Ez Texting is an SMS service provider that provides text messaging packages to businesses and helps them market their company. Their service coverage includes the United States and Canada. With a name like “Ez Texting” you expect a company that will provide an SMS messaging service that is intuitive and simple to use. In this SMS marketing review, we’ll examine Ez Texting, its service and the features provided by them.
From their website, Ez Texting’s philosophy is “that launching an SMS Marketing campaign does not need to be difficult.” We completely agree. Your focus should be “how do I market effectively to my clients?” It should NOT be “how do I get this blasted SMS service to work?” But, regardless of ease, its always nice to have ways to get help. Therefore, we’ll start by reviewing the support aspect of EzTexting because it was impressive to see the wide array of options to get help from them.
We see the common support options such as email, phone, and support by fax. They guarantee a response to your email inquiry within 4 hours and if that isn’t quick enough, they have a live chat where you can talk to a support representative as long as it is within business hours. If your needs are less time-contingent, they have a well-populated FAQ page as well as a help center that addresses many common problems and questions that customers ask. If you want to do deeper research into this product and how mobile marketing works, they have a good list of options for you:
- Set up a webinar of how their product works
- A video tour of some of their dashboard/control panel and some of its features
- How-to videos
- System documentation
- Step-by-step “get started” guides
- Mobile marketing guide – great way to get tips about your mobile marketing campaign
- Plenty of case studies and customer testimonials
You won’t be wanting for support options here; all options prove to be informative on getting your mobile marketing off the ground. There is a catch, however. Support options are available for message plans that are using their “Express Delivery” methods. If you purchase packages with the “Standard Delivery” option, you won’t receive support for these (both Standard and Express Delivery are discussed later in this article) Now lets look at some of the features of the EzTexting platform.
Aside from the standard features you look for in an SMS marketing service, such as contact management (including the ability to group contacts), auto-response set-up, and scheduling future messages, Ez Texting offers additional features to meet your business needs. Some of the features are:
- Web widget to allow your customers to opt-in from your web page
- Facebook widget where customers can provide their information on your Facebook page to opt-in (appears as a tab on your Facebook profile)
- The ability to voice broadcast a message. Through their system, you can upload a .wav file or if you don’t have a microphone, you can request a call from their automated system that will record the message for you to send out to your customers.
- Send pictures to clients through a WAP link which is basically just a link to a mobile website with that picture on it. Only mobile phones with web access can actually view the link, anyone else can view it from a computer with a web browser. They also provide capability of sending a video over text message, but it requires you to sign up with one of their partners called “myBrainshark” before you can do so.
- You can send a message from your phone to your contacts with 2 options
- If you have a smartphone, their system is web-based giving you the ability to send messages from their web dashboard. They have an app available for Blackberry users as well.
- A feature called “text-blast.” Simply text your keyword with a message to your shortcode and the system will send that message to all your subscribers.
Ez Texting has a decent list of features available to you. If you want to know more, check out their website.
The pricing for the use of Ez Texting is where things become confusing. The system itself seems easy to use without too many features outside the scope of the basic user. First, lets discuss the 2 different types of message services they use, Express Delivery and Standard Delivery.
Express Delivery messages are more reliable and are delivered quicker to your customers. It is sent from the short code Ez Texting uses that is directly connected to the carriers. They offer support for these messages.
Standard Delivery messages are less-reliable and occasionally messages can be delayed from sending out or even dropped. The reason? Ez Texting sends these messages via SMTP, the same protocol used for email. A lot of the reliability issues are dependant up many things that cannot be controlled such as server speeds and network traffic at the time the message is sent out. Ez Texting doesn’t provide support for these messages.
Read our review on SMS, SMPP, and SMTP for more details about the differences between the protocols for Express Delivery and Standard Delivery messages.
At first glance, the prices look good for the standard messaging service, getting as low as $.02 per message, but after reading the description of the Standard Delivery service, one has to wonder, am I really getting a good deal? On the other hand, you can purchase the Express Delivery message packages and have more reliable transmission and the many support options available to you, but you end up paying from $.04 to $.05 per message. The company does also offer a Pay & Go plan that allows you to pay per message (2.5 cents per message for the Standard Delivery and 5 cents per message for the Express Delivery) and just pay for additional messages if you run out during the month. As for keywords, they charge $25 per month to have an additional keyword. That gets spendy if you need several keywords on your account. They do, however, have an unlimited number of sub-keywords for grouping purposes. If you want to try before you buy, they offer a free trial that will deposit 10 credits (messages) into your trial software for testing purposes.
Ez Texting offers some nice features and great support options. Their prices aren’t bad, especially if you go with their Standard Delivery option. The downfall is the more appealing message prices are the least reliable and don’t provide support. Also if you are looking at having multiple keywords, $25 per keyword is a hefty bill. There are other companies out there that offer additional keywords at a much lower cost. Carefully consider Ez Texting when selecting an SMS marketing company and make sure the pricing will fit in your budget for marketing.