Mobile payments, messaging and marketing specialists Fonix has added Zensend, an enterprise grade two-way messaging platform, to its suite of tools, providing developers and businesses with the ability to add SMS integration for apps and platforms worldwide.

The Zensend messaging API aims to make it simple for developers to integrate SMS tools into existing apps, enabling businesses to quickly execute messages to their audiences simultaneously, wherever they are, and with a high level of engagement.

While push notifications, OTT messaging and other more recent developments may offer more versatility, old-school SMS continues to provide a 98 per cent open rate for messages, with 90 per cent of opens occurring within three minutes of being received, making it one of the most responsive and cost effective ways of direct marketing to customers.

Zensend offers high-throughput bulk messaging through direct connections to every UK mobile operator, providing quality connections and avoiding non-legitimate so-called grey routes which are often used for messaging spam, and can often fail to deliver, or delay mission critical messaging such as user verification.

“Without a doubt providers of grey routes are damaging to the industry,” said Rob Weisz, CEO and founder of Fonix. “Whilst undermining price points for bulk messaging campaigns may be attractive to some brands, the long-term effect is a poor user experience and no guarantee that a message has been delivered.

“With Zensend, weve built a product that competes on price and also delivers on the quality of the connection. Messaging continues to be the most effective way of delivering communications to consumers – whether thats based on cost or engagement. We have invested a lot of time and technical know-how to make it easy to set up two-way messaging campaigns with any business and its customers.”