How to Send SMS and MMS Messages at Scale: What is Your Number?

If you’re a marketing department and you want to reach the widest audience possible, text messaging is the best channel to do that with.

Most people check their texts more often than email, and text messages have a 90%+ open rate within three minutes of reception.

To send SMS and MMS messages at scale you need a cloud communications platform — a.k.a. a communications platform as a service (CPaaS).

Peer-to-peer review site G2 lists more than 100 of them, with Plivo ranked number one for customer satisfaction. Throughout this article we’ll use Plivo and Twilio, the CPaaS market share leader, as examples.

What’s Your Number?

Once you’ve settled on a CPaaS, you have another decision to make: What number type should you use to send your messages?

Commercial application-to-person (A2P) messaging follows different rules from person-to-person (P2P) texting. Businesses have three options: 10-digit long codes (10DLC), toll-free numbers, and short codes.

10DLC Numbers

Long codes are normal 10-digit phone numbers — the kind that individuals use every day to engage in P2P conversational messaging.

10DLC is a service offered by major US carriers to explicitly allow commercial A2P SMS traffic over long code phone numbers. 10DLC is available only in the US.

You can turn long codes into 10DLC numbers by registering them with a carrier, which you can do through your CPaaS provider. Provisioning a 10DLC number takes less than a week.

A vetting process determines the maximum throughput a carrier will allow for a 10DLC number. Throughput is the number of messages they can send in a given time period — messages per second, for example.

Toll-Free

Toll-free numbers are used by businesses that want their customers to reach them at no cost. In North America, 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833 denote toll-free numbers.

Businesses provide toll-free numbers so that incoming calls are free of charge for the calling party, but they can also be enabled for SMS messaging through your carrier or CPaaS, generally in about one business day.

Short Codes

Short codes are five- or six-digit numbers used to send and receive SMS messages.

Unlike long code numbers, shortcodes are not tied to an area code, so they can be used across a country to provide a nationwide brand identity under one easy-to-remember number. Short codes take the longest to acquire — up to 16 weeks.

Throughput and Cost

Two major differences between number types are their maximum throughput and cost.

Throughput Limits

Carriers impose varying maximum throughput on different number types. Generally speaking, short codes support the highest throughput and toll-free numbers the lowest.

10DLC numbers sit in the middle. Carrier-imposed throughput for 10DLC numbers depends on vetting scores assigned by an independent organization called The Carrier Registry.

Cost Considerations

There are three kinds of costs involved in messaging: one-time setup costs, number rental costs, and cost per message.

All pricing numbers that we quote below were taken from the two representative vendors’ pricing pages.

Short codes incur the highest setup costs: $1,500 for Plivo and $500 for Twilio. 10DLC numbers incur $44 charges for brand and campaign registration and vetting. There are no one-time charges for toll-free numbers.

Number rental costs for long codes and toll-free numbers are negligible compared to usage costs for organizations that send a lot of messages. Short code rental costs, however, are significant.

Cost per message depends on several factors: whether you’re sending or receiving messages, whether you’re using SMS or MMS, and which carrier you use.

Your CPaaS vendor’s pricing page can break it down for you. For comparison purposes, we put together a table showing pricing for sending SMS messages, which for many businesses is the most common use case, and arbitrarily chose T-Mobile as the carrier for which to show surcharges in this table; the “plus” numbers are the T-Mobile carrier surcharges.

Run the Numbers

All of the different options make it difficult to figure out which number type makes the most economic sense.

The best way to decide is to create a spreadsheet that includes the number of SMS and MMS messages you plan to send and receive per month, and factor in your carrier’s surcharges.

Regardless of which number type you use, message senders must obtain opt-in consent before texting consumers — and be aware of other considerations.

Plivo’s SMS best practices guide lays out those considerations for businesses that want to take advantage of the best channel for business communications — text messaging.