Text Blasts: Everything You Need to Know

If you want to send a text blast or learn everything there is to know about sending text blasts, you’ve come to the right place.

As much as 54% of consumers revealed they would appreciate text-message promotions from businesses.

In an age where mobile devices are nearly an extension piece to the vast majority of the population’s hands, the consumer interest in more text-based communication is anything but surprising.

However, with such high demand, the response from businesses is incredibly underwhelming. This is leaving customers unreached and unsatisfied.

Fortunately, this opens up a fantastic opportunity for your business to get ahead with a well-designed text blast. Ready to up your impact with this SMS marketing? Follow along to learn everything you need to know about this effective strategy and how to text blast for your business.

What is a Text Blast or SMS Blast?

A text blast or mass text is a single text message that is sent to a large group of people with individual phone numbers at the same time. Text blasts are used for marketing, reminders, emergency alerts and more.

Text blasts are great for marketing campaigns because they allow you to send out group text blasts to a large list of phone numbers simultaneously. With one SMS message, your business can reach an impressive amount of consumers in seconds.

When you send a SMS blast, you’ll instantly be opening up a connection point with your leads. Your business will experience a healthy boost in brand awareness and can increase sales by promoting a higher purchase intent from your audience.

SMS Blast Marketing Benefits

We already know customers are asking for text communication, but the benefits of SMS blast marketing technique go further than customer satisfaction. Along with an incredibly reasonable price tag or even a free text blast service, using text can boost your growth in a profound way.

High Open Rates

The problem with email campaigns is that they have discouragingly low open rates. Text messages, on the other hand, don’t suffer from this problem experiencing an open rate of 98% compared to 20% from emails.

With an overwhelming majority opening your text blast, you’ll have a greater chance at making an impression with this approach. Such an increase in eyes on your business is inevitably good for your brand and encourages an increase in sales.

Large Reach

The simplicity of text blast makes reaching hundreds or even tens of thousands of customers as easy as clicking a few buttons. Utilizing an SMS text blast service takes your messaging efficiency to new heights.

If your business is already utilizing text communication with customers, you’ve likely discovered the labor-intensive work of sending individual appointment reminders or offers. This time-consuming factor can decrease the number of consumers you are able to reach for time-sensitive information.

Sending a text blast enables you to scale your texting service and reach a larger audience instantly.

Promotes Engagement

One of the key factors to staying top of mind is continual engagement. While businesses turn to social media and optimized websites to remain omnipresent, the use of text messaging can contribute to your efforts.

Enabling automated response options or opening up the lines for feedback allows your audience to interact with your brand and encourage communication. This, in turn, boosts their connection to your company and promotes brand loyalty.

Cost Effective

Sending text blasts are not only extremely easy to send, but they are also relatively inexpensive. Costs are always an important consideration when it comes to any form of marketing. But, value should be a factor as well. If you’re sending effective text blasts then the cost will be offset by the value you receive.

Many organizations can receive 5-20x their return on investment in text blast marketing.

Most SMS blast software pricing is based on messages sent. Messages are broken up into SMS segments. SMS segments are the blocks of characters (letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation, etc) that an individual SMS message is broken into.

Segments are usually 160 characters for the GSM-7 format and 70 characters for the UCS-2 format.

GSM-7 is the standard format, but UCS-2 is almost always used if your message contains an emoji.

Messages over the character limit will be sent in multiple segments and each segment you send counts as one credit. These rules are set by wireless carriers, not TextSpot.

Using A Blast Text Message Software

If you need to know how to send a text blast, your best option will be an SMS text blasting service. Text blast software can take the guesswork out of your approach and help you eliminate common challenges associated with the marketing technique.

Respect Regulations

One of the key challenges to consider when using a texting approach is the regulations associated with the practice. Each phone number you obtain must be accompanied by customer consent.

You’ll need to ask your consumers if they would like to opt-in for your text promotions to remain in line with strict regulations. Fortunately, online forms and organized contacts can simplify this process and ensure you remain legal with your outreach.

Make sure you read and follow the rules and regulations laid out in the telephone consumer protection act.

Personalization

Its been proven again and again that personalization takes customer service to a whole new level. The trouble mass messaging faces is the limitation of customized messages.

Using our software, however, opens up this personal approach by utilizing elements like templates and scheduling features. You can include names and target key audiences at specific times to maximize their satisfaction with your messages.

