TextMagic Review – Is This SMS Marketing Solution A Good Choice?

SMS marketing is a little counter-intuitive. Of all the different options out there, it often takes the simplest, most direct approach. You can’t add flashy videos, long paragraphs of interesting text, tag people, or really do much more than what you can type out in 160-800 characters.

But it’s effective. It has a 97% read rate within 15 minutes of delivery, has minimal costs, and is usually successful. 45% of campaigns generate a successful ROI.

So, the real question is, why haven’t you started using SMS marketing already?

TextMagic is an all-one-one SMS marketing solution allowing users to bulk send notifications, reminders, alerts, and more. Users can send messages to over 200 countries, connect to other apps via API, and much more.

In this ultimate TextMagic review, we’ll dive into all things you need to know about TextMagic. We’ll give you an overview of its core features, pricing plans, competitors, and how to get started using its free trial.

Will TextMagic take your campaigns to the next level? Find out now.

What Is TextMagic?

TextMagic is one of the original SMS marketing solutions. Founder Dan Houghton created it in 2001 during the very beginning of the texting era. Way before iPhones, Facebook, and even mainstream MP3 player usage, Houghton noticed how cell phones were changing the way we communicate.

What originally started as a side project at university grew into the full-service TextMagic of today. Since its founding, the company has worked with 100,000+ businesses. If you check out the testimonials on the site, and you’ll see a general pattern. People like how cost-effective and easy-to-use TextMagic is and used it to improve engagement rates.

With TextMagic, you can import contacts, manage user lists, and bulk send messages to over 200 countries and 1,000 mobile networks.

TextMagic is also a dedicated mobile app; you can take your campaigns on the go and use branding tools like dedicated virtual numbers that can display your business and product name. The software supports multiple languages, and up to 918-character limit messages. In addition, with the reporting and analytics tools, you can track performance and see the ROI you’re getting out of every text.

Finally, TextMagic works on a simple pricing structure. You are charged based on the number of texts you send, meaning you’ll never have to worry about unexpected fees.

TextMagic Features

• SMS Marketing
• Carrier Lookup & Number Validation
• Scheduled messages
• Multi-language support
• Online text messaging
• Reporting and analytics
• Voice Calls forwarding
• Incoming SMS automation
• SMS Surveys for collecting feedback
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) SMS
• Contacts and lists management
• SMS templates and mail merge
• Sub-accounts
• Virtual mobile numbers
• Branded SMS ID
• Voice broadcast
• Single sign-on for enterprises
• SMS Gateway API
• SMS distribution lists
• Android and iOS apps
• Email Lookup & Validation

Getting Started With TextMagic

Since all TextMagic accounts are free and include all premium features, you don’t need to provide your credit card to sign up. Simply submit your email, set an account password, and choose your location—don’t worry; you can send messages anywhere. This just helps TextMagic localize content.

Once you verify your email, TextMagic will walk you through the account setup. Then choose your number type, and what’d you like to do with TextMagic.

TextMagic has a ton of helpful tutorials and videos to walk you through each step of the process. Or you can skip these steps and head on over to your dashboard.

The software is super intuitive, so you likely won’t need to be much onboarding, but if you need any help, you can find resources on the site or chat with a TextMagic representative.

TextMagic Pricing

TextMagic is super affordable. As mentioned, your account is free, so you only pay for the texts you send. However, if you’re in the US or Canada, you are required to have a dedicated virtual number to send and receive messages. This is a legal requirement and not from TextMagic.

However, since all accounts come with a free trial, you get this number for free for the first month. After it’s just $4/month, and there are plenty of additional benefits, including higher customer engagement rates by having one.

Pricing is determined by the country you’re sending to. In the US and Canada, texts are $0.04 each. To send messages, you purchase blocks of credit in various increments.

And, to sweeten the deal, TextMagic gives you an extra 10% bonus on your first purchase along with $0.40

Overall, TextMagic is in the middle in terms of pricing. For example, with Textedly, you pay $29/month for 1,200 messages. While this works out to be cheaper than TextMagic, that’s only true if you send all your messages. Otherwise, it can actually be more expensive. We’ll go into more detail about this later.

TextMagic Main Features

TextMagic is packed with tons of features you’ll use to improve the effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaigns. Here are a few of the main things you’ll do with it:

1. SMS Message Composition

This is the heart and soul and TextMagic. With it, you can compose multiple messages easily from your dashboard. It’s all very simple. Select who to send to from your contacts, lists, or frequently sent.

