TOP 3 SMS Providers & How To Choose The Best

The diversity of digital marketing has motivated companies to take advantage of different platforms to narrate their brand's story. With constant technological development, businesses are opting for more beneficial strategies that enhance their marketing efforts.

If your business provides goods or services to customers, then you must have noticed that all your customers use mobile phones. Companies that want to keep a competitive edge over their competitors need to adopt effective strategies like SMS marketing. Intuitive business owners have taken advantage of this platform to promote their business by harnessing the power of bulk SMS services.

Short messages are not only used for general communication, but they also allow specific and personalized SMS marketing messages to be sent to your best clients. The main question is how does one get started? Yes, you have a great idea, but how do you find the best bulk SMS service provider?

How to choose an SMS provider

Choosing from the best bulk SMS vendors for promotional or transactional SMS updates requires more tenacity than just a simple price comparison. The success of your SMS campaigns depends on various factors such as the delivery time, delivery rate, uptime, scalability, security, support, compliance, and other customization options.

Even though it might be tempting to save money by choosing inferior bulk SMS products, in the end, it turns out to be even more expensive. This is due to the higher costs that accrue in the form of lost transactions or even lost customers. Essentially, it is vital to evaluate all the factors that affect your campaign success.

Here are 8 of them that you should pay attention to.

Effective delivery

Experienced companies in SMS communication have a huge advantage as they benefit from multiple telecom partnerships and access to resourceful, calibrated SMS gateway technology. They tend to offer the best delivery rates while providing low latencies for SMS messages.

Customized SMS campaigns

Being able to create customized SMS campaigns by personalizing individual texts, attaching files and images, or scheduling remittance is quite convenient to do. Personalized media SMS campaigns are more effective than plain bulk SMS campaigns. Bulk SMS providers offering these types of services save you time and resources in the long run.

Authentic reports

Competent bulk SMS providers provide real-time reports so that one can track the delivery status of every SMS sent. Authentic delivery reports help one validate their database and measure whether their campaign has reached the goals. Be careful of fraudulent SMS providers who provide fake delivery reports just to make up for their extremely low prices.

Robust SMS APIs

The best SMS APIs do more than just send SMS and enable one to access delivery reports, receive SMS, schedule campaigns, access results on mobile, and so much more. Powerful APIs help one to get deeper integration, faster go-to-market, and decrease development efforts.

Reliable customer support

95% of customer reviews are rated 5/5 from independent third-party review sites. The advantage with bulk SMS providers is that they provide simple product demos and marketing tips, personalized campaign recommendations and technical integrations, amongst others. All this is done while mobile marketing experts and support engineers are always available to help you.

Fair pricing

The best SMS service providers offer transparent pricing structures throughout the website. Other SMS providers lure customers with cheap SMS pricing and pile up various hidden charges such as API fees, platform subscription fee, higher pricing for transactional SMS, transactional account fees, etc.

Potent infrastructure

A high-performing cloud-based infrastructure with an inbuilt redundancy monitoring system working round the clock ensures zero downtime for its client's SMS platform. Business-critical SMS alerts need a platform that runs 24 hours a day, all year. Unscheduled downtime can result in lost business and disappointed customers. Cheap SMS providers lack the technology and resources to build and maintain effective backend infrastructure.

Customer data protection

Data privacy and security issues should be taken seriously to enforce them at all levels, minimizing the risk of any leaks, hacks, or breaches. Data security is critically important for any business as unscrupulous SMS vendors tend to share your hard-earned customer data with other customers to make up for their low pricing. The damage can be quite severe if the customer data is shared with your competitors.

3 SMS providers to consider

Here are 3 SMS providers to consider besides other alternatives.

1. VertexSMS

Key functionalities: Bulk SMS, two-way communication, two-factor authentication (2FA), SMS alerts and notifications, SMS gateway.

VertexSMS is an SMS marketing platform suitable for businesses of all sizes as well as various organizations and non-profits. It’s a solution that allows you to connect with your clients instantly, without putting too much time and other resources into it.

With VertexSMS, you can reach people in over 185 countries and send thousands of text messages at once. Whether you want to send promotional SMS, company updates, reminders, or any other relevant information, you can do it using its SMS gateway. What’s great about it is that the SMS gateway could be easily customized to meet specific needs and industry environment, so you’ll feel absolutely comfortable using it.

Pricing: Starts at 23.29 Eur/month or 278.40 Eur/year (on the annual plan). SMS prices may vary (depending on the country).

2. SlickText

Key functionalities: Mass text messages, scheduling, MMS, auto-reply, 2-way texting, drip campaigns, various integrations (email, Facebook).

SlickText SMS marketing solution offers a variety of features that will benefit both small and large businesses alike.

Using SlickText, you can take advantage of mass texting, SMS scheduling, grow your subscribers list, grab attention with pictures, launch different campaigns (contests, birthday texts, drip campaigns, etc.), benefit from user segmentation and much more to strengthen customer relationships and boost engagement.

The platform is easy to use and navigate so the whole process will not be that complicated even if you’re a beginner at this.

Pricing: Varies between $29/month-$139/month. Free trial available.

3. Twilio

Key functionalities: Bulk SMS/MMS, two-way communication, verifications, different channels (SMS, WhatsApp, chat), email marketing, voice API.

Twilio is an all-in-one platform that offers various solutions to grow your business, including email and SMS marketing. Using its SMS API, you can reach customers in over 180 countries by delivering mass messages at affordable rates.

The platform is great for sending various notifications, like purchase confirmations, shipping updates, account activity, etc., time-sensitive mass alerts, promotional texts, engaging in conversation with customers, or delivering one-time passwords for user verification.

You can also use Twilio’s visual editor to develop applications quickly, add extra bots or intelligent assistants to stay accessible to your customers at all times.

Pricing: Pay-as-you-go, SMS prices may vary (depending on the country).

Conclusion

Bulk SMS is not limited to how big or small a business is. Companies of all sizes can use this service as it is very effective. Increased targeting and personalization have become more sought after, in marketing and customer service messages, SMS messaging services have grown to satisfy these business needs.