Texting is an incredibly effective way to reach leads and customers. The open rate for texts hovers around 98%, so you can feel confident that if you send texts, they’re getting read.
If you’re not sending texts yet as part of your marketing, sales, and customer support plan, 2024 might be the year to start. After all, texting is the preferred method of communication for many customers and allows you to reach your leads faster. So if you’re looking for the best text messaging service for business, we’ve got you covered.
This roundup of some of the best SMS solutions for businesses can help you explore the pros and cons of each and find the right one to suit your business needs.
Table of contents
The best business text messaging services in 2024
Each of the SMS services in this list focuses on something different. If you’re unsure about which type of texting solution you need, check out our post on 10 things to look for in a texting platform.
1. Hatch: Best for call centers focused on sales and revenue
Hatch helps sales and customer service reps in the home services and home improvement spaces to deliver personalized, attentive service at scale. The platform supports omnichannel communications, and its user-friendly, card-based workspaces help your team ensure every conversation gets the attention it deserves.
Hatch also includes AI bots that text with customers for you, to boost your team's productivity and efficiency. Whether engaging inbound leads, confirming appointments, or following up on quotes and jobs, your Hatch bot handles customers swiftly and with the same care and dedication to your business as any human.
- Key features
- You can automate outreach across multiple channels—text, email, voicemail, and phone—and see all your communications in one centralized dashboard.
- Pre-built message sequences tested in the field and designed to generate responses. They can also be customized as you see fit.
- Reporting on response rates, reply times, sales by campaign, and more so you can refine and improve your communications day after day based on your key business objectives.
- Customizable AI chat bots that text with customers to move them through your funnel while following customer communication best practices and taking care of the admin work—a huge time-saver.
- Pros
- Hatch’s AI is one of the most powerful generative AI tools on the market today, as it doesn’t just suggest tasks or messages for agents conversing with customers, but actually converses with customers on its own.
- Hatch offers a dedicated onboarding and support team, guides, and resources for continuing education to help you maximize your investment.
- Its simple, intuitive process for building campaigns, audiences, and workflows makes it easy for your current team to learn and for new hires to get up to speed quickly.
- The pipeline-style conversation tracking boards make it easy for anyone on your team to see all communications in one place and deliver accurate, timely responses.
- Cons
- Hatch isn’t the cheapest option out there. It might not be the right fit if you’re a small business on a tight budget.
- Hatch shines when it’s helping businesses manage a large volume of leads and customer communications. To do that, you need to integrate it with other solutions, like your lead aggregator and CRM. If you don’t have a lead generation engine built yet, Hatch might be too robust for your needs.
- Starting price: $1000/month
And if you’re unsure about allowing a bot to converse with customers, you can text with one yourself to see how well they work! Click here to put Hatch AI texting to the test.
2. Podium: Best for small businesses focused on leads and reputation
Once a review-specific platform, Podium has evolved into a customer communication platform with a specialty in texting. With tools like in-message payment options and texting to solicit customer reviews, Podium helps businesses manage the entire customer relationship via text.
- Key features
- All customer communications are accessible from within the Podium app. There’s no need to toggle between phone, desktop, and email inbox.
- You can automate follow-up to keep your audience engaged. Send an auto text when you miss a call, automate a mass marketing campaign, or ask for reviews.
- Podium allows you to add a form to your website where your audience can request that you text them. Easy opt-in options are how you build your marketing list! Hatch has this feature as well, in addition to direct integration with lead sources outside of your website.
Image source
- Pros
- The integrated payment system allows customers to pay via phone or card reader, which is convenient for them and your field workers.
- Podium focuses on reputation management—its texting workflow to solicit Google reviews can help you quickly build up your ratings.
- It’s not just SMS; Podium integrates with Facebook Messenger and your website chat, making it easier to track incoming messages and convert those queries into leads.
- Cons
- If the main draw for you is Podium’s reputation management solution, there are cheaper solutions that focus solely on that.
- For those businesses looking to send a high volume of texts, you may incur an additional monthly fee or have to upgrade to a higher-level plan.
- Podium doesn’t have online scheduling built directly into its texting solution; instead, it integrates with tools like Calendly which drive your audience to your Calendly link.
- Starting price: $249/month
To learn more about Podium as it relates to Hatch, head to our Hatch vs Podium deep-dive.
3. Yotpo (SMSBump): Best for e-commerce
Yotpo already offers a suite of marketing solutions, and when it acquired SMSBump in 2020, it added texting into the mix. You can now purchase SMSBump as a separate texting solution or get Yotpo’s complete set of e-commerce marketing tools, including solutions for email, customer reviews, subscriptions, as well as loyalty and referral program management.
- Key features
- Yotpo is user-friendly and intuitive, making it a strong contender for beginners or those building a brand new SMS marketing program without help from an agency.
Features like Yotpo’s segmentation are beginner-friendly. Image source
-
- In-app SMS chat allows you to connect with customers directly and instantly, and it also integrates with help desk apps so you can keep track of conversations that need follow-up.
- The platform offers international texting coverage. Yotpo boasts that you can reach customers in almost every country.
