When Choosing Mass Text vs Group Text Here’s How to Decide

Mass text vs group text: what’s the difference?

It’s easy to assume that “mass texts” and “group texts” are the same. After all, both options give users a way to communicate with multiple people at once, via SMS. Both types of messaging have also become more popular in recent years, as smartphone adoption accelerates.

However, there’s a big difference between using your smartphone to send a message to a “group” of contacts, and using a mass texting service to send texts in bulk. Understanding the differences between these two messaging methods is crucial for a few reasons.

It’s the key to making sure you can choose the most cost-effective, intuitive, and impactful way to connect with both your internal employees, and customers. It’s also critical to making sure you can consistently adhere to SMS compliance standards and industry regulations.

Here’s everything you need to know about group texting vs mass texting.

Group Text vs Mass Text: What’s Really the Difference?

Let’s start with the basics. Group texting and mass texting both give people a way to communicate with multiple people at once. With both options, you can avoid writing out the same message multiple times and connect with multiple contacts in an instant.

However, with group texting, you’re not sending messages to contacts individually. Instead, you’re basically inviting a bunch of contacts into a “group chat.” Everyone you send your message to will also be able to see the contact and responses of the other people in the “group.”

That’s fine for certain business group texting use cases, such as when you want to share updates on a project with your team. But the “grouped” nature of this messaging strategy creates problems if you want to use SMS for marketing campaigns.

Mass texting, on the other hand, involves using a specific bulk SMS or text blasting service to send messages to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people at once. With mass texting, each message reaches the recipient individually. No one will be able to see the contact details of all the other people you might have shared the same message with.

Plus, if someone responds to your mass message, you’ll see that response in a separate message thread. This ensures you can converse with customers without putting their data at risk.

Mass Text vs Group Text: What’s Best for Your Business Communication?

Ultimately, the biggest difference between mass text vs group text as messaging strategies, is that group texting can be done with texting platforms or uses the software built into your phone to facilitate a “group chat” experience, while mass texting leverages software to send messages to contacts individually, at scale.

However, if we dive a little deeper, it becomes easier to see just how different these two options are, in terms of everything from the number of contacts you can reach to the type of messages you can send. Here’s a closer look at the core differences between group and mass texting.

When Audience Size Matters for Group Text vs Mass Text

First, as mentioned above, both group texting and mass texting gives you a way to reach multiple people at once. However, there are limits to the number of contacts you can include in a “group chat.” For instance, Google Messages limits the number of contacts in a group to 20. WhatsApp gives users slightly more freedom, with the option to add up to 256 contacts to a group.

Mass texting services, on the other hand, allow companies to communicate with thousands of customers at once. Some platforms, like Clerk Chat, allow you to send messages to an unlimited number of contacts.

You can even segment those contacts into different groups, for more personalized conversational text messaging campaigns. This means mass texting campaigns are usually the better option if you want to reach a bigger audience.

Mass Texting vs Group Chat: Number of Messages you Can Send

In general, when you send a group text, you’ll only be able to send one message per second. This is because telecom carriers, like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, place limits on sending frequency. These limitations mean even if you could send messages to hundreds of people at once with group chat, it would take time for all those messages to actually send and reach your audience.

Mass texting platforms, like Clerk Chat, on the other hand, can allow users to send dozens of messages per second. This means you can distribute information a lot faster, even if you’re interacting with thousands of customers at once.

With mass texting platforms, you can also create entire “automated campaigns,” and send scheduled SMS messages to customers at the time that’s best for them.

Group Chat vs Mass Text: Why Privacy Matters in Messages

One of the most important differences to keep in mind when you’re choosing between group text vs mass text for business messaging, is that group texts naturally encounter more privacy issues. Everyone in a group message can see the responses of other people, as well as their contact details.

That’s not necessarily a problem if you’re using group messaging for internal collaboration, as your team members are likely to already have the contact details of their colleagues. But if you were sending promotional messages through group text, you’d be exposing the private information of your customers with a lot of different parties.

This puts you at risk of fines and other repercussions from industry bodies that implement strict rules about how businesses should protect and share customer data.

Mass Text vs Group Chat: Opt-In Issues

Group texting doesn’t just expose your business to more data privacy problems, it can create compliance issues in other ways too.

For instance, according to standards like the “Telephone Consumer Protection Act”, businesses need to ensure their customers explicitly “opt-in” to receiving marketing messages. Plus, they need to make it easy to “opt-out” of receiving promotional messages too.

Consumers can easily let companies know if they want to opt-out of receiving mass texts by clicking on a link in an SMS text. However, with group texting there’s no real “opt-out” option.

Customers can choose to “leave” a group chat, but they can’t easily tell a company they don’t want to hear from them again.

Group Text vs Mass Text: Marketing Applications

Group texting is not the best option for SMS marketing for a few reasons. Even if you could find a way to bypass the compliance issues mentioned above and send thousands of texts to customers at once via group texts, you risk a number of carrier issues.

