Text messaging is one of the most vital and active communication channels in our modern era, and has quickly become an essential tool for brands to reach their audiences. (Especially as email becomes more oversaturated and social media algorithms make it more challenging to stay visible.)
But standing out in texting inboxes takes more than just a solid strategy. You also need the right enterprise text messaging platform, and preferably one that’s reliable, secure, and offers the features your brand needs most.
In this guide, we’re breaking down the best text messaging service for business use so you can choose wisely and boost audience engagement fast.
What is a Business Text Messaging Service?
As a business, you can’t send text messages the same way an individual can (at least not if you want to reach your audience effectively and efficiently while avoiding industry regulations). Instead, the best and most compliant method is to leverage application-to-person (A2P) messaging, which uses purpose-built texting software to send and receive a high volume of messages at once.
A business text messaging solution allows you to compose, automate, send, receive, and manage text messages at scale. Unlike P2P messaging, which travels between two personal devices, business text messaging platforms enable brands to send A2P texts using an approved 10-digit long code (10DLC) or a short code. Many solutions also offer a variety of business-friendly features, such as:
- Contact management and audience segmentation
- Integrations with CRMs and marketing automation platforms
- Analytics and reporting
- Compliance and security support
- Administrative controls and role-based permissions
Additionally, more text messaging software platforms are offering support for rich communication services (RCS). With this newer messaging protocol, brands can deliver immersive, app-like, branded texting experiences directly to their audience’s texting inboxes, which can help boost engagement even further.
Top 8 Text Messaging Services for Business
Texting has grown considerably as a marketing and business communication channel over the past decade, and the market is vast. A simple Google search for “best texting service for business” surfaces dozens of solutions, all promising to deliver the best experiences for brands and their customers. To help you narrow down your search, we rounded up the top eight texting services for businesses:
TrueDialog
Innovative, secure, and extremely user-friendly, TrueDialog is the ultimate texting solution for brands seeking flexibility and enterprise-grade support. Specializing in higher education, sports and entertainment, financial services, B2B software, and healthcare, the software has built-in compliance features designed for highly regulated industries. Perhaps most importantly, this solution natively integrates with leading CRMs and marketing automation platforms, making it easy to onboard and start using right away — no advanced developer support needed.
SimpleTexting
SimpleTexting is a user-friendly texting solution designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses in the retail, e-commerce, automotive, restaurant, real estate, nonprofit, and home services spaces. It offers both simplicity and functionality, an intuitive interface, an SMS AI assistant, and hundreds of integrations. All of this makes it an excellent option for brands with brick-and-mortar locations that want to start small and keep it simple. However, it may not be suitable for larger enterprises seeking a more sophisticated texting program or for those with more complex use cases.
EZ Texting
As the name suggests, EZ Texting is easy to use and ideal for small- to medium-sized brands looking to hit the ground running. Developed for car dealerships and businesses across retail, insurance, legal, hospitality, and nonprofit sectors, this software promises to turn your texts into leads, appointments, donations, and event attendees. That said, pricing can scale quickly as your message volume and number of contacts grow. The solution also lacks enterprise-grade security, such as SOC 2, and does not natively integrate with leading CRMs or marketing automation tools.
Textedly
Textedly is another preferred choice for organizations seeking an affordable, easy-to-use, beginner-friendly solution with a pay-as-you-go model. It was recently named by G2 as the “most implementable” texting solution for small businesses, and primarily serves restaurants, hotels, spas and salons, gyms, retailers, and nonprofits. Of course, while it’s a great option for simpler, smaller texting programs, it doesn’t offer as many customization options or enterprise-grade integrations as larger platforms. Additionally, it lacks native integrations, and its pricing model may not be the best for organizations with high-volume needs.
SlickText
Consistently rated highly by its users, SlickText is an excellent platform for relationship-building and list growth, and is especially powerful for e-commerce organizations that use Shopify. The solution offers features designed to boost subscriber numbers, such as text-to-win campaigns and loyalty program support, along with highly customizable workflows. However, it’s mostly geared toward e-com marketing use cases and doesn’t offer as much support for non-retail businesses and those with more complex enterprise communication needs. Additionally, customers often need to upgrade to higher-tier plans to access more customization capabilities.
