Introduction
In spite of so many advancements in communication channels, SMS is still something that is largely preferred by both businesses and common folks. And did you know SMS has the highest (98%) ‘message open’ rate as opposed to emails, Facebook, etc.? No wonder why most successful businesses still rely on SMS to reach out to their customers. And for this, a widely used feature that business owners utilize is mass texting or bulk texting. If you are unsure about how to send a mass text message then keep on reading to find out the easiest and most effective way to reach out to multiple people at once without wasting precious time.
What is Mass Texting?
Mass texting, also commonly referred to as mass text messaging or bulk texting involves sending the same message to a large group of people at once. This method could be extremely beneficial for businesses or entities who want to connect or reach out to multiple recipients without wasting valuable time.
Mass texting has multiple use cases for example, it can be used for sending promotions and offers, booking appointments, and much more depending on the type of business you have.
Also, do not confuse mass text with group text as the two are quite different from each other.
How To Send Mass Text?
Now that you have a basic idea of what exactly mass text is, you may be curious to find out how to send out mass texts for business. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to send out a mass text:
Step 1: Grow Your Audience and Form a List
The whole point of mass texting is to reach out to multiple people at once. Now they could be your current customers, prospects, old customers, etc. So grow your audience and create a list of people with their names & numbers.
Step 2: Find a Reliable Mass Text Service
Now comes the most important step. In order to send mass texts, you will need a reliable mass messaging app or software, such as Emitrr. This is because native mobile texting apps do not support mass texts; they only support group texts for group chats. Mass texting software such as Emitrr complies with US SMS texting laws and is approved for mass texting, allowing you to market your business or run marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Choose a business number
Once you have found an efficient mass texting app or mass texting service provider for your business, now it’s time to choose a business number. Having a business number for bulk texting is extremely important if you do not want to get bugged on your personal mobile phone every now and then.
Step 4: Select & upload your contact list
Before you start sending your bulk messages, you will need to select the list of recipients you want to send the messages to and upload them. You might be able to add the list of contacts at once or enter the contact details manually, depending on the mass text messaging app you choose. Emitrr might be a great choice here as it allows you to upload your contact list in both ways.
Step 5: Create your mass text message & hit send
Now comes the most important step. Create a crisp, engaging, and effective mass SMS that is relevant to your recipients and serves your goal. Do not forget to personalize and include a call to action (CTA) if necessary.
Step 6: Review the performance of your mass text campaign
Good mass texting software providers also offer analytics features to help you track the performance of your mass texting campaign. Pay attention to the response rate, delivery rate, click-through rate, etc. to analyze what works and what can be improved for future marketing campaigns.
How To Send Mass Texts Through Emitrr?
There are essentially two ways of sending a mass text via Emitrr depending on the number of recipients you want to send the message to.
For under 100 recipients, you can follow these simple steps:
- Go to Emitrr’s dashboard, click on the “send” button on the top right corner, and click on a “new message.”
- Now select the location from where you want to send the bulk texts.
- Now start adding multiple recipients by typing in the name or number. If you have these numbers in a comma-separated format that you can paste them all together in the recipient list, any duplicate number will be removed automatically.
- Instead of selecting the contacts individually, you can also select the list of contacts that you want to send the bulk messages to.
- After adding the contacts, select the option “Message recipients individually.”
- Now give a name to this list for your reference in the option below.
- Finally, start typing your mass message. Now you can either choose a template or customize the message by selecting the relevant property available at the bottom of the text box.
This method is like a mini-campaign, it is super efficient and it works just like how email does.
And if you are wondering how to send mass sms to multiple recipients, then you’ll need to create a campaign, using the following steps:
1. Segmenting Customers
As a business owner, you might want to send mass text messages to different customers and for different purposes. For example, you may want to send booking confirmation messages to your new leads, or you may want to send promotional messages to existing customers. And this is where Emitrr’s dynamic list feature comes in.
Using Emitrr’s “dynamic list” feature, you can segment your customers and send them mass messages accordingly. The best part is that this feature adds and removes contacts automatically over time as contacts are created or updated based on the dynamic filter. This cool feature saves a lot of time and effort that may go to waste if you were to create a new list every time any of your contact lists are updated.
2. Creating Your Campaign:
There are essentially two ways in which you can create a campaign using Emitrr namely: one time or automated. Let us understand how you can create a mass text campaign depending on your business’s use case.
One-time Campaign:
Creating a one-time campaign may be suitable for you if you want to simply send out a one-time mass message. For example, let’s assume that you own a dental clinic and want to send quarterly clean-up reminders to your patients. Using this example, let us see how you can create a one-time campaign:
- Log in to your Emitrr’s dashboard and select your location.
- Now scroll down and click on campaigns>text campaigns.
- Now click on the “Create campaign” option appearing on the right side.
- Start by entering your campaign’s name in the box first.
- Now you can use the box below to type and customize your message. Now here’s where this gets interesting. Emitrr offers a great deal of advanced capabilities to ensure that your mass texting campaign looks perfect. Here’s what you can expect:
- Personalization: To personalize your mass SMS, Emitrr offers “property feature.” So what you can do is in the first line you can, for example, add Hello, (First name & Last name property) and keep the rest of the message similar. Because of the first & last name property that you have used in this case, your recipients will receive your message with their first and last name, making them feel like you have especially written the message for them. Now this is just an example. You can choose from a list of properties that is available at the bottom of the text box.
- Templates: Don’t feel like typing a message? Don’t worry! Emitrr offers a list of templates to choose from. You can simply choose/search one of them and send the message or you can even create your own template and use it in the future as well.
