Build A Mass Text System Using Bulk SMS

There’s no doubt about it, we like to text. Among most age groups and in the majority of locales, texting is the most popular form of communication. A text message is read, on average, 98% of the time and within four minutes of being sent. Given these stats, it’s clear that text messaging offers businesses an effective way to communicate with customers on the channel they already prefer. But what about those times when a business wants to reach more than just a handful of people with the same message?

Texting in Bulk

When businesses and organizations have an announcement, reminder, or special offer to communicate, they likely want to reach a large audience all at once. They also may want to segment who receives their communication by selecting people in a certain geographical region or those who have subscribed to a specific service, for example. This is when bulk SMS comes in handy. With bulk notifications, a business can send relevant, targeted messages to large groups with only one API request.

Do Your Homework

A great example of the power of bulk texts is taking place in more than 70% of U.S. public schools each day. Remind, a real-time messaging app for schools and groups, lets teachers, students, and parents communicate with each other about what’s happening at school. Teachers write messages to an entire class, a subset of a class, or specific students or teachers from Remind’s website or app. Twilio assigns a local phone number to each teacher, which the teacher uses to communicate with students and parents, allowing personal phone numbers to remain private.

For years, teachers have relied on notes carried home in backpacks to reach parents, and kids to keep track of their homework schedule or convey it to their parents for support. Parents often feel out of the loop about what’s going on at school, and kids can easily feel overwhelmed with everything they’re supposed to remember. With Remind, teachers stay in touch about assignments, due dates, grades, schedule changes, and more—directly by text message that can be translated into more than 70 languages. Teachers can also send attachments such as photos, PDFs, and voice clips, and see who’s read their messages and who’s missing out.

With more than 2.6 billion messages delivered between more than 35 million teachers, parents, and students, the system seems to be working quite well. A Remind-sponsored survey of K-8 teachers who used Remind found that 78% reported an increase in parent involvement and 38% reported an increase in homework turn-in rates. Clearly, they got the message.

Easier to Build

When Remind was searching for a telephony vendor that would give them access to a system they could easily program themselves, as well as change and scale as needed, they chose Twilio. And as Remind grew quickly, going from hundreds to millions of messages per day in a matter of months, Twilio seamlessly scaled with them. It was particularly beneficial for Remind, as it is for other businesses who want to build a mass text system, that the Twilo “Super Network”—a software layer that interconnects with telecom networks around the world—is already baked into the Twilio SMS API.

Thanks to Twilio’s Super Network, developers who build with Twilio REST APIs can focus their time on building the exact SMS workflow they want, instead of writing extra code to accommodate for the complexity of mobile carriers and global regulations. That means more time for creating a superior customer experience and less time dealing with telecom logistics.

Twilio Programmable SMS provides an affordable and agile way for businesses to quickly add bulk messaging with their customers, without having to bankroll an expensive out-of-the-box communications infrastructure package. The flexibility of building with APIs allows businesses to customize and build the exact communication workflows they need.

Is your business ready? To start sending bulk text messages, visit the Twilio SMS page.