Placing SMS links on your web pages

Overview

Quiq will allocate one or more SMS/MMS numbers for each of your business units. Your existing phone numbers may not support MMS. It’s therefore recommended that you promote the Quiq number on your web page as the primary SMS/MMS number and continue to use your existing voice numbers for voice.

If a customer calls your SMS/MMS number, Quiq will forward the call to your voice number. Conversely, if a customer texts your voice number, we’ll work with your provider to forward the text to your Quiq SMS/MMS numbers.

Please do not promote the Quiq number as your primary voice number. These SMS/MMS numbers are not intended to be used for heavy voice traffic and are reserved for occasional voice traffic only.

You can take the SMS/MMS numbers with you should you choose to leave Quiq.

HTML Support for SMS

HTML has a standard for supporting SMS links. Most modern mobile browsers support this syntax.

<a href="sms:+14065558878">Text us</a>

It is important to prefix the number with “+1” for international support.

When a customer visits your site from their mobile browser, they can touch the link and the default SMS application will open on their phone, with the SMS number populated.

Desktop users

Since desktop users cannot text, your web pages should detect a desktop user and replace the link with the actual number. Users can then use their phones to text you.

For example, the link above should be replaced with something like:

<div> Text us at +1 (406) 555-8878</div>

There are many code samples on the web used to detect if the visitor is using a mobile device. This is one Javascript library. Here is another example on Stack Overflow.