TextMagic
TextMagic is a popular business texting platform that’s purpose-built for customer support and internal communications, though it also offers marketing capabilities. It serves companies of all sizes across IT, education, healthcare, professional services, and more, and bills itself as an all-in-one solution for reaching customers via SMS and email. It’s worth noting that the user experience can feel slightly more utilitarian, and its automation features are less advanced than those of others on the list. Additionally, it offers a less sophisticated reporting and analytics experience, limited integrations, and lower send volume thresholds, which can be limiting for businesses with larger audiences.
Attentive
Attentive shines as an enterprise ecommerce texting platform, and works with some of the world’s largest retailers, including Wayfair, Crate & Barrel, H&M, Neiman Marcus, and more. It’s especially powerful for brands looking to deliver personalized promotional messaging, run cart abandonment campaigns, and launch customer loyalty initiatives. It’s an excellent option for retail and e-com businesses that want to align their messaging to online shopping workflows, but it can be limiting for organizations in other industries with different user journeys (such as healthcare, higher ed, or financial services). And with a $40,000 minimum price point, this solution has a high barrier to entry.
Twilio
Much like TrueDialog, Twilio is also a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider, and is particularly adept at helping organizations build custom messaging applications through its APIs. This software is a great option for startups and global enterprises alike, especially those that are more developer-driven and have a surplus of engineering resources. The challenge is that, while powerful, Twilio is not a plug-and-play solution, and onboarding and maintenance can be meticulous. It’s best for businesses with large developer teams that are prepared to build much of the messaging experience themselves, and not ideal for brands seeking a solution their front-line sales, marketing, and customer service teams can use directly.
How We Chose the Best Text Messaging Software
We know that the leading SMS platform for one organization may not be the best fit for another. That’s why, when compiling this list, we evaluated several factors we know are important across numerous industries and business types.
Here are a few things we considered to help us rank the best sms marketing software options on the market:
Enterprise Scalability
When investing in any type of software, it’s important to think beyond your current needs. Otherwise, you might make the mistake of adopting good-for-now technology that limits your future growth or struggles to keep up as your organization expands and your demands become more complex. When it comes to business text messaging platforms specifically, it’s crucial that your chosen solution can support large contact databases, high message volumes, and multiple teams or departments without restricting your performance.
That’s why we took a close look at automation capabilities and infrastructure reliability. When these things are lacking, it often leads to costly operational bottlenecks and technical headaches.
SMS Compliance and Security
Text messaging is a highly regulated channel. And organizations in sectors like healthcare, financial services, and higher education often face additional scrutiny and have to adhere to their own industry’s strict regulations. The business texting platform you choose can significantly affect how easy it is to comply with these laws and legal guidelines, as well as carrier requirements.
As we reviewed the top texting software options, we considered SMS compliance features such as opt-in and opt-out management, data privacy, assistance with 10DLC registration, and support for both the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) guidelines. We also looked at security measures, such as multi-factor authentication, and whether providers maintain essential security certifications such as SOC 2 and TX-RAMP.
Alerts, Notifications, and Two-Way Messaging
Today, businesses need to deliver informational blasts quickly and reliably, but they also need technology that enables two-way, conversational messaging at scale. And it takes a powerful solution to accomplish both.
From appointment reminders, payment notifications, and emergency updates to one-on-one customer support, you need to be able to communicate in a variety of ways and meet rapidly evolving demands for more personalized chat experiences. Solutions built only for basic campaigns may not help you reach your engagement goals or keep pace with shifting consumer expectations.
Integrations, APIs, and CRM Support
The most effective and efficient text messaging solution is one that connects seamlessly within your existing tech stack. Integrations and APIs should help your business sync customer data, automate workflows, and schedule messages to arrive in your contacts’ inboxes at the moment they need it most, without creating significantly more work for your development team.
Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Some platforms rely too heavily on third-party tools (like Zapier) to manage integrations, or expect businesses to build complex integrations from scratch with internal resources. Either way, it can get expensive and introduce more headaches than you bargained for. And that’s why we considered both integrations and ease of use when evaluating texting platforms.
Reporting, Deliverability, and Support
Knowledge is power, and a great texting platform should offer ample visibility into messaging performance. It should be easy to see how your campaigns are doing at a glance, with the ability to dig deeper and even generate custom reports. Moreover, your solution should equip you with the tools you need to boost deliverability and offer expert support when you need help achieving your goals (or when you have a technical concern that you can’t resolve internally).
For example, instead of routing your texts through a third-party CPaaS, TrueDialog maintains direct carrier connections. By cutting out the middleman, brands can enjoy higher message throughput and better deliverability. (And, if you do have a concern, you’ll have access to a team of technical experts who can provide immediate assistance.)
