Bulk SMS Service Setup for Businesses: What you Need to Know?
Prasanna Dasari
Last updated on February 27th, 2024
4 min read
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Reading Time: 4 minutes
Bulk SMS is a wonderful tool for communicating and connecting with current and potential clients. It is a fantastic technique to spread the word about your company because people are more receptive to them than emails. It guarantees that your message reaches your audience and doesn’t get lost in the inbox spam, whether you’re informing clients about a system update or trying to advertise your most recent product offering.
A Couple of Stats that are Considered Here:
- According to a Statista study (kindly refer to their official website), mobile devices produced 52% of all online traffic in 2018. Additionally, this number is rising globally year over year.
- Additionally, according to several reports, response rates for SMS messages can reach up to 45%, with open rates as high as 98%. These numbers are much greater than those for email communications.
What Does that Mean for Us, Then?
Therefore, this is the way to go if you want your messages to be read. It can also be utilized to drive visitors to your website or e-commerce store so that customers can take action, as more and more online activity is done on mobile devices.
Go through the information below to learn how group messaging functions and benefits any organization.
- What it is
- How businesses are using it
- The essential steps to set up
- Campaign tips
What is Bulk Messaging?
As its name suggests, it is the preparation of sending numerous SMS messages to mobile devices. A specialized service is required to send out these large numbers of text messages quickly.
Businesses can send bulk messages using software programs or API integration with their website. These services typically integrate with an SMS gateway software to ensure messages are sent to the receivers irrespective of their place.
How are Companies Adopting Bulk SMS?
Every industry uses it, including banks, e-commerce sites, traditional stores, and technology firms.
Campaigns may be used for marketing, entertainment, or informational objectives. Here are some examples of business applications:
- Collecting payments
- Discount, offers, and sale alerts
- Coupon codes
- Product news
- Service notifications
- Feedback requests
- Survey links
- App download links
- Internal employee updates
- Emergency updates
- Reminders
Like email campaigns, these campaigns may be created and launched within minutes. Immediate SMSs enable organizations to respond to situations rapidly. Retail establishments can increase traffic on slow days or clear stock before the start of the next season. At the same time, marketers can act quickly in response to a competitor’s promotion or manage a PR issue.
Utilizing Bulk SMS for Your Company
Using a strong and reliable tool is the simplest approach to implement this. There are several options, including:
- ReplyBuy
- VoiceSage
- SendMode
- TextMagic
- BulkSMS by Vitel Global
- TechRepublic
Once you’ve decided on a tool, all you need to do is, open the app or website, log in, and then type or paste your text message and brand link. Most user interfaces will display your character count and services and allow you to customize your texts by adding the first and last names of the recipients and some more advanced options.
Additionally, you can select the sender name and the sender lists you want your messages to be sent to. Before you confirm, remember to look into the cost of your campaign.
Five Tips for Successful Bulk SMS Messages
Targeting this market should be done as much as feasible. The audience has probably already engaged with your company in some way, whether existing customers have chosen to receive SMS alerts or have made a past transaction. So this makes them excellent targets for marketing and research teams.
Here are five suggestions for writing powerful marketing messaging to help you connect with this warm audience:
1. Keep it Brief
Keep your message at most 160 characters. If you exceed this limit, your messages may appear uneven on older phones. Additionally, your costs will increase. Keeping things straightforward is important since shorter, briefer communications will impact the recipient’s moree.
2. Showcase the Name of Your Company
You don’t want an unknown number displayed at the top of your SMS. People are more likely to believe your message when it comes from your company name and is also certain that the text is not spam or dangerous. Additionally, it improves brand recognition and presents a graceful image. You can edit the sender ID on the majority of bulk SMS services. To accomplish this, however, you may need to register in some countries; be sure to check this out.
3. Personalize your Messages
Even though multiple SMS campaigns are distributed widely, you may customize your messages. Based on the date in your database, you can customize your messages while sending SMS. Mention an account number, a person’s name, or the date and time of an occurrence. Consider how you want to customize your messages when designing fields for your sign-up pages and database.
4. Include a Branded Link
You only have 160 characters to say your information, so you should abbreviate the URL you what to include in your SMS message. Use a branded URL, and make it click-friendly rather than a shortened common link.
Branded links appear more professional and can increase click-through rates by up to 39%. They attract more clicks because people trust them and can see where the link goes.
Using a short link should be flexible to edit your link whenever you want. It’s impossible to edit an SMS once it’s been sent. But under the Vitel global dashboard, you can change the link’s final resting place.
Vitel SMS is simple to integrate into your mass sms strategy. Use our tool along with the SMS service of your choice, or use Bulk SMS API to automate the procedure.
5. Track and Keep an Eye on Your Results
You can carefully track effective campaigns by adding UTM parameters to your brand URLs. You can determine which wording, subjects, and call to action encourage customer involvement in this way. Even the conversion process will be visible to you. As a result, you may make better judgments moving forward and enhance each mass SMS campaign you conduct.
6. Beyond Bulk SMS
SMS messaging services have developed to satisfy the needs of contemporary businesses as improved targeting and personalization become more desired in marketing and customer support messages. Besides this messaging, many platforms offer additional capabilities, like sending individual texts for passwords, delivery status updates, and verification codes. Some services now offer interactive messaging features. Now that your outgoing with this campaign has resulted in inbound messages, these can interact with those messages.
This messaging isn’t going anywhere soon, even though it has been around for a while. It will continue to be a preferred tool for companies of all sizes due to its high engagement levels and the new capabilities in SMS communications. It’s time to start using this campaign if you still need to as part of your customer care or marketing plan.
