Business faxing never went away. Neither has old-style SMS text messaging, even in the age of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic gave new life to text message marketing. Zipwhip‘s State of Texting report stated that 34% of businesses used SMS to keep in touch with customers during the lockdowns, and 77% have decided to stick with it now that things are returning to normal.
We’ll examine why text message marketing still works, how to use it in your business and suggest which text messaging platforms you might want to check out.

There are four reasons why text messaging is so effective.
When your phone beeps or vibrates to tell you that you’ve got a text, you open it and read it right away. Nothing has the sense of urgency that a text message has. That’s why people open 99% of text messages compared to just 28% to 33% of emails, according to RedEye.
We trust texts far more than email, even though spam is increasing. Text messages have a click-through rate of 19%, according to SMS Marketing, versus a range of 1.34% to 5.1% for email, as reported by MailChimp.
You can broadcast text messages in bulk for as little as $0.01 per send, which is similar to the sending fees for email broadcasting platforms.
When you use SMS to deliver offers and coupons to your customers, you are doing them a favor. Most people say that they want to receive special offers via text message rather than email because an SMS is easier to find when they are in a store.
Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first text message to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis on Dec. 3, 1992, in England. It said, “Merry Christmas.”

To get the biggest returns from your campaigns, here are our eight best ways to use text message marketing:
Be careful about how many texts you send. Too many, and it could feel like harassment. Too few, and recipients might forget they subscribed in the first place. You know your customers, so go with your gut on messaging frequency.
We review the best text message marketing services in America once a year. To help businesses make the right choice, we assess each platform on topics, such as pricing, contract lengths and service features.
Our review of SimpleTexting found their dashboard is easy to use, even for business owners who are new to marketing. Their $29 a month price included 500 texts. What stood out for us, though, was their $229 plan. You get 7,500 texts included per month and one of their programmers will help you integrate their service into other software and apps you use.
In our Textedly review, we found the service was suitable for SMBs with simple texting needs. Per text message sent, Textedly was one of the cheapest we found in our research.. Although the company didn’t offer as many features as the other providers we reviewed, we found it easy to build subscriber lists, link to apps such as Salesforce, send campaigns, and have two-way conversations with customers.
You can learn more about other top options in our Podium review, our review of EZ Texting, and our ProTexting review.
Additional reporting by Sam Bocetta.
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