Many of these apps are designed for enterprise companies, political campaigns, and other groups looking to send thousands of SMS messages a day as part of a marketing campaign, rather than smaller businesses that want to maintain a more personal relationship with their customers. Most of them, however, aren't really appropriate for small businesses. SMS marketing is a huge business around the world, so there are dozens of different SMS marketing platforms available.

Smartphone messaging apps are quick, easy to use, and fit into day-to-day life, while email is, to be honest, generally awful. They're also a super convenient way for your customers to reply. SMS or text messages, on the other hand, are opened up to 98 percent of the time, and often in the first few minutes after they're received. I can't count the number of times I've missed an important update to a booking or change to an order I've made because it was sent by email-especially over the last two years when everything has been so unsettled. Inboxes are overflowing, apps like Gmail automatically separate your messages into a folder that's never checked, and many people just don't open them anyway-no matter how important they are. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.Įmail is a terrible way to communicate with your customers. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review.

We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

Text messaging apps for schools