With almost everyone owning a cell phone these days, business mails messaging has become an affordable and effective communication method. A mass texting service will allow you as a business owner to send messages to large groups of subscribers. Also referred to as bulk texting, many businesses use mass texting services to send a blanket message to their target markets.
For instance, imagine a retail business running a holiday sale and needs to communicate to its ideal audience. A mass texting service would for one, help such a business save time since texting customers manually would be labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Secondly, a a research study by Dynmark found that text messages have an open rate of 98% compared to emails which have an open rate of nearly five times less than SMS messages.
Now that it’s clear how important a mass texting service is to a business, how should the business go about choosing a mass texting service or by sending mass emails considering the plethora of options on the market today?
Here’s a list of factors every business owner should consider while scouting the ideal mass texting service.
1. Make Sure the Service Understands Your Needs
With the many companies operating within different sub-niches in different industries, the best text messaging service should be able to understand the unique needs of each business.
As a business owner, you’ll find numerous text messaging solutions but you need one that has a certain level of experience in your industry. This will help the solutions provider curate a comprehensive and powerful package for your business needs.
2. How Powerful Are The Solutions Provided by the Service
A lot of mass texting solutions providers over promise but underdeliver when it comes to serving their clients. For this reason, you should try and find solutions provider that offers the best value for your money.
Consider what the solutions provider does to stand out from the competition but also reflect on if your business really needs everything that the solutions provider offers.
3. What Are You Communicating
The information you intend to send out will have a say in what company you choose to work with. While all bulk messaging software can send text, some are used to share videos, pictures, and links. As such, you need to be clear on what you’re sending and what sort of response you expect from your message’s CTA (call to action).
4. The Cost of the Service
You also need to consider the cost of your investment. Make sure you ask for service quotations from different solutions providers and compare their prices. You also need to factor in how much you expect back in ROI. Are you looking to gain more website traffic, make more sales, or create brand awareness?
5. How Accessible Is the Service
Another factor that you should also consider is how you’re going to access the texting service for your business; can you log in to your account through your phone, tablet, or mobile device.
A lot of mass mailing services are computer-oriented. However, if your business operations are handled mostly from on-field mobile devices, then you might require mobile support. In light of this, try and make sure the business texting service you choose to use offers an all-in-one solution that gives users the same experience and features when accessed from any device.
6. Consider the Phone Number Assigned to Your Business
Mass texting services usually accord their clients 5 or 6 digit numbers as the identity of the business. These numbers work great, especially during massive text marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, they only allow for one-way communication between a business and its clients. Customers and contacts of a business aren’t allowed to respond.
However, texting your clients from a 10-digit number gives off the impression that the message they’ve received came from a real person they can respond to. Businesses that use this approach usually get feedback from their clients. These numbers also use local area codes, thus making the business look more in touch with its customers.
7. Text Message Scheduling
A good business text messaging service should allow you to schedule your messages. This feature will allow you to better plan your campaign accordingly. You need to use a platform that allows you to set the date and time to deliver your message as per the timezone of your contacts.
Keep in mind that this feature varies among different messaging services so you need to be aware of whether your ideal platform allows for this functionality and the dynamics of how it works.
The Bottom Line
With that said, setting up a mass texting service for your business is very easy and straightforward.
All you have to do once you’ve selected the right provider to suit your business needs is to create an account and to upload your contacts database (those who’ve provided consent to be contacted by SMS). Proceed to create a text message campaign to be delivered to your set audience and you should be good to go!