Additionally, the platform’s TrueDelivery feature assesses your messages and provides you with a deliverability score based on carrier spam filters. Armed with this information, you can edit messages and reduce your risk of being erroneously flagged for spam.
Key Features to Look for in a Business Text Messaging Platform
Brands looking for the best SMS marketing platform are spoiled for choice. There’s no shortage of great providers on the market, and each caters to different industries, needs, and preferences. But the sheer number of software solutions can be overwhelming (even when you have a roundup list to help refine your search).
If you’re still feeling uncertain, here are a few key features you can use to help make sure the platform you choose is aligned with your organization’s needs today and well into the future:
Mass Texting and Campaign Management
At a bare minimum, your business text messaging software should support reliable mass texting (i.e., sending large volumes of messages simultaneously). But beyond bulk texting, your provider should also equip your team with the tools you need to create, build, schedule, and organize your campaigns, and to personalize messaging at scale. As you evaluate your options, look for features such as audience segmentation, dynamic contact lists, and the ability to clone campaigns or create templates to speed up your campaign deployment.
Additionally, if you’re new to business texting, choose a provider that can help you navigate the 10DLC and/or short code registration process.
Two-Way Business Text Messaging
Timely notifications are important, but today’s customers also want an easy way to engage in real-time conversations with brands. With two-way texting, you can engage your contacts in genuine, personalized, one-on-one communication that fosters trust and long-term loyalty. (Which is especially useful when delivering customer support or guiding prospects down the funnel toward a sale.)
When you compare text messaging services, pay close attention to how each solution handles two-way messaging. Look for functionality that makes it easier to maintain one-on-one conversations at scale, such as shared inboxes, messaging forwarding so you can always get messages to the best-equipped team member, and auto-response features to ensure your contacts’ responses never fall through the cracks.
SMS Automation and Scheduled Messaging
Messaging automation is key to saving time and reducing manual work as you scale your program. It also helps ensure you get the right message in front of your audiences at the right time. Automated texting workflows are especially helpful for appointment confirmations, payment reminders, post-event follow-ups, and other routine communications. Just make sure the solution you choose makes it easy to set up automations and offers features like event-triggered workflows and scheduled sends. Your software should also be able to personalize bulk messages using dynamic fields.
Compliance Support
Security and compliance are two of the most important considerations when choosing your business texting platform, especially if you’re part of a highly regulated industry. As text messaging evolves, so do regulations and carrier requirements, and failing to keep up can lead to legal fines, blocklisting, and even brand reputational damage. (In other words, it’s not worth the risk.)
Make certain that the texting platform you invest in offers built-in support to help you follow the TCPA and CTIA guidelines, as well as any industry-specific laws, such as HIPAA and FERPA. Additionally, choose a solution that prioritizes security and adheres to enterprise-grade data privacy standards. (For example, TrueDialog meets SOC 2 Type II and TX-RAMP standards, and uses an ISO-certified cloud data center.
CRM, API, and Workflow Integrations
As we touched on above, having a platform that effortlessly integrates with your tech stack is crucial for building reliable workflows (and will likely save you a lot of time and headaches). It’s also helpful for syncing data across your organization and unifying texting efforts across departments.
We recommend opting for a solution that natively integrates with your CRM and marketing automation tools, but also offers a robust SMS API for more advanced and custom use cases.
RCS Enablement
RCS is still relatively new for business use cases, but adoption is growing rapidly, and the organizations that master this protocol now will be poised to leapfrog their competition in the months and years ahead. That’s why it’s so important to choose an enterprise texting solution with the expertise and infrastructure to support RCS messages. Even if you’re not quite ready to launch an RCS campaign, having the right provider will ensure you have the guidance and technology you need when you’re ready to hit the ground running.
Why TrueDialog is Built for Enterprise Business Text Messaging
Choosing the best text messaging service for business communication doesn’t have to be a burden. So long as you know what to prioritize during your search, it should be easy to select the right provider. Just remember to consider your needs beyond today and look for software designed to help you grow.
And if you’re looking for a texting platform built specifically for large, fast-growing organizations, with innovative features, security and compliance support, a user-friendly interface, and easy onboarding, TrueDialog may be the best choice for your brand.
Request a demo to learn more about how TrueDialog can help you deepen audience engagement and connect with customers faster than ever.
