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MMS Marketing for Business

Find out what MMS marketing is and why so many businesses are using it to enhance their mobile marketing strategies.

  • Share photos, audio clips, short videos and more
  • Increase customer engagement and click-through rates
  • Drive more sales and higher ROI

No credit card required

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MMS Marketing Trusted by Businesses of All Sizes

What Is MMS Marketing?

MMS marketing is a method of mobile advertising that uses MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service, to send enhanced text messages. It’s the smarter, stronger, splashier cousin of SMS marketing.

  • With MMS, you can add all kinds of rich media right inside your messages, including images, GIFs, videos, and audio files.
  • Plus, you can write up to 1,600 characters in a single message.
  • Most promotional text messages will benefit from including photos, GIFs, or videos.
  • MMS marketing is also known as photo messaging, video messaging, and multimedia messaging. But what you call it doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you can do with it.

How Is MMS Different From SMS?

The main difference between SMS and MMS messages is the type of content you can send. With SMS, everything you’re including has to be plain text and fit within 160 characters. (With extended SMS, you can send up to 306 characters.) MMS allows you to send images, videos, audio, and GIFs. However, because of the increased character length, MMS messages typically cost more

What Is the Cost of MMS Marketing?

The difference in cost varies from provider to provider. With SimpleTexting’s text messaging platform, MMS costs 3 credits per message. SMS, on the other hand, costs 1 credit per message.

In case you’re wondering, “Why should I pay more for MMS?”, the answer is simple: MMS campaigns have a 20% higher opt-in rate than SMS campaigns, and MMS messages are 8x more likely to be shared on social media. Pics and gifs are much more engaging than plain old text, and that’s why it’s worth paying more for MMS.

Brianna collected 1,000+ event photos from with SimpleTexting’s MMS services

After the Franchise Brokers Association’s largest conference of the year, event planner Brianna LaCaruba asked attendees to text in photos from the event.

The ease of MMS messaging allowed Brianna’s 400+ contacts to send more photos than they did in previous years with email.

Image for Brianna collected 1,000+ event photos from with SimpleTexting's MMS services

The Benefits Of MMS Marketing

Visual aids are power tools. Combine that with the speed and reach of SMS and you’ve got a knockout marketing strategy.

There’s power in pictures

Our MMS service creates a richer mobile experience for your customers or contacts. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all, and the video and audio options speak volumes, too.

Click-through rates are 52% higher

People prefer MMS marketing to SMS. Businesses who use MMS see click-through rates that are 52% higher. Picture messaging is simply more engaging than SMS.

The setup is crazy simple

If you can swing email attachments, you’ll be just fine uploading files to your MMS messages. Just like SMS, setting up a campaign is easy, subscribing is easy—everything is easy.

It plays nice with mobile devices

Over 98% of mobile devices can handle MMS just fine. For the tiny slice of the mobile pie that can’t, we’ve built in a handy little feature for sending automated fallback messages via SMS.

You get 1,600 characters

With MMS marketing, you can kiss that pesky 160-character limit goodbye. How does 1,600 characters per message sound? Now we’re getting somewhere. Make your text blasts more powerful!

Shares are 8x more likely

Did you know that people are 8 times more likely to share MMS content on social media? If you’re looking for a bigger impact from your mass texting service, MMS just makes a lot of sense.

How To Start MMS Marketing With SimpleTexting

Picture messaging is just the beginning. With MMS, you can share GIFs, longer messages, and more! It takes just three steps to send multimedia text messages.

Step 1

Write Your Message

Write out your text message and select the list of contacts you’d like to send your campaign to.

  • Write up to 1,600 characters
  • Include emojis to capture even more attention 🎉
  • Add shortened, trackable links to your site
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Step 2

Upload Your Media

Upload the media you’d like to send. Supported file types vary by number. Common use cases include:

  • Share photos in JPG/JPEG, or PNG format
  • Share exciting, animated GIFs
  • Create a text message business card with VCF
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Step 3

Send Your Campaign

Click send and watch how your MMS marketing campaign performs in real-time right from your dashboard!

  • Track click-through rates
  • Send follow-ups based on click behavior