Building a Text List

While it may take some time to build your audience, the benefit of these systems is their ability to be integrated early on. You’ll be able to add in contacts and start sending to authorized numbers as you build.

With in-store signage or prompts at the till to ask for numbers and consent, you’ll be boosting your reach in no time.

Reminders

If your business needs to send out recurring reminders for appointments you’ll love the set it and forget it features of a blast text message software.

Need a personal reminder, too? You can even use these services to remind you of daily activities like when it’s time to take your pills or prompts to complete employee payroll by the deadline.

How to Send a Text Blast

At a minimum, you’ll need the following to send a text blast:

1. Text Blast Service Software
2. A contact list with phone numbers.

With your contact list uploaded to your text blast service, you can easily schedule and send text blasts.

There are plenty of available text blast services available online. When selecting a service, there are a lot of different factors to consider. Make sure to consider:

• The costs of sending SMS text messages.
• The complete feature set of the text message blast service.

TextSpot makes sending out text messages user-friendly and affordable. All you need to do is create your free account, upload and manage your groups, and then start sending text message blasts. If you already have a contact list, you can start sending text blasts within 10 minutes of creating your account.

Who Should Send Text Blasts?

Dozens of different industries and organizations can benefit from sending out text blasts. If you’ve got a message that needs to be heard to a large group of people–text message blasts might be a great fit for you.

Not sure if your business can benefit from these services? Our text blast service is optimized for industries including:

What to Use Text Blasts For

Take your texting beyond expectations by using this service for invitations to events or personal updates for things like weddings, birthday parties, and more. And of course, you can take the annoying alarm out of reminders for yourself and your customers with automatic reminder texts timed just right for your needs.

Use text blasting to promote your latest sale, or let your customers know about upcoming launches. They’ll love that you keep them in the loop and you’ll experience an increase in sales with minimal investment.

Looking to update your customer service approach? Ask your audience for feedback to gain valuable insights about their experience. You can improve your systems and increase interactions at the same time with a simple, open-ended question.

Text Blasts vs Email Marketing

Text blasts are great alternatives to or additions to your email marketing. Your customers may prefer to receive SMS messages rather than emails. Or, you may just be able to get better results through text blasts rather than email.

Restaurants, for example, typically get better results sending text blasts to their contact lists rather than email because people tend to be more spontaneous about dining decisions. Nearly 98% of text messages are opened compared to 21% of emails. Not to mention, most text messages are read within minutes of being received.

Email marketing certainly has its place and can be incredibly valuable, but SMS text blasts can outperform many email marketing campaigns.

Text Blast Software Features

Great text blast software should come with key features that allow you to easily grow your list, manage contacts, and continuing improve the results you’re after.

Importing

A good sms blast service will include a feature that allows you to upload a contact list from a CSV file or excel spreadsheet. This will make it fast and easy for you to start sending SMS blasts.

Automation

An automated messaging system or autoresponder can be really helpful if you have very large lists and you are trying to get your recipients to reply to your text blast. An autoresponder will automatically send a message to your contact when they reply to your text blasts. This is very helpful for setting expectations with your customers or audience that their message has been received and will be responded to.

Keywords

Keywords allow you to create a unique word that people can text in order to add themselves to your groups or lists. It allows anyone to text your number in order to opt in to your mass text messages. Keywords can be marketed on your website, print ads, and so on. It’s a great feature to have in order to get meaningful results from your text message marketing.

Analytics

Analytics can tell you how many messages were successfully sent to your list and what subscribers of your group(s) may have opted out of your campaigns. It’s very common that when you send a blast text to an entire group that not all contacts will receive messages. This is because users can unsubscribe or opt out of campaigns at any time.

Scheduling

Scheduling future messages is a great way to plan out your SMS campaigns ahead of time.

Web Forms

Web forms allow visitors of your website to opt in to your SMS groups or lists via a form you place on your website. They can also be used to entice website visitors to start conversations with you that they can pick up on their phones.

Send a Blast Text with TextSpot

Now that you know the benefits of text marketing and the best way to work past challenges, you can launch your text blast approach and grow your business. With this highly effective way to reach your customers, you’ll be mastering marketing in no time.

Want to send a text blast? Sign up for your free TextSpot account to start SMS text blasting for your business today.