SMS Marketing Misc. · SMS Marketing Statistics

How to Make Your SMS Messages Send Faster

Interested in SMS marketing? If so, you’re going to want to understand how SMS messaging speeds can impact your campaign. In this blog post we talk about why SMS speeds matter, how fast Tatango sends compared to our competitors, and how to calculate your own SMS speeds.

 

What is SMS marketing?

SMS marketing is text message marketing, where a business sends one message to thousands or even millions of people who have opted in to receive those text messages. For example, if you ever have received a text message coupon from Macy’s, or Olive Garden, then you’ve received SMS marketing. It’s very important to understand that SMS marketing is not spam. Because of very strict federal protections for consumers in the United States, businesses can only text message people that have opted-in to receive those text messages. From a consumers perspective, they’ll only ever receive text messages from businesses that they’ve signed up to receive.

SMS marketing is incredibly effective because, while emails can sit unopened in an inbox for hours — or worse, sent directly to the trash folder — 78% of consumers say that SMS is the fastest way to reach them. In fact, 90% of text messages are read within just 3 minutes. That makes SMS marketing a perfect channel for marketers who have a time-sensitive promotion or alert to share.

 

Why does SMS messaging speed matter?

You may be wondering: what’s the big deal with SMS throughput speeds? While the content of a text message is important, equally important is the speed with which the SMS messages are sent. If an SMS marketing software provider doesn’t send text messages fast enough, then subscribers could get a promotion once it’s already ended, or even worse, miss out on an important notification.

In text message marketing, there is a term commonly referred to as messages per second (MPS), which is the SMS throughput speed with which a software provider can send SMS messages. While MPS is the commonly used term in our industry, we at Tatango prefer messages per minute (MPM), as it’s much easier to conceptualize how many messages are being sent per minute, rather than per second.

How many SMS messages per minute is normal in our industry? In our research, other SMS marketing software providers usually offer a maximum SMS throughput speed of 6,000 MPM. This could either be because of SMS throttling, their technology, or even their SMS aggregator relationship. With a local pizza place, who might have 10,000 SMS subscribers, that 6,000 MPM works pretty well. Within a couple minutes, at 6,000 MPM, all of their 10,000 SMS subscribers would have received the promotion.

But for bigger senders, MPM becomes a lot more important.

Let’s say that you’re a sender with 2 million SMS subscribers, and you’re still sending at a rate of 6,000 MPM. While 6,000 SMS messages per minute sounds like a pretty fast SMS throughput speed – and worked just fine for a small SMS subscriber list — once you start getting into millions of SMS subscribers, that actually means that it can take hours to send. So hours later, your message is still sending, and a large portion of your list still hasn’t received it.

Let’s say that you’re a large restaurant chain and you’re sending 3 million SMS messages about a lunch special. If you’re only sending at 6,000 MPM, it will take 8+ hours for that SMS message to send. Suddenly, you’re messaging Joe Subscriber at 8 p.m. about a lunch special that happened earlier that day. Even if you start sending your text messages at 6 a.m. (not recommended), 25 percent of your SMS subscribers would still have not received your message by lunchtime.

So it’s clear that SMS throughout and increasing SMS speed is so important. If you’re a text message marketer, you may be wondering how Tatango (or your text message marketing provider) stacks up.

 

How does Tatango stack up?

Understanding the situation above, and working with enterprise companies for whom faster messaging speeds is of the utmost importance, at Tatango we’ve engineered our system to send SMS fast. How fast? As we said previously, other SMS marketing software providers usually offer a maximum SMS throughput speed of 6,000 MPM, where Tatango averages a whopping 98,940 MPM. Yes, you read that right… 98,940 SMS messages per minute. That’s more than 16X faster SMS throughput speed than other SMS providers! We found it was the only way to ensure that important, timely messages from the world’s most important senders got out on time — to their entire list — without SMS throughput speeds slowing them down.

How much faster is Tatango than other SMS providers? We’ve created a graph below to show you how our SMS throughput speeds compare to what other SMS marketing software providers are offering.

Tatango SMS Speed Throughput Comparison

How does SMS throughput speeds impact a business like yours? Let’s say that you have a list of 250,000 SMS subscribers. With other SMS providers it would take about 41 minutes to send your message. At Tatango, your SMS message would be fully sent in only 2 minutes.

Tatango SMS Speed Throughput - 250 Thousand Messages

What if your SMS list is a bit larger, around 500,000 phone numbers? With Tatango, your message would take about 5 minutes to send, and with other SMS providers it would take 1 hour and 23 minutes. That’s a difference of 1 hour and 18 minutes!

Tatango SMS Speed Throughput - 500 Thousand Messages

If your SMS list was 1 million phone numbers, Tatango would have your entire SMS message sent in just 10 minutes, while using another SMS provider would take 2 hours and 46 minutes. That’s a difference of 2 hours and 36 minutes!

Tatango SMS Speed Throughput - 1 Million Messages

SMS messaging throughput speeds become even more important the bigger the SMS list size. If you’re a sender with 2.5 million SMS subscribers and you’re using another SMS provider, it would take 6 hours and 55 minutes to send your SMS message. Using Tatango it would only take 25 minutes to send your SMS message, which is a difference of 6 hours and 30 minutes! To put that in context, when your SMS message is done sending on Tatango, you’d still have 6 hours and 30 minutes left before your message was sent if you were using another SMS provider.

Tatango SMS Speed Throughput - 2.5 Million Messages

Some of our largest clients have upwards of 5 million SMS subscribers. If you’re using another SMS provider, you’d have to wait 13 hours and 53 minutes for your SMS message to send. Using Tatango it would only take 50 minutes. That’s a difference of 13 hours and 3 minutes!

Tatango SMS Speed Throughput - 5 Million Messages

As you can see, SMS throughput speeds matter, especially with larger SMS lists and in industries where time counts.

 

SMS Speed Calculator

Interested in calculating how fast you need your SMS speeds to be to send to your entire SMS list? Check out our free SMS speed calculator. For more information on the calculator, and how it works, check out the video below.

 

If you want to discuss how we can help you increasing your SMS throughput speeds, we invite you to contact our text message marketing experts.

We’d be happy to help — sooner rather than later. ;)


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