How to send a mass text to customers the right way

There are three common ways to send one text to a few hundred customers. You can start a group thread on your phone. You can type phone numbers into an email client through a carrier's email-to-text gateway. Or you can use a texting platform built for this. The first two cost nothing up front, and they cause problems at roughly the size of list where texting starts to pay off: a few hundred people.

This guide covers what goes wrong with the phone and email workarounds, then gives the full process on a real platform. That includes consent, carrier registration, opt-outs, quiet hours, and the cost of a send worked out with real numbers. We make Ready, so the platform examples use it. The steps are the same on any properly registered sender, and we point out where another tool is the better choice.

Why the phone and email workarounds break

iPhone and Android group threads

A group message from your phone is built for a dinner plan with six friends. It goes wrong with 200 customers in a few predictable ways:

• Everyone sees everyone. Each recipient gets every other recipient's number. That is a privacy problem as soon as the list contains customers who don't know each other.
• Reply-all. One "who is this?" goes to all 200 people, and so do the next 40 replies. Our post on group texting for business without reply-all covers how to get the group feel without that problem.
• Carriers filter it. Your personal number is set up for person-to-person traffic. A sudden run of identical messages from it looks like spam to carrier filters, so delivery drops and the number can get flagged.
• No opt-out handling. If someone replies STOP, nothing happens unless you remember to remove them by hand. Texting that person again after they opted out is exactly the kind of message that creates TCPA exposure.

Sending the same text one by one from your phone fixes the reply-all problem. It doesn't fix the other three, and it takes most of an afternoon.

Email-to-text gateways

Older guides suggest emailing 5551234567@carrier-gateway-domain to reach a phone as a text. This has several problems:

• You have to know each recipient's carrier, and the address breaks when they switch carriers.
• Several carriers have wound down or restricted these gateways. Delivery that worked last year can fail with no error message.
• There is no registration, no opt-out handling and no delivery receipts. You can't tell who actually got the text.

Email-to-text, done properly through a platform rather than a carrier gateway, has real uses. We go through them in email to text for business. It is not a way to message your customer list.

Side by side

Step 1: Text only people who agreed to it

This step determines whether the other steps are worth doing. Marketing texts need consent, and for promotional content that generally means prior express written consent: the person agreed to receive texts from you, specifically. A phone number on an invoice or a past order does not count. Statutory damages under the TCPA run $500 to $1,500 per text, and a 500-person list multiplies that fast.

In practice:

• Collect opt-ins at checkout, on a web form, or with a keyword people text in. Each one needs clear wording about what they'll get and how to stop.
• Keep your own record of each opt-in: the time, the exact wording, and the page or form it came from. Our post on documenting SMS consent covers what that record needs to show.
• Cold contacts get a phone call or mail, not a text. Text people who opted in or who have already texted you.

On Ready, each bulk send and each API send that sets consent_attested records your attestation that the recipients consented: who sent it, to how many, and when. That gives you an audit trail of your sends. It is not a per-contact consent record. Ready does not store each recipient's opt-in time, wording or source page, and a keyword reply does not create one. Your store, form or CRM has to keep that record. Compliance is ultimately the sender's responsibility. The tooling reduces risk; it doesn't remove it. (A contact who signs up on a Ready-hosted opt-in page is the exception: Ready stores that sign-up, with the time, IP address and exact wording, and support@tryready.com can send you a copy.)

Step 2: Register your brand and campaign (10DLC)

Carriers require businesses texting from regular 10-digit numbers to register through A2P 10DLC. You register your brand (the business) and a campaign (what you send and why). Unregistered traffic gets filtered, which is why "the texts just stopped arriving" is such a common complaint. If you're not sure whether this applies to you, see is A2P 10DLC required. The short answer for business texting is yes. Our 10DLC explainer covers the background.

On Ready, registration is done in the app with no setup fee:

• At submit you pay the first month, $25.
• After that it costs $25/mo for registration + $2/mo per number.
• Most approvals take 2 to 7 days.

There are two things to know while you wait. First, an account can send up to 500 texts a month before it registers, at the normal per-text rate. After that it has to register. Second, if you bought your number before registering, you send on Ready's shared registration at the same rate while your own is in review. Choose the campaign use case that matches what you actually send. Reminders and promotions are registered differently.

Brand vetting ($79 Standard / $179 Enhanced, one-time) raises your trust score and daily limits. Most small senders don't need it. It matters once you're regularly pushing against carrier caps.

Step 3: Write a message that fits in one segment

You pay per segment, not per message, so length and characters matter:

• A plain GSM-7 text fits 160 characters in one segment. Longer texts split into 153-character segments.
• One emoji (or any non-GSM character) drops the limit to 70 characters, or 67 per segment for longer messages.
• Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain versions before sending, so pasting from a word processor won't silently triple your cost.

