Do you want to send bulk SMS to inform your customers and prospects on Android mobile devices from the internet? To help you communicate easily and cost-effectively, SMS sending platforms are the ideal solution. You can take advantage of their features to easily grow or retain your customer base on Android mobile.
There are several players on the market. Octopush, like 123 SMS, offers comprehensive services for sending SMS in France and abroad. These specialists share other common features that we will present to you.

When should you schedule an SMS to be sent later?

Sending a scheduled SMS can be motivated by various reasons:

1. Compliance with current French legislation regarding commercial text messaging (see below).
2. Preparing mailing campaigns for specific events such as Valentine's Day, the holiday season, "Black Friday" (a sales phenomenon from the United States that is starting to grow in France), winter and summer sales, a new service, or any other major occasion.
3. Gains in efficiency and responsiveness. The goal: to adapt quickly to the market and reach out to your customers without depending on staff availability.
4. Sending a delayed SMS for more personal events, such as a birthday, for example.

What does current French legislation say?

In order to protect user privacy, current French legislation regulates text messaging activity by, for example, prohibiting the distribution of commercial texts at night (between 8:00 PM and 8:00 AM) and all day on Sundays (as well as public holidays) on Google Android mobile devices.

To comply with this legislation, it can be useful to send an SMS via email using the API, for example. You should know that theSMS API Octopush offers an option for delayed delivery.

How does it work? How do you set up this option?

The Octopush API allows you to delay a text message on Android or via email to your contacts. You can then set its date.

Integrating this option is very simple to implement. The technical documentation provided by Octopush is very clear; you just need to enter the following parameter: “sending_date” for each text message. This parameter is the value of the date in GMT+1 timestamp format.

For the development of your application, we highly recommend the Csharp language, also known as “C#”. This language was developed by Microsoft to serve as a development base for its .NET framework. It is an object-oriented language, which makes the development possibilities for your applications virtually endless. The language's code is very similar to Java, C++, and C.

To schedule the date of your text message using the C# SMS API in your applications, you will need to calculate its estimated date. Let's say, for example, that you want to send your SMS on March 14, 2016, at 9:00 AM. The “sending_date” parameter takes an integer value in timestamp format (the timestamp format is the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970; this format serves as a reference for many computer programs). This parameter is therefore in the following form: 1457182005 (which is equivalent to March 5, 2016, at 1:47 PM). Therefore, there are three crucial steps:

1. You must set your server's date to the GMT+1 time zone (Paris is synchronized to GMT+1 during winter and GMT+2 during summer);
2. Once your application server's time is synchronized, be sure to convert the desired date to timestamp format;
3. Then, integrate this value into each SMS.

To convert to timestamp format, you will need to use a special function in your program:

ToUnixTimestamp()

By performing the operation this way:

var timestamp = dateenvoisms .ToUnixTimestamp();
where datenvoisms corresponds to the desired date of the SMS.

Sending each text message can be managed via a special function in your application that will ensure each text is sent individually, or in batches of recipients. With the C# SMS API service, you can introduce custom variables. Also note that it is possible to link theprofessional SMS sending to a database (SQL Server), in particular to store information about each subscriber.