Transforming an SMS Campaigns Startup into a Multifunctional SMS Marketing Platform

Business challenge

An Israeli SMS campaigns startup decided to expand their business and was looking for a skilled, experienced, and reliable partner to develop an idea for a multifunctional SMS marketing platform. Starting from a simple SaaS product, our client built a solution that successfully delivered SMS notifications to multiple subscribers upon request. Yet over time, they grew out of their simple SMS marketing software and wanted to turn it into a multifunctional platform with a number of features.

The future platform was to be equipped with additional capabilities such as:

• Multi-language input, including support for right-to-left languages like Hebrew
• Support for Unicode and emoji characters in messages
• Storage of all messaging data for a seven-year period
• Multi-currency transaction support
• Blacklisting and whitelisting
• Two-factor authentication
• And more

The most challenging part of the client’s request was developing a cloud-agnostic product architecture that could be deployed on-premises for security reasons. Considering the client’s tight budget and the relatively high cost of on-premises deployment, the Intellias team was looking for the best way to satisfy the client’s requests and significantly cut development costs.

Solutions delivered

After a thorough analysis of our client’s request, the Intellias team developed a unique architecture for a unified communications system. For several reasons, on-premises development turns out to be more expensive than cloud services. Apart from high hardware, electricity, and maintenance costs, on-premises development requires tediously building the whole infrastructure from scratch. On the contrary, cloud solutions have pre-built architectures available for customization.

To cut costs for SMS marketing platform development, Intellias experts decided to base the solution on the AWS Stack and rely on AWS-managed services to build a unique architecture with the flexibility to be deployed either on-premises (via a Kubernetes-based deployment) or in the cloud with minor investments and changes.

Apart from being relatively easy to implement, this architecture allowed us to realize new features for blacklisting and whitelisting, storing messages for seven years, and supporting multiple languages and currencies.

Additionally, the newly created architecture can expand any software for SMS marketing with:

• E2E omnichannel management with extended functionality to manage notifications, templates, and queues
• Support for various communication channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, and email
• An event hub for real-time handling of events streams for various producers
• Voice of the customer for measuring net promoter score (NPS) right after actual usage
• Customer support in the form of manual or AI-driven chats or answering bots
• A2P messaging as API GW functionality for clients
• Emergency communication for alerts from 911, fire departments, etc.
• Campaign management enabling bulk SMS sending, handling, and reprocessing

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Business outcome

By creating a unique architecture that can be deployed both on-premises and in the cloud, Intellias has significantly pushed the client’s SMS marketing software solutions forward. The structure is flexible enough to create unified messaging or communications platforms and to be used for specific use cases, such as emergency communications or government solutions.

Even though the solution relies on the AWS stack and AWS-managed services, it was designed in a completely cloud-agnostic way, allowing for quick on-premises adaptation using Kubernetes and significantly cutting deployment costs. The platform’s functionality can also be expanded by external SaaS platforms, allowing for the addition of features such as invoicing and billing without the need to build functionality from scratch.