Every message should identify you and say how to opt out. For example:

Harbor Coffee: Fall menu is live. Show this text for 15% off any drink through Sunday. Reply STOP to opt out.

That is 107 characters with no emoji, so it's one segment.

Ready's AI message writer can draft or tighten copy, and its spam-filter check flags phrasing carriers tend to block before you send.

Step 4: Know what the send will cost

Here is a worked example. Assume 2,000 opted-in customers and the one-segment message above.

• Ready Standard rate: 2,000 × $0.0075 = $15
• Carrier fee: 2,000 × $0.0045, itemized separately on the bill
• All-in is $15 plus that carrier fee. This figure excludes the optional compliance surcharge covered below.

Now add one emoji to a 140-character version of the same message. That pushes it past 70 characters, so it becomes 3 unicode segments:

• 2,000 × 3 × $0.0075 = $45, plus 6,000 × $0.0045

One emoji tripled the bill. Check the segment count before you press send.

Some other costs to know about:

• Replies are billed like sent texts, at the per-segment rate plus the carrier fee. If 20% of your list replies with one segment each, that's 400 × ($0.0075 + $0.0045).
• If you'd rather check a list once without the per-segment surcharge, the standalone TCPA & DNC litigator scrub is $0.005 per contact.
• Opt-outs and numbers on your Ban list are refused before sending and not charged.

Ready's all-in prices per segment include the carrier fee but not screening: Scrub lists and Number validation, the two switches in Settings under Compliance, each add $0.003 per segment when switched on, shown as screening on your bill, and both are off by default. Unless you turn the opt-out footer off, the first text to each contact, and one again from time to time, also gets "Reply STOP to opt out" and your business name if the message does not already have them, so a text close to the segment limit can bill one more segment.

The cost comparison: raw carrier APIs like Twilio (~$0.0083/segment) and GoHighLevel's LeadConnector (~$0.0083/msg, about $0.0128 all-in) have a lower per-message price than our Standard rate. If you have a developer and only need a pipe, Twilio is a reasonable choice. With Ready you get registration handled in-app, the compliance tooling, the inbox, campaigns and automations without building them yourself. Per-seat or subscription texting tools work differently, so compare your own volume against their plans. Full rates are on the pricing page. Billing is prepaid credits through Stripe.

Step 5: Send, with quiet hours and opt-outs handled

Quiet hours

A 9 AM send from New York lands at 6 AM in California. Ready holds texts that fall outside permitted local hours, based on the recipient's area code, and sends them once that window opens. You're charged only when a held text actually sends. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.

Throughput

Carriers limit how fast you can send. A fresh standard campaign usually gets about 1 to 4 segments per second; carriers don't publish exact figures. At an assumed 2 segments per second, the 2,000-segment send above takes around 17 minutes. T-Mobile also caps brands daily by trust score, starting around 2,000 messages a day at the lowest tier. A brand-new sender with a larger list may need to spread the send over a couple of days.

STOP handling

When someone replies STOP or UNSUBSCRIBE, Ready honors it automatically. The opt-out applies across every campaign, so that contact can't be texted again by mistake next month.

Local numbers

If you have numbers in several area codes, Ready sends each text from the number closest to the contact's area code. Teams use it because a familiar area code looks less like spam. Every number still sits on your registered campaign.

If you're sending from software, not a dashboard

If you run an app or platform that texts on behalf of your own customers, the same rules apply through the API. Bulk sends take up to 100 recipients per call, so split larger lists into batches:

POST https://api.tryready.com/v1/messages/bulk
X-API-Key: <key>
Idempotency-Key: <uuid>

{"to": ["+12125550199", "+15559876543"],
 "body": "Harbor Coffee: Fall menu is live. Reply STOP to opt out.",
 "consent_attested": true}

The Idempotency-Key header means a retried request won't send twice. Each of your customers can get their own sub-account with separate numbers and registration. See the bulk messages docs and the quickstart.

The short version

A phone group thread and an email-to-text gateway are fine for a handful of people who know each other. For a customer list, the reliable process is:

1. Text only people who opted in, and keep your own record of each opt-in.
2. Register your brand and campaign. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days.
3. Keep messages to one segment where you can, and watch for emoji.
4. Send through a platform that enforces quiet hours and honors STOP across campaigns.

To try it, sign up and add a card. Your first 20 texts are free one-to-one sends, so use them to test your copy and number before you register. Campaigns are paid from the first text. When you're ready to send to the whole list, register, and the steps above apply.