Happy holidays from your team at seven

We wish you a happy holiday season and thank you for your trust.

Another year is drawing to a close and once again it has been filled with challenges, bright spots, but also setbacks for many companies. We have seen clearly this year that many companies are adapting their strategies to the New Normal and are opting for flexible, uncomplicated and reliable communication channels in order to be able to cope with short-term changes. However, many companies also expanded their communication strategies due to the greater focus on digital marketing of products and services. Let’s take a look together at the changes that have taken place this year at your company and ours, and try to predict what will happen next year.

Another year full of challenges

First of all, we would like to thank you for your trust. We were pleased to welcome many new customers this year and our existing customers also realized numerous interesting projects in which we are happy to support them. Thank you also for your questions, your praise and your criticism – thanks to your feedback we can constantly improve our service and adapt it to your needs.
We at seven wish you, your colleagues and employees, your friends and family happy holidays, good health and a great start into the new year.

What happened at seven this year?

This year we went with a colorful mix of home office and work at the actual office and a Christmas party in the middle of June. We even had Christmas decorations – but it was a little too warm for mulled wine. When coming back to our office, we also upgraded the interior. However, we remain flexible and have also improved our home office options. So it goes without saying that most of our team works from the home office at this time, too.

Speaking of which, our team has also grown: Jan has been with us since October 2021 and helps our customers achieve their goals as our Inside Sales Manager. We are happy about his competent support and wish him a continued good start in the world of business SMS solutions. If you are interested in one of our products, Jan will be happy to advise you in a personal meeting.

Want to learn how our products can help your business?
Book a meeting with us.

Changes and new functions

Of course, we have again adapted, improved and added features for you this year as well.

For example, we improved the set up for webhooks in our webapp, making it even easier for you to use them for your projects.
The possibility to set up webhooks can be found under the menu item Developer, which we also added this year to make our webapp even more intuitive to use.

Under the Developer menu item, you can also now specify a respective scope of validity for your individual API Keys. For example, it’s possible to create an API Key that is only meant for querying your balance, to minimize the risks if your API Key ever falls into the wrong hands.

Another new feature we added this year: You can now send attachments in SMS. This feature is especially handy, for example, if you want to send a document via SMS but don’t want to send a link of your own. We are often asked if it is possible to send pictures in an SMS – the attachment function is a compromise here, because the fact that an SMS cannot contain a picture file is based on technical circumstances.

As a reminder: You can view all adjustments to our products and service at any time in our changelog.

The industry in 2021

As already mentioned, this year we were once again able to support numerous customers in the realization of their projects. We were able to observe that this year around 150% more SMS were sent than in the previous year. Normally, this growth was between 70 and 100% in our case before the pandemic.

This strong increase could be observed throughout the industry and is not surprising: more and more companies use SMS as an efficient and uncomplicated medium in uncertain times, be it for notifications, alerts or in marketing.

Learn more about selected projects of our customers in our case studies.

What do we expect for the year 2022?

As things stand at present, we assume that the heavy use of SMS will at least remain the same, but will probably continue to increase more strongly than before. This assumption is of course based not least on the current pandemic situation and the empirical values of the past months. But even beyond pandemic use, the sending of A2P SMS will increase, firstly in marketing and secondly because of the easy ways in which SMS can be integrated into projects of all kinds.

The use of SMS in conversational marketing is likely to grow particularly strongly. In Germany, too, many companies are starting to offer consultations via Messenger and it is a logical step to also offer consultation via SMS, because it is much more accessible, can easily be made GDPR-compliant and, under certain conditions, promotional content is also allowed.
Individualized SMS can kickstart a positive conversation, and consulting via SMS reaches not least those customers who have reservations about using common messengers.

Another trend we have seen for some time is the use of low- or no-code workflows in companies. Here, too, it is easy to integrate SMS into individual projects, especially if we already offer an integration for the respective software. What is particularly pleasing here is the fact that even more complex projects can be handled without programming knowledge. Of course, we also offer resources for developers that will help them to integrate an SMS service into their project. We recommend to keep an eye on our GitHub repositories as well.

We wish you a successfull year

This year we faced challenges together and realized new plans. We hope that we will accompany you in your projects in the coming year and that our products will meet your needs perfectly. If you have any questions about our service or our products, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are also happy to receive requests for future integrations or general feedback. We wish you relaxed and happy holidays and we look forward to communicating with you again in 2022.

Happy holidays
Your sms77 team

Header image by Daria-Yakovleva via pixabay.com, cropped and edited background color.

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