- Pros:
- Yotpo made our list in no small part because of its integrations with the biggest e-commerce platforms out there: Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommrce, and Adobe Commerce, to name a few.
- Many of Yotpo’s online reviews sing its customer service praises. Its in-house team will help you utilize the platform’s features, like assisting with building pop-ups.
- Because Yotpo still offers SMSBump as a separate service, you can go all-in on Yotpo’s solution suite or purchase SMSBump separately to integrate with your existing martech stack. Though this could change in the future.
- Cons
- SMSBump’s free plan is limited. For example, you can’t send texts with your business name as the sender, and there are ceilings on features like opt-in keywords and A/B testing.
- SMSBump’s reporting is not as robust as some other SMS tools. It might suit beginners, but experienced SMS marketers might want more granular data.
- SMSBump charges additional pricing per message. While it’s not the only provider to do this, its rates are not the cheapest. If you’re sending a high volume of messages, that higher rate can add up!
- Starting price: For SMSBump: Free, with SMS pricing starting at $0.0165/message. For Yotpo: $368/month (messaging and email usage charged separately)
4. Textedly: Best for businesses on a budget
If you’re hunting for the best SMS marketing service for when funds are tight, Textedly is a strong contender. Its primary focus is text messaging for businesses, so you get the tools you need without paying for additional bells and whistles that other solutions in your tech stack can handle. But for a more focused offering, it gives you a range of text-focused solutions that can help with marketing and reputation management.
Image source
- Key features
- Textedly allows you to choose between a toll-free number, a local 10DLC number, or a five-digit shortcode to reach your audience.
- You can send SMS (text) or MMS (image) messages (learn more about those differences here), which can be automated or sent in real time.
- Textedly captures essential data about your contacts, including their email address, state, city, and zip to make it easier to stay in touch and segment your messaging.
- Pros
- If you’re on the fence about business texting, Textedly offers a 14-day free trial so you can see what it’s like before you commit.
- Similarly, it doesn’t require an annual contract, though it does offer 20% more texts per month to customers who pay annually.
- There is no cost for incoming texts (not a given on all platforms!); you only pay for outgoing messages.
- Cons
- Textedly doesn’t offer 24/7 support. Its help desk is only open until 4 pm ET on the weekends, which might be tricky if your business stays open later.
- You can send texts from your phone, but Textedly doesn’t offer a mobile app, so the “on-the-go” solution is not as integrated as in some other texting providers.
- As the budget option, Textedly’s intro-level plan is not as comprehensive as some of the more expensive options on this list. As an example, the introductory plan is capped at 600 texts a month and does not include access to features like text-to-pay payments and Google Business Reviews.
- Starting price: $26/month
5. Textmagic: Best for SMS marketing and feedback
Are you on the lookout for the best SMS marketing service, specifically? Textmagic is explicitly focused on marketing and feedback. As another service provider focused specifically on texting, Textmagic goes deep on texting features and gives you the flexibility to manage your text marketing from your desk or via its mobile app.
6. Intercom: Best for customer support texting
Intercom is focused on helping brands use text to provide top-notch customer service and support. Intercom’s texting offering works in tandem with its help desk, ticketing, AI chatbot, and more. And you can build custom omnichannel automations to help you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
- Key features
- Intercom’s primary focus is on customer service solutions. Its help desk, AI-powered chatbot, proactive support, and platform are the four main features it touts on its site.
- The series campaign builder allows you to build multi-channel campaigns in a visual, easy-to-navigate platform. Once the automation launches, you can track results and stats at each point along the way.
- Intercom is investing heavily in generative AI; its chatbot is already fully AI-enabled. The bot can answer most basic questions and push the complex ones to your human team.
- Pros
- Intercom’s inbox creates one central location for all customer communications, including your business SMS.
- You have the flexibility to automate your outreach and can send event-triggered campaigns or schedule sends based on user behavior.
Image source
- While Intercom is primarily a customer service solution, you can use its texting service for marketing, promotions, transactional communications, and more.
- Cons
- While Intercom certainly offers texting, this is not its main focus, and AI-powered chatbot draws from your knowledge base with limited customization. If texting is the cornerstone of your outreach plan, a more robust text-focused platform might be a better fit for you.
- Intercom’s pricing is per seat, per month. If your team is looking to scale, this per-user pricing model could begin to add up!
- Intercom charges per message for incoming and outgoing texts, and the cost per message drops as volume increases. This might not be the most cost-effective solution if you’re looking to send and receive fewer than 100,000 texts per month.
- Starting price: $39/seat/month, plus additional texting fees for sent/received messages
Find the best business text messaging service for you
At the end of the day, there is no single best tech solution in any single area of focus. It’s about finding the one that suits your business and its needs. Start with your goals in mind, then evaluate each prospective provider to see which one is most aligned. When you do that, you are far more likely to select a solution that can serve you today and well into the future. And as we mentioned above, you might find our post on choosing a texting platform to be helpful.
If Hatch sounds like it suits your business needs, book a quick 15-minute demo here. Our team will take you through the ins and outs of our platform and answer any questions you have. You can also watch a demo of Hatch here.
