Text Messaging Featured Article

Retailers with brick-and-mortar stores are facing an incredible amount of competition from online merchants who are cutting costs to the bare minimum. While this is great for the consumer, it is getting increasingly more difficult to keep the doors of physical stores open. Established retailers are using different technologies as well an in-store experience to engage with their customers. Nordstrom, a fashion specialty retailer founded in 1901, has partnered with Twilio (News - Alert) to enrich the mobile experience for customers using multi-media messaging (MMS) communications.

Twilio is a software and cloud-based communications platform, enabling developers and businesses to rapidly build and deploy communication solutions. The company's new MMS solution allows organizations to send images on standard U.S. phone numbers.

Using this MMS technology Nordstrom sales associate will be able to text photos of merchandise to their customers, delivering a personalized service no algorithm will be able to duplicate. While this will not stop customers from going online to buy a cheaper item, this type of engagement can’t hurt the long term customer relationship with the company.

“Using the Nordstrom texting app NEXT, our salespeople are able to share recommendations, product images and timely reminders of upcoming events in a safe, secure and seamless manner with our customer in control of the experience at all times,” said Scott Jones, vice president of personalization at Nordstrom.

Prior to the introduction of this technology, MMS communication using short code was a time consuming and expensive process which could take months and cost the organization $10,000 or more annually. This new process on the other hand lowers the upfront costs to as little as one dollar and minutes instead of months. Pricing starts at $0.01 to receive and $0.02 to send with volume discount options.

“Twilio's goal is to make communications more accessible to developers and the companies they work for. In 2010, we introduced SMS text capabilities to the market and equipped organizations to disrupt whole markets with powerful and innovative customer experiences. Now, by enabling the immediate, low-cost ability to send and receive pictures, videos and more via Twilio's APIs, we're excited to enable a new generation of rich media applications. We can't wait to see what customers build,” said Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO.