Mass texting is a business communications strategy that enables you to send a single text message to a large group of recipients simultaneously. It's ideal for reaching a mass proportion of your target audience in minimal time. Text messages – which can either be SMS or MMS – leverage cellular networks for widespread, reliable message delivery.
Let's examine what mass SMS messages can do for your business.
Using mass SMS messages for business
Mass text messaging is used by a variety of businesses for both internal and external communications. It's also commonly used by organizations to send business-critical information to customers and employees. Here are some specific use cases for mass texting.
Promoting your offerings
Retail and e-commerce businesses use SMS to cast their nets wide and send out blanket marketing messages, such as flash sale notifications, special offers, loyalty discounts, product launch announcements, and seasonal updates. You can even include a link inside an SMS to a dedicated landing page where the user can take further action.
Increasing brand awareness
You can help build recognition for your products or services through mass texting campaigns. Consistency is the key to brand awareness, so a tactical approach could be to send one blanket text per week over a couple of months to ensure your brand is front of mind. The greater brand awareness you have, the more successful your business will be.
Capturing customer feedback
A business texting app is invaluable for sending out feedback requests. It's so quick and easy for consumers to respond – you can even send out a whole series of questions this way. Alternatively, you could direct subscribers to your website to leave a detailed review.
Sending emergency notifications and announcements
During the COVID-19 pandemic, all of the UK's mobile networks worked with the government to send out a ‘stay at home' text message. Millions of people were contacted in this way. While this is an extreme example, mass texting is essential when you need to inform employees or customers about a crisis situation or something important.
Large enterprises, particularly those with a mobile workforce, often use text messaging to keep staff updated with company news and updates. For example, a power outage at the office might mean that staff need to work from home temporarily. A blanket text could be sent instantly so that everyone affected is notified timely.
Announcements can also be of a non-urgent nature. For instance, non-profit organizations send out bulk texts to gather support and collect donations from their patrons and benefactors.
Why your business will benefit from a mass text message service
There are several reasons why you must choose the very best mass texting service as part of your overall marketing strategy.
Using a mass text app is super convenient and saves a tremendous amount of time when sending out communications. Imagine a retail store wanting to tell all its customers about a fantastic sale running over the weekend. It would be virtually impossible to inform all customers manually, individually.
Sure, this retail business could send an email campaign instead or put out an announcement on social media. Still, the impact of those communications wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as a text message. For instance, text messages are much more effective than email in terms of open and response rates. Only 20% of emails get opened, and 6% achieve a response. Whereas 98% of texts are opened and 45% are responded to.
Secondly, mass SMS messaging is also more cost-effective and scalable than many other marketing channels. It's often cheaper to send text messages than to carry out social media advertising, printed ads, direct mail campaigns, or voice calls.
And, if you choose the right bulk texting app to send messages en masse, you'll find that the price per text reduces. The more you send, the more affordable the campaign. Usually, you'll pay for the number of texts you want to send monthly, taking into account the destination country where your subscribers reside.
Thirdly, many people prefer receiving SMS text messages over voice calls. (One-third of Americans, in fact.) This is mainly because it takes less time to read a text than it does to have a phone call. Texts are also less intrusive and disruptive.
SMS is also better for accessibility, not just for people who are hearing impaired but to compensate for patchy network connections. It means broken conversations ("Hello? Are you still there? HELLO?!") can be avoided.
Features to look for when choosing a business texting app
If you want to send bulk SMS messages for business, you'll need to use a mass text message app (commonly called an SMS provider or service). There are plenty of SMS companies on the market today, each offering different features and levels of service. To compare them adequately, make sure you take the following factors into account.
1. Delivery rates
What kind of reach does the mass text message service provider offer? Not all of them will have access to global networks – this is important if your target audience is located all over the world or you want to target a very specific region.
Check whether delivery is guaranteed. If so, to what percentage? You won't find a mass text app with a 100% delivery rate as this isn't realistic – you must take into account any mobile network errors or invalid numbers. But you'll want reassurance that delivery rates are high. For example, Messente's customers often reach delivery rates above 90%.
Ask for real-time delivery statistics and review client case studies before making a decision.
2. Platform security
How safe and secure will your business data be? Not only will you be handling mobile phone numbers, but you could also be sending out one-time PIN codes to enable account logins or transmitting other forms of sensitive data via SMS.
Check how the provider collects, stores, and processes data relating to your business as well as your customers and subscribers. You'll want a mass texting app with secure architecture in order to comply with global privacy laws (which are more complex in some countries than others).
3. Ease of use
Is the mass text app you've got your eye on easy to use? What's the user interface like – is it simple to navigate, or will you have to undertake rigorous training to use it? Ideally, the app should be self-explanatory and straightforward enough for you and your employees to use immediately.
4. Scheduling and automation options
One feature that will save you time over the long term is message automation and scheduling. For example, it would be hugely convenient to automatically send a welcome text to every new subscriber that joins your SMS subscriber list. Or automatically send an order confirmation when someone makes a purchase online.
Text message scheduling is also essential, especially if you have busy periods where you don't have time to compose and send an SMS marketing campaign.
An example is Black Friday – one of the biggest online shopping holidays of the year. It would be much easier to draft your messages a few weeks before the event itself. And then trigger scheduled texts to arrive during the run-up to Black Friday (when you'd be busy getting stock ready and your fulfilment side in order).
5. Analytics
Finally, check whether these mass text messaging apps offer reporting tools or ways to analyze and measure the performance of your SMS campaigns. Seeing whether your audience is opening and interacting with your content is crucial and will inform future campaigns.
If you notice a spike in unsubscribes, this indicates that your campaigns aren't being received as well as they should. You may be sending them too frequently, at the wrong times, or the message content itself isn't hitting the mark.
7 best mass texting apps for sending bulk text messages
We've compiled a list of the best mass text apps that are optimal for business text messaging, with a comparison of the key features they offer as well as their pricing packages. Do note that none of these tools offers unlimited free mass text messaging. You might be able to find websites for free texting online, but they usually aren't bothered about the kind of quality of service they're providing and generally have no regard for user data privacy laws.
1. Messente
With its two-way SMS offerings, Messente takes pride in empowering its users to engage their customers in valuable conversations. Operational since 2012, Messente has helped 1500+ client businesses spread their marketing messages to over 190 countries, aggregating more than 1200 cell networks all over the world.
The basic features offered by Messente's mass text software include personalized text messaging services, shortcodes, keywords, scheduling, two-factor authentication, and various reporting and analytics tools. You can also easily integrate Messente's well-documented API with Slack, Facebook Lead Ads, Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, and various other apps via Zapier. Messente offers free support to all of its customers regardless of their messaging volumes. You can test out their tools for free.
Messente's pricing page features a handy SMS cost calculator to help interested customers get quick estimates to send messages, depending on the recipients' countries of residence and the volume of text messages they want to send to each country. If the number of mass texts you expect to send exceeds a certain number, you'll be eligible for exclusive, cost-effective volume pricing. The convenient and affordable pay-as-you-go pricing model means you only pay for the texts you send in a certain period of time. There are no hidden fees, the billing process is extremely transparent, and you can get an accurate quote for any campaign you wish to run before you run it. If you don't want to commit to a contract right away, you can get free bulk text messaging for a short free trial period.
2. Trumpia
Founded in 2006, Trumpia is a marketing software vendor based in California, US. Besides its text messaging service, Trumpia also provides tools for other marketing activities such as email marketing, social media marketing, and voice broadcast.
Depending on the package you choose, Trumpia offers a range of core features, including mass messaging services with varying monthly limits, two-way messaging, keywords, multimedia messages, text-to-vote, and link-shortening, along with reporting tools. Some of these features can be tested as part of their free trial. They have helpful tutorials on their website which can otherwise be a bit overwhelming and difficult to navigate through.
There are six different core plans that they offer for varying prices. The number of monthly SMSes, emails, contacts, and keywords, along with the level of support you receive, changes depending on the plan you select. Then they have five more advanced plans, with some more technical features billed on top of the core services offered. These are more expensive than the core plans.
3. JookSMS
JookSMS's targeted mass texting software caters to businesses of all sizes operating in a wide range of industries, from retail and real estate to religious organizations. It offers most of the standard features that are also offered by quite a few other marketing platforms. This feature set includes mass messaging, two-way communication, contact management tools, scheduling, automation, tags, and, for additional costs, long-distance and toll-free numbers.
