues.

The penultimate menu choice, Logs, displays a log of outbound and inbound SIP calls. Clicking on a log entry displays a Message Details popup that gives you information about the call.

Finally, the pricing menu page gives you the costs for calls and phone number rental in every country in which Plivo supports SIP trunking.

Step right up for another tour

That’s a whirlwind tour through the Zentrunk features on the Plivo console. We’ve got similar looks for the Voice, Messaging, Lookup, and Phone Numbers menus.

The latest quarterly G2 rankings are out, and Plivo leads the pack.

Plivo was named a Leader in the Communications Platform as a Service category. We received the highest Satisfaction score among products in our category — 99 out of 100, as voted by actual users of our platform.

To celebrate, one of my colleagues suggested we ask a generative AI platform for “99 reasons to love Plivo.” That might be challenging even for a human (yes, we’re biased in favor of biological life forms), but maybe nine reasons? That seems more doable.

We put the question to several generative AI platforms.

• Copy.ai
• Chatsonic
• ChatGPT
• Writer
• Google Bard
• Bing Chat
• You Chat

We gave all of them the same simple prompt:

“Give me nine reasons why people love the CPaaS platform Plivo.”

What we got back was interesting. Each of the platforms was able to quote many of the themes we pride ourselves on, but not always in the same way.

Every tool cited pricing as an advantage, touting Plivo as “cost-effective,” “affordable,” and “attractive,” among other things.

A couple of the platforms talked about the flexibility of our integration and development tools. A couple of others mentioned flexible pricing. One highlighted the flexibility of our premium support plans.

Scalability was on almost every list. One platform referred to it as “robust infrastructure.”

All but one had a bullet about reliability, but that one did call us reliable under both “robust infrastructure” and “proven track record.”

Every one mentioned our global reach — which comes in handy at those big tables at large family reunions.

They all mentioned our excellent customer support.

Most of the platforms mentioned security.

Finally, as we got down toward the end of the list, we got some varied responses: customizability, innovation, multiple communication channels, robust API, advanced features, comprehensive documentation, and proven track record.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. And in fact we did say it ourselves, because generative large language models (LLM) like these tools train on large amounts of text, including, in all likelihood, our website and many other websites on which people have written about Plivo. They then string together likely combinations of words that can mimic expertise if the training based was good enough.

Generative AI platforms are not always right, however. In our case, while all of the good things were 100% correct, ChatGPT and Chatsonic noted that we offer video, and that’s not true. This is a good reminder not to rely on AI for your content. (This message was brought to you by your friendly local content marketer, who hopes to keep his job.)

Read what the robots wrote

Are you curious to see how each platform handled the answers? Let us know if you want us to post them verbatim on our LinkedIn page. Drop by there now and click that Follow button so you don’t miss them.

Global media company TMC just named Zentrunk, Plivo’s cloud-based SIP trunking solution, a 2023 Communications Solutions Product of the Year. It’s a threepeat for us — in 2021 and 2022 we won for our SMS API.

Zentrunk has evolved in the last year, capped by announcements of our new Trunk Properties API and Call Object API. A recent blog post shows you how easy it is to manage Zentrunk from the Plivo console.

In its blog post announcing the award, TMC says, “Winners represent prominent players in the market who consistently demonstrate the advancement of technologies. Each recipient is a verifiable leader in the marketplace.”

“This list encompasses the true leaders within their market segments,” says Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “Honorees truly represent the best-of-the-best communications products and solutions available today.” He called Zentrunk “truly an innovative product and is amongst the best communications products and services available on the market today.”

To see for yourself what the excitement is about, sign up today for a free trial.

If you’re planning a high-volume marketing campaign, you can save money by ensuring that the numbers you’re trying to reach are active and able to receive text messages. Number lookup can uncover deactivated numbers, landline numbers, and mobile numbers that can’t receive SMS.

Plivo introduced the Lookup API in 2020 to allow customers to programmatically determine information for any phone number worldwide. The Lookup API can also properly format numbers for use with our other APIs; improperly formatted numbers can cause calls and messages to fail. Number lookups also make economic sense in many regions, where the cost of a number lookup is less than the cost of sending a text.

What is number lookup?

You might be familiar with number lookup in the context of a reverse directory lookup, where, instead of finding a phone number for a name, you use the phone number to find out details about the person or business using it.

In the context of Plivo APIs, the Lookup API returns the phone number country, the number format, its carrier, and its type: fixed (landline), mobile, VoIP, or toll-free. Type is especially useful, as most landline numbers and many VoIP and toll-free numbers can’t accept SMS messages.  CPaaS platforms charge a fraction of a cent for every message sent, whether a number can accept SMS or not, so it’s worthwhile to eliminate invalid numbers from your target list.

For mobile numbers, the Lookup API relies on the Home Location Register, a global database that contains information about authorized subscribers to GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) networks. Fields returned include the mobile country code (MCC), mobile network code (MNC), and carrier name. These values map to fields of a unique ID for all mobiles phones — an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), which is associated with the SIM in the phone. The first three digits of the IMSI represent the MCC. The next two or three numbers represent the MNC. The remaining digits represent the Mobile Subscription Identification Number (MSIN) within the mobile operator’s customer base, a unique number that the carrier uses to identify a user’s mobile phone number.

Though it sounds as if the MSIN should be a subscriber’s mobile phone number, it’s not necessarily. When a subscriber changes their phone number, for example, they keep their original MSIN.

Lookup use cases

Number lookup can keep your business from wasting time and money sending text messages or making voice calls to invalid numbers or ones that have no value for your organization.

• Marketing — By looking up numbers and purging invalid ones from your database, you can save money by not contacting invalid numbers, and get higher response rates by eliminating the bad numbers before you reach out.
• Shipping and delivery — Number lookups confirm the validity of a customer’s contact phone, and while it can’t confirm a delivery address, it can serve as a first line of defense against fraud.
• Security — Many organizations use SMS to send one-time passwords to improve login security through two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s prudent to make sure that the numbers customers provide for this critical step are both valid and reachable. A similar argument applies to numbers supplied for logins to mobile apps.

Lookup on the Plivo console

While most people access it via code as part of their applications, you can do one-off lookups from the console. In the spirit of the console tours we did for SMS and voice, here’s a similar look at Lookup.

The Lookup Overview page is the fourth icon on the Plivo console menu. It displays a single screen.

A usage summary section tells you how many API requests you made in the last 7, 30, and 90 days.

Under that, another box lets you enter a phone number. Once you click Submit, the API retrieves information about the number, including its country, the number in various formats, and the carrier and number type, and displays it. Each lookup, whether executed in code or submitted via the console, costs 0.4 cents (US).

That’s all there is to it; we try to keep things simple around here.

Get started with Lookup

To get started with Plivo’s Lookup API, check out our documentation or read the FAQ page in our support portal.

To minimize spam texting in India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) mandates that all entities that want to send SMS messages must register information such as their entity/organization and message templates on distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms. Read our blog post for complete details.

Part of the registration process requires organizations to register message content templates. A content template includes the actual text of an SMS message to be sent, with space designated for variables where appropriate, such as an account number or balance.

SMS message content falls into four categories, and therefore so do content templates: transactional, service implicit, service explicit, and promotional. This table shows each type of content and shows how they differ from each other.

Finally, certain types of messages are always prohibited: political messaging during elections and gambling- and cryptocurrency-related content.

We’ve included all the information you need to know about registering on DLT platforms into an article in our support portal. It should guide you through registration for whichever content types you plan to use.

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