Amazon Web Services offers the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) which provides pub/sub messaging and push notifications to iOS and Android devices. It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.
$0.01
per 1 million
ClickSend
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
ClickSend aims to help businesses communicate with their customers and staff in the moments that matter on the channels, they use every day. ClickSend is designed to power billions of messages worldwide and offers a full suite of communications products from SMS and rich messaging to letters and fax all done via online dashboard or API.
Using SNS for any notification use case where available is the default and defacto solution. It directly integrates with SES to configure both incoming email and email delivery responses.
Additionally, any notifications, such as CloudWatch alarms, are a good use case for SNS topics and allow us to fan out delivery as needed (pagerduty, email, etc)
ClickSend is not for activation account SMS. For that, you can use services like TWILIO. Neither is it for having continuous communication with your users, like a kind of chat over SMS (becomes expensive). Better to try to route your users to a common customer communication tool like Facebook Messenger or something.
It is definitely suitable for outbound marketing campaigns to already registered users. Some exmples would be to send a communication annoucement, send a general offer to all your database of users, to send offers to a particular segment of users by filtering them, automated marketing campaigns based on users who join lists (users that just register and you send 1-5 welcome SMS with tips and tricks on how to better use your product, SMS to users who have an issue with payment method so they can check quickly with its bank, automated SMS with offers each time the user makes a trip, a buy, or gets more engaged with the product).
At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.
It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.
The AWS documentation is well maintained and has lots of information which makes it easier for developers to refer to and develop applications in a fast efficient manner. It is well documented with examples which is easy to understand and implement. You can also get help by posting into forums from like-minded developers.
In general, support is good. Actually they usually write to you about things like when you upload your first contacts, send your first campaign, or when you forget to put the opt-out option. Of course, they are automated emails but it happens that if you reply to one of them a real support agent will attend to your case. If you have any doubt you can write directly to support by email. I'm not sure if they are using Zendesk or any other kind of program but they usually answer in less than 2 hours. Still, the option of an actual real-time chat is missing.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is well integrated in AWS and has been there since the early days of public cloud. It is a cost effective and very inexpensive solution to meet the needs of event notifications and custom messaging. Wish to share that there is considerable number of developers who can easily build solutions using AWS SNS. So, training costs are minimal. Other solutions are emerging and we are seeing a great usage especially of Firebase notifications because of its very neat integration with open source cross platform hybrid app frameworks like ionic, xamarin. SNS needs to become better and should have plugin support for the mobile application developers using low code/no code tools too.
The starting price of ClickSend is significantly low, and one is not bailed, instead, they pay for what they use. ClickSend works in almost all devices, from Apple products, Windows, and even Android devices. The existence of intelligent mail support is another driver that makes ClickSend more advanced and reputable, as it tracks the minds of audiences and even employees.
Cost of alert calls to the different stakeholders across different geographies have gone down since using Amazon SNS.
Amazon SNS has saved a lot of time for the employees that they used to spend to call multiple stakeholders so they can now focus more on productive tasks.
Amazon SNS usage needs prior knowledge of programming.
The ROI is time. More time focused, less time distracted with a mobile device.
Early days, however the customer survey and marketing campaigns will hopefully yield results.
Customer adherence to appointments and/or rescheduling for missed appointments has drastically increased with the use of reminder and follow-up SMS options that normally wouldn't be used as often on a mobile device.
