Group Messaging
Keeping your employees informed about important company-wide events and announcements is critical to avoid miscommunication and the resulting loss in productivity. There are several ways you can achieve this. Either you call everyone on phone and notify them of important events or send them circulars through emails. However, for medium to large scale enterprises, making calls to everyone is impractical, and emails, on the contrary, are often missed or have a low open rate. But, there is much less labor-intensive and effective way of doing the same – group text messaging.
Group text messaging is a method used to send messages to a large set of people at once. For businesses, group messaging helps to notify people in a company instantly about announcements, reminders, etc. directly through SMS or MMS technology. With a 98% open rate, this channel of communication is extremely powerful, providing an effective way to reach out to every single person within the organization in the most engaging way.
How to Send Group Messages?
Group messaging is essentially a part of mass messaging and is usually done through a mass text messaging software that can be accessed from any internet-connected device. In order to start sending messages to the group, you’ll need to create a database of contacts containing the phone numbers of the recipients. The database can be divided into sub-groups according to the roles. This ensures that the message you send reaches only to the intended person and not to everyone in the contacts list.
Mass messaging software can be used to send more than just plain text messages. Through the use of MMS, you can increase the impact of your text message by adding audio, video or image files and generate better engagement.
Here are some of the key features that make group messaging an attractive communication channel for businesses:
- Instant notification: With group messaging, you can use MMS or SMS option to send information across to your employees. Everyone on the broadcast list will receive the message almost instantly.
- Cost effective: Instant messaging solutions are cost-effective and most of the process is automated, requiring few clicks to setup everything. This further eliminates the need to hire dedicated resources to manage the communication channel.
- Customizable: Customizability is available in group text messaging in two ways – you can customize the messages and the recipients. Build custom messages and send them to customized groups based on filters such as interests, role, departments, etc.
- Automation: Need a specific set of messages to be sent automatically at a specific point in a task or time to specific groups? You can make use of automation feature that many group text messaging services provide. With automation, instructions can be given to the software that handles the messages to manage messages according to the defined schedule.
How UCaaS Makes Group Messaging More Efficient?
Utilizing SMS and MMS technologies for business communications isn’t new. However, the mass messaging software that is being utilized all these years works in a silo. It is not integrated with business phone systems that form a primary channel of communication in organizations.
But this is changing now. With UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service), mass messaging systems come integrated with other communication mediums such as voice, video, email, conferencing, etc. This opens up a multitude of opportunities to build an effective business communication network.
Unifying all channels enhances the efficiency in corporate communications and makes messaging even more effective. For example, if a person leaves a voicemail on your employees’ office phone, they can get notified through a message. Having the ability to unite all communication channels also means that teams can collaborate from anywhere, on any device through dedicated apps that come along with the Unified Communications suite. This facility allows you to easily switch from a messaging to placing a call at any point during the conversation.
Group messaging is rapidly becoming the preferred choice of communication for businesses, replacing the aging voicemails that offer very limited engagement rate. Adopting this channel can bring in more efficiency and establishes a culture of effective collaboration within the organization. However, group messaging or mass messaging systems working in a silo might not bring the results you expect. It is important to have a messaging solution that is well integrated with your business phone systems and UCaaS is precisely the solution that guarantees this unification.
Collaboration is key to the success of any business. Whether you are using the Virtual Office Mobile app or the 8x8 Virtual Office desktop app, 8x8 makes collaboration quick and simple. Call 1-866-879-8647 or fill out an online form to request a no-obligation quote from an 8x8 product specialist.
