If you have a small business and want to make sure your order confirmations, booking reminders, promotions, and the like are actually seen by your customers, SMS marketing tools are one of the best ways to do it. SMS marketing apps can be used to personally message your customers or send automated texts based on a calendar, marketing list, or other integrated app. Your customers can even text you straight back.

I've been covering technology for 10 years, and I've been responsible for updating this list for the past four years. In that time, I've deeply researched and tested more than 40 of the top SMS apps for small businesses. This year, I also have a personal stake: we're currently exploring adding SMS functionality at Snapsure, a photography alerts company I co-founded. So with that, here are my picks for the best SMS marketing tools.

The 6 best SMS apps for small businesses

• TextMagic for getting started quickly with an SMS service
• SimpleTexting for easy-to-run SMS marketing campaigns
• Sakari for outgoing SMS marketing
• Salesmsg for small, local businesses using SMS
• EZ Texting for non-technical people who want some guidance on SMS marketing
• Twilio for customizing your SMS marketing

What makes a great SMS app?

Email is a terrible way to communicate with your customers. Inboxes are overflowing, apps like Gmail automatically separate your messages into a folder that's never checked, and many people just don't open them anyway—no matter how important they are. I can't count the number of times I've missed an important update to a booking or change to an order I've made because it was sent by email—especially over the last two years when everything has been so unsettled.

SMS or text messages, on the other hand, are opened up to 98 percent of the time, and often in the first few minutes after they're received. They're also a super convenient way for your customers to reply. Smartphone messaging apps are quick, easy to use, and fit into day-to-day life, while email is, to be honest, generally awful.

SMS marketing is a huge business around the world, so there are dozens of different SMS marketing platforms available. Most of them, however, aren't really appropriate for small businesses. Many of these apps are designed for enterprise companies, political campaigns, and other groups looking to send thousands of SMS messages a day as part of a marketing campaign, rather than smaller businesses that want to maintain a more personal relationship with their customers. Similarly, a lot of "apps" are actually API services that developers can use to add SMS functionality to their own projects, rather than a service you can sign up for and use straight away.

To cut through the huge range of options, we set five key criteria that we were looking for in SMS apps:

• Easy to use for regular people. Setting up an SMS app for your business shouldn't require hiring a specialist. There are plenty of great apps that can plug into whatever existing setup you have, without you needing a huge amount of technical knowledge. Some of the apps—and especially the API services—just weren't user-friendly enough to recommend. Yes, you might need to read through the help documents or ask the support team a question or two, but all of our picks are easy to get started with. In practice, this means that almost all the apps on the list have a dedicated web app you can log in to and use to send and receive messages. A lot of them also have the ability to send and receive text messages through your email client or with mobile apps.
• Capable of true two-way messaging, so you can have a conversation with your customers. This isn't a list of marketing SMS apps that can send 100,000 text messages with the click of a button. These are all apps for small businesses that want a way to directly communicate with their customers. This means proper two-way communication—just like when you're texting a friend—was essential for inclusion. You can still automate responses, collect survey data, and schedule texts with many of them.
• Able to integrate with other apps and services, so you can automate things like reservation reminders. Integrations with other apps and services were a must. This means that, in addition to texting your customers directly, you can also (for example) have your online ordering service automatically confirm when an order is placed or ready for collection, and follow up with a customer satisfaction survey.
• Affordable with low-volume requirements, so small businesses can get started. When it comes to sending SMS messages to your customers, pricing matters. I required all the SMS services on this list to be affordable for small businesses. This meant no high monthly pricing or large volume requirements. Instead, all the services are either pay-as-you-go or have low-volume, low-fee monthly plans.
• Able to scale as needed. Being locked into a plan that's too small for your holiday marketing push isn't good either. All these services also had to allow you to scale up your SMS campaigns without charging ridiculous fees or forcing you to jump up to a much more expensive tier.