The packages listed on their pricing page seem quite simple and straightforward, but they are estimated based on messages to the US and Canada only. Rates can increase significantly if you want to send SMS messages to other regions or countries. There are three monthly packages and three yearly packages: Prepaid, Basic, and Gold. All packages offer varying numbers of text messages with a similar set of features across the board.
The text message marketing software offered by JookSMS is a bit lesser known than other mainstream bulk text message services. Regardless of that, current long-time customers of JookSMS seem to be quite happy with the responsiveness of the customer support team, along with the fact that their engagement model is flexible in terms of penalty-free cancellation.
4. Sakari
Another bulk text messaging software provider based in California, Sakari has been on the market for a relatively short amount of time, having been founded in 2016. In spite of that, it has built a decently sized customer base for itself.
The company offers a host of features apart from mass text messages, such as campaign scheduling, contact management, two-way messages, landline messaging, multi-media messages, and automatic replies. The software is capable of integration with third-party apps such as HubSpot, Cradle, and many others.
Based on the countries where you want to run your SMS marketing campaigns and the number of text messages you want to send and receive, the pricing can vary. Costs and packages are fixed for up to 25,000 SMSes, beyond which their team will offer you a custom package. For all packages, your remaining credits can be rolled over for the next 90 days. You can book a free demo by registering via Sakari's website, or sign up for a free trial where you can test out all features of the software for a limited time, i.e., 14 days, with $5 worth of SMS credits.
5. Salesmsg
An offshoot company of an older phone-based marketing company called Call Loop, Salesmsg was born out of the founders' realization that text messaging offered great potential for marketing campaigns.
The software offers a plethora of features to its users, all of which are accessible with a dashboard that is easy to use and navigate. These include local and toll-free numbers, landline texting, opt-in and opt-out management, automated and one-click replies, scheduling, emojis, and tags. You can also send MMS messages with various attachments, such as photos and PDFs. A shared inbox, along with the ability to take notes internally, enhances collaboration across marketing teams. The service offers integrations with numerous apps such as Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Aircall.
Salesmsg lists several price bands for varying numbers of text messages per month, starting from $25 per month for 500 messages. Dedicated account managers and premium support services are also provided, but only to customers signing up for 5,000 or more texts. For customers with a requirement of over 10,000 SMS messages, Salesmsg's team is available to discuss custom pricing packages.
6. TextMarks
TextMarks has been operational since 2006 and has garnered an impressive customer base over the years, comprising thousands of businesses of all sizes. Their services, however, are only available in the US.
The wide range of SMS marketing services provided by TextMarks includes sending mass text messages, dynamic automatic replies, subscriber management with advanced grouping and segmentation options, custom keywords, shortcodes, API integration, phone support, and SMS campaign performance monitoring and reporting tools. The business SMS app can be managed via an intuitive interface.
Compared to other companies that offer services for text message marketing campaigns, TextMarks seems to prioritize catering to customers with a much higher monthly requirement. Their packages start from a 35,000-text bundle that costs a whopping $549 per month, which is their Platinum package. They also have an Enterprise plan for up to 100,000 monthly SMS messages, beyond which a custom plan can be drawn up for you with discounted bulk pricing.
7. Omnisend
This one isn't solely a mass SMS marketing platform. Omnisend provides an automation solution that focuses primarily on email marketing and combines it with web push notifications, SMS, and other channels as an added benefit. Their product is built especially for e-commerce businesses.
Omnisend's bulk texting software includes personalization, pre-built workflows, global reach (for varying prices), two-way conversation, MMS, opt-in and contact list management, and reporting tools.
For businesses looking to experiment with mobile marketing with limited resources, Omnisend offers a free package with a limited number of emails, SMSes, and other marketing features. Additionally, the pricing page lists Standard and Pro packages, the cost of which changes depending on the number of people you want to reach via your campaign. However, due to the primary focus being on email marketing, the SMS offering pales in comparison.
Picking the best mass texting app for your business
Many different businesses use a mass text app for SMS services and to send other crucial communications. Text messaging is affordable, impactful, and often preferred by customers compared to other channels.
When researching the best mass text message apps, consider the main features described above – delivery rates, platform security, usability, scheduling, and reporting. Also, make sure to check the level of support available too. If you run into problems, you'll want the peace of mind that they'll be resolved quickly. Watch out for providers that only offer online chat support or an online knowledge base.
Ready to see what mass text messaging can do for your business? Try Messente today – create a free account.
