#Best free texting apps for pc update#
#Best free texting apps for pc full#

This meant no high monthly pricing or large volume requirements. I required all the SMS services on this list to be affordable for small businesses. When it comes to sending SMS messages to your customers, pricing matters. This means that, in addition to texting your customers directly, you can also (for example) have your online ordering service automatically confirm when an order is placed or ready for collection, and follow up with a customer satisfaction survey.Īffordable with low-volume requirements, so small businesses can get started. Integrations with other apps and services were a must. You can still automate responses, collect survey data, and schedule texts with many of them.Īble to integrate with other apps and services, so you can automate things like reservation reminders. This means proper two-way communication-just like when you're texting a friend-was essential for inclusion. These are all apps for small businesses that want a way to directly communicate with their customers. This isn't a list of marketing SMS apps that can send 100,000 text messages with the click of a button. A lot of them also have the ability to send and receive text messages through your email client or with mobile apps.Ĭapable of true two-way messaging, so you can have a conversation with your customers. In practice, this means that almost all the apps on the list have a dedicated web app you can log in to and use to send and receive messages. Yes, you might need to read through the help documents or ask the support team a question or two, but all of our picks are easy to get started with. Some of the apps-and especially the API services-just weren't user-friendly enough to recommend. There are plenty of great apps that can plug into whatever existing setup you have, without you needing a huge amount of technical knowledge. Setting up an SMS app for your business shouldn't require hiring a specialist. To cut through the huge range of options, we set five key criteria that we were looking for in SMS apps:Įasy to use for regular people.

Similarly, a lot of 'apps' are actually API services that developers can use to add SMS functionality to their own projects, rather than a service you can sign up for and use straight away. 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.

#Best free texting apps for pc update#

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.

#Best free texting apps for pc full#

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.