Next, choose the sender ID and then enter your message. It doesn’t get any easier than that. You can also use the scheduler tool to create a calendar and always send messages at the right time.

2. Message Templates

TextMagic also has a large template library you choose from. It spans a wide variety of niches, like appointment reminders, call back requests, and more. You can also create your own templates that specifically fit your business needs.

3. Chat

This is another awesome TextMagic feature. Here you can keep track of all your open conversations, check previous messages, and follow-up. If you enable notifications, you can also get message alerts anytime you have your computer open.

4. Contact Management

TextMagic makes it easy to track and manage contacts. You can import Excel or CSV files, tag in custom fields, and create custom actions like share with sub-accounts, hide, and add extra profile information.

5. Reporting

TextMagic’s reporting tool helps you track key analytics like the number of messages sent and received, your delivery rate, and reply percentages. It even includes a handy Product Usage tab that shows which part of the TextMagic you use the most so you can really double-down on what’s working or find new areas for growth.

6. Services

Under Services, you’ll find a ton of other useful tools. This includes forms, API, text-to-speech, and many others. This is where you can really make TextMagic work for you, so take some time and go through each of them, watch the tutorials, and check out all the cool features.

Don’t forget to set up your integrations directly or via Zapier.

7. Mobile App

With SMS marketing, you’d think a mobile app would be standard for any service, but that often isn’t the case. Fortunately, TextMagic’s iOS and Android options cover all the bases and can do just about everything the desktop version of the site can so you can manage campaigns from anywhere.

Who Should Use TextMagic?

TextMagic is a great fit for SMEs looking to get into SMS marketing. It’s easy to use, has an excellent free trial, and is a really low initial investment.

Just about anybody can learn how to use this tool in minutes, and you can experiment on small segments of your contact list to see how well TextMagic works for your marketing needs before scaling up to massive campaigns.

You’ll see a few negative reviews about TextMagic but read these closely. Many of these users simply don’t understand what SMS marketing is and how to deploy it effectively, which is ironic because TextMagic is one of the best introductory tools out there.

There are only a few small downsides to this product that advanced users may not love. You can’t really get into the granular details with it and overly customize messages. Likewise, you can’t set up recurring surveys. But this is pretty minimal compared to how much easier it makes contact management, outreach, scheduling, and more.

TextMagic Alternatives

There are many players in the SMS campaign marketers. You can generally find them in two categories—those that focus on SMS like TextMagic and those that bundle more services like email marketing.

Two excellent alternatives to TextMagic are Textedly, which is the first category and Sendinblue, which is in the latter.

What Is Textedly?

Textedly is a cloud-based SMS messaging tool. It has many of the same features of TextMagic, including contact management, dashboard, and analytics. It also has a cool link shrinking feature to minimize the characters taken up by links. The UI is also a little nicer and modern.

The biggest difference is the pricing structure. Textedly works on a monthly subscription starting from $29/month. On the higher-tiered plans, however, you can see some serious cost-savings. For example, the Enterprise plan from $50/month includes 4,200 messages getting your per-message cost down to just $0.01. So, if you have a bigger list, this may be a better option for you.

What Is Sendinblue?

Sendinblue is an all-in-one relationship tool that focuses primarily on email campaigns. It also does SMS marketing, CRM, and more. If you want to combine SMS and email into one convenient location that this is a great option.

Sendinblue has a limited free plan as well as options starting from $27/month. In addition to this, SMS texts cost $1.12/100 messages if you’re sending in the US.

Overall, Sendinblue is a fantastic email and SMS marketing solution, so it’s definitely worth checking out.

Is TextMagic Worth It?

Yes. The best thing about TextMagic compared to its competitors is you’re only charged based on the texts you send. This means there’s no surprise $500 bill waiting for you at the end of the month.

And TextMagic is so easy to use. You can literally send out for first texts within minutes of signing up for it. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Overall, if you’re going to go down the road of SMS marketing, it’s hard to beat what TextMagic has to offer.

Pros

• Tons of onboarding materials
• Anybody can use it
• Simple pricing structure
• API
• Templates
• Analytics tools to track ROI plus reporting options
• Huge coverage of SMS providers
• Advanced scheduling options
• Mobile app
• Excellent free trial
• Lookup service lets you see if numbers and email addresses are valid

Cons

• Limited customization
• Can have delivery issues (common problem from these types of tools though)
• Missing support for some major countries like France, Mexico, and Korea
• Would be nice if it had MMS support
• UI could use a little refresh