Posted on April 23rd, 2016
This weekend, we launched V2 of the Clearstream SMS marketing platform. Finally.
What started as a major feature update a year ago turned into a complete overhaul of our SMS platform from the ground up. It has a similar feel to V1, but that's where any similarities end. As we stated in an earlier post, we started dealing with an increasingly bloated software. Ugh. How does this happen one might ask? Good question. Our product roadmap is built on a few important criteria: customer feedback,...
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Posted on September 22nd, 2015
This year, we’ve been terribly busy rebuilding the Clearstream platform from the ground up, complete with a new REST API, and other goodies. It looks incredible, it’s fast, and much more scalable. rabbit trail One of the primary values here at Clearstream is to listen to customer’s needs, and then build what they’re asking for (as long as it fits our product roadmap). It’s a great strategy for building a customer-centric company, but is comes at a cost. A big problem we were starting to face...
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Posted on May 12th, 2015
SMS message marketing is an amazing way to contact your interested consumers. Text messages are about as personal as you can get now-a-days. And, almost everyone you know (unless you live in a cave) has a cell phone. In addition to it’s intimacy-factor and reach, SMS message marketing is extremely affordable and offers an amazing return on investments for businesses when used correctly.
If you are ready to give it a go, it’s really important that you are setup for success! We’ve compiled a...
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Posted on March 18th, 2015
I’d argue with almost anyone that the best sport in the history of ever is soccer. I actually grew up playing quite a few sports competitively. As you might guess, one of those sports was soccer. But, another was Track & Field (though I excelled mainly on the Track, doing sprints like I was high-tailing it from the devil himself). After years of cleat marks and hard lefts, I hear the word “vertical” and automatically think of my high school coach, clipboard in hand, pen posed, asking,...
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Posted on March 10th, 2015
Just this morning, I went shopping to pick out some string lights for my back patio. I got to the outdoor aisle, saw the light section and though, "This’ll be a snap!" But I was sorely mistaken. I kid you not, there were at least 15 options. Different styles, different bulbs, solar or electric, green wires or white. Just as I was trying to get my two year old to make the final decision for me, another woman turned down the same aisle. She caught part of the conversation, shook her head a...
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Posted on February 17th, 2015
A few months ago we began offering a new way to add SMS message credits for Clearstream customers. We call it “Pay As You Go” and it is exactly like it sounds. "Pay As You Go" gives our customers the ability to purchase bundles of SMS message credits that rollover each month.
We always (like, always always) listen to our customers. In fact, our awesome listening skills and customer service (along with our seriously killer product) are what makes Clearstream so loved. When our customers...
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Posted on February 3rd, 2015
There are a lot of questions that plague our society. For example; What in the world does IMHO stand for? What's really the best combination of pizza toppings? And, what exactly is SMS Marketing?
Don’t worry! In the next few sentences, I'll be able to clear up these first two questions fairly quickly…. IMHO is Internet slang for “in my humble opinion”. And, the answer to the best pizza toppings is simply sausage, pepperoni, cheese, mushrooms and onions. (That’s just IMHO, mind you.) The last...
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Posted on August 12th, 2014
ZenPayroll offers a comprehensive, incredibly user-friendly payroll service.
As a startup, two of our biggest headaches are payroll and accounting. Last year, we solved our accounting headaches by ditching Quickbooks and moving to Xero. Finally, we’ve now also dropped our antiquated payroll company and switched to ZenPayroll, and we couldn’t be happier.
For a long time we were using another large online payroll company. I wouldn’t say we had an incredibly bad experience. We never ran into...
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Posted on August 1st, 2014
Smartphones are quickly becoming the primary platform for making donations to non-profits and churches. As web traffic moves away from desktop and to mobile, there is a big need among non-profit organizations for a reliable and simple way to make collect donations through smartphones.
Let's breakdown the two primary ways to enable mobile giving for your organization. One is actually better than the other.
Text-to-Give through Wireless Carriers
This is a popular option for very large...
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Posted on July 10th, 2014
We've released a host of new features this month, including the ability to easily capture email addresses from your subscribers.
Capturing email addresses has been a very popular feature request for a few months. Now, we've made it incredibly easy to both capture and export subscriber email addresses. All you need to do is enable the feature on your MANAGE ACCOUNT page, and then simply ask your subscribers for their email addresses, either in a message blast or in an auto-response...
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