- URL Shortener: You may want to send a URL to your recipients. It could be a payment link or a review link, form link, etc. But most messages with URLs often end up in spam boxes because of their length. However, by using Emitrr’s advanced URL shortening capability you can shorten your URL link and ensure it never goes into the spam box. Shortened URL also looks professional and clean, not to mention it allows marketers to track click data effectively. Here are some more benefits of shortening your URL:
- Saves precious character space
- Looks professional
- Greater user trust
- Gets more click-through rate
- Form Request: Want to send out a form request to your recipients? By using Emitrr’s advanced capability, you can even do this! For this, you can simply click on the form request option present at the bottom of the text box, and search the form you want to send. You can either send a single form, or a bundle form using this option.
- Attachments: You can also add any attachments to your message from the option available in the text box.
- Assign conversations: Emitrr allows you to assign conversations to a specific team or a specific person to tackle the replies that you receive from your customers automatically. This cool function lets your team handle the communication part allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.
- Setup auto responses and confirmations: Last but not least, you can also set up auto-responses that go out based on certain keywords that the customer uses. You can also set up a confirmation message by selecting a confirmation keyword of your choice. And if the customer replies using this set keyword, then their appointment or any other event will automatically be confirmed.
- Below you will see two options: “Opt Out Message/Unsubscribe Message” and “Include confirmation text.”
- You can select the “Opt Out Message/Unsubscribe Message” option if you want the customer to be able to opt out from your messages.
- Or you can select “Include confirmation text” and type in your preferred confirmation keyword (for example, you can use words like Yes, Confirm, etc.) to allow the customer to reply to your text. Let’s take the above example again to understand this better. Let’s say you have chosen “Yes” as the response message, then once your patient receives their quarterly clean-up reminders, they can respond to your message by choosing Yes.
- You can also type and create a “Response on Confirmation” message while creating this one-time campaign. This message will go to the customer directly once they respond to your initial message.
- Now click on next.
- A new page will appear wherein you will get two options: “Upload contacts” and “Select the existing list.”
- Choose your desired option to upload your recipient’s list or to select an existing list.
- Upon selecting the list, you can either hit on “next” > “confirm and send” to make your campaign live or schedule the campaign for a later time and date.
Automated Campaign:
To create automated campaign on using Emitrr, follow these simple steps:
- Go to Emitrr’s dashboard and click on campaigns>automated campaigns.
- Click on “Create Automated Campaign.”
- Give a name to your mass SMS campaign.
- Now, for the first message, you can use a template or customize a message that includes the recipient’s first name.
- Now add a follow-up message by clicking on the “Add follow-up message” option below the text box.
- Click on the “Send after” option to delay the message by one minute or to set the delayed response timing as per your choice.
- Now customize this second message as a friendly follow-up.
- Once done, click on “Next” and set up a trigger that will activate the campaign when a user is added to a specific list.
- Go to the trigger section in Emirtr’s dashboard and create new triggers.
- Select the trigger as “when the user is added to the list.”
- Now select your preferred list for the campaign. This means whenever a new user is added to the list, he/she will automatically receive your message.
- Lastly, click on “Create” and this campaign will automatically start.
- And in case you want to add or remove people from this list in the future then you can do so by accessing “Contacts>List.”
- Look for your list, choose it and click on the menu in the right corner.
- Click on add contacts, search the name or number of the person you want to add. And once you add them to the list, they will also start receiving the messages from this campaign.
3. Schedule / Send
You have your mass message campaign ready, but do want to send it right away and schedule it for a later time and date? Emitrr allows you to do that too! Using this bulk SMS service, you can either send your mass messages right away or save the campaign and schedule it to go live later.
4. Track Metrics
Sending a mass text is only half the job done. In order to effectively utilize and benefit from your mass message campaign, you need to track how it is performing and make the necessary adjustments later. Thankfully, Emitrr allows you to easily track your campaign performance by offering metrics like:
- Status
- Sent Messages
- Failed Count
- Responded Count
- Trigger Count
- Created At
- Created By
Mass Text Messaging FAQs
Yes, mass texting is legal; however, it is heavily regulated by the U.S. government, and there are restrictions on how and when businesses can send mass messages. For a long time now, the U.S. government has been regulating this to protect the privacy of consumers and safeguard them against robocalls and telemarketing calls, and this even extends to SMS. The most important legislation that regulates the scope of mass texting or telemarketing is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA). And as per this act, here are some rules that you need to take care of when sending a mass text:
Mass messaging before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m. is prohibited.
Anyone who has registered with the National Do Not Call Registry cannot be the recipient of mass texts.
Businesses sending out mass texts must identify who they are or why they are texting.
The sender must provide a reply-back or call-back option.
Companies or businesses sending out mass marketing texts must maintain a Do Not Call (DNC) list of recipients who do not wish to receive SMS. Additionally, opt-out requests must be honored for a minimum of five years.
To send out mass texts for business, you will have to opt for a mass texting software such as Emitrr. Once you do that, here’s how you can send out mass texts for business:
Sign in to a mass texting software like Emitrr.
Now create and upload a list of contacts to send your mass texts to.
Compose the message for your list.
Now send the messages immediately or schedule it for a later time.
Be it small or large businesses, community groups, educational institutions, health care providers, etc. anyone can use bulk messages for purposes that include but are not limited to marketing, advertising, taking bookings, feedback, etc. However, before you start sending out mass text messages make sure to check and comply with the legal mass messaging regulations in your state.
Conclusion
Mass texting is the best way to reach out to multiple people without putting in too much effort or time. Since your phone’s inbuilt app can’t send mass messages, as a business you will require an efficient and reliable mass texting service such as Emitrr to take care of your marketing needs. And since Emitrr complies with US SMS texting laws and offers handy features and unique capabilities, it might be a great choice for you. We hope now you know how to send a mass text.
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