Group texts generally aren’t approved for marketing campaigns by carriers. If you do send a lot of promotional messages using group chat, you risk penalties from carriers, and there’s a chance your future messages could be marked as “spam” before they reach customers.

Alternatively, mass texting platforms like Clerk Chat are designed to support marketing campaigns. They enable companies to take full advantage of application to person messaging strategies for advertising. Plus, with a mass texting platform, you can choose to use a number specifically approved for SMS marketing, like a 10DLC registered number.

Mass vs Group Texting: Specialist Features

Because group texting often takes advantage of your phone’s built-in messaging application, it doesn’t really offer access to any unique or specialist features - unless you’re using a business texting platform. For instance, you can’t create a full automated marketing campaign with a group message on your phone like you could with a mass texting platform.

You also won’t be able to take advantage of branded templates for text messages or access analytical reports that give you insight into the engagement rates you get from each campaign.

Additionally, while you can engage in two-way conversations via group chat, you won’t be able to have unique, distinct conversations with every customer that responds to one of your messages.

A mass texting service gives you a lot more functionality for SMS marketing and customer service. With a platform like Clerk Chat, for instance, you can design branded templates for texts, create automated SMS workflows for marketing campaigns, and respond to messages individually from a dedicated SMS desktop app.

You can even take advantage of advanced capabilities, like AI tools for customer service, that allow you to automatically respond to customer questions with personalized messages 24/7.

Group or Mass Texting: Costs and Simplicity

In the battle between group chat vs mass text, group messaging is arguably the simpler, more cost effective option. However, that’s only true in certain circumstances.

For instance, sending a group text is easy because most smartphone messaging applications already support this feature. Plus, some tools, like WhatsApp, even allow users to send mass texts from a computer too. However, mass texting platforms can be very user-friendly too.

For instance, with Clerk Chat, not only can teams send a text from a computer in seconds, using pre-defined templates, but they can create and manage text campaigns within the apps they already use. Clerk Chat integrates seamlessly with tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, allowing employees to send messages and respond to queries without jumping between apps and tabs.

Additionally, while group texting eliminates the need to pay for a specialist platform, you’ll still need to pay your carrier’s rates for all the texts you send. If you’re going to be sending thousands of messages at once, a mass texting platform can allow you to take advantage of cheaper rates.

Mass Text vs Group Text: Which Option is Best?

Ultimately, whether you should use group text or mass texting platforms for SMS based communications all depends on your use cases and priorities. Also keep in mind that some platforms offer both options.

When to Send a Group Text

Group texting is usually the better option for internal collaboration and communication. Everyone will be able to see each other’s responses in a thread and contribute towards the same discussion. If you’re brainstorming new product ideas, sharing news updates with colleagues, or discussing projects, group texting is a good choice.

You could also potentially use group messaging as a low-cost and convenient way to share updates with a small number of contacts at once. However, you’ll need to be cautious to make sure you’re not sharing any sensitive information or contact details with the wrong people.

Group Texting Pros and Cons:

When to Choose Mass Texting

If you’re investing in promotional text marketing campaigns and want to communicate with customers without exposing yourself to issues with industry regulations and TCPA guidelines, mass messaging is the obvious choice.

Mass messaging via campaigns gives you more freedom to personalize text messages for different lists, allows you to keep contact information and data secure, and ensures you can track the impact and results of your marketing campaigns with in-depth analytics.

With a mass texting service, you’ll also be able to choose the ideal number for your marketing campaigns, customize messages with variables and branded templates, and create scheduled campaigns.

Plus, mass text messaging can be the better option for SMS, WhatsApp, or RCS customer service too. With a two-way SMS service like Clerk Chat, your team members can track customer responses to messages in a shared inbox, respond with personalized insights, and more. You can even take advantage of AI agents to enable automated 24/7 customer service.

Mass Texting Pros and Cons:

Enable Group and Mass Texting with Clerk Chat

Ultimately, group text and mass text are two very different solutions for SMS communication. Most businesses will want to use a combination of the two options for specific use cases. For instance, you might use group text for internal communication and collaboration, and mass texting platforms for promotional campaigns and SMS-based customer service.

As one of the world’s leading business SMS platforms, Clerk Chat makes it easy to take advantage of both group and mass texting for different needs.

Companies in any industry can use Clerk Chat to enable group texting for internal communication and mass texting for marketing and customer service. Our platform easily integrates with the software teams already use, from CRM platforms like Salesforce to collaboration apps like Microsoft Teams and eDiscovery options like Global Relay.

Plus its advanced features, from AI agents that can qualify leads or reply to customer FAQs, are helpful for any business looking to scale its messaging strategy.

Access your free trial of Clerk Chat today, and discover how it can help you unlock the benefits of both group and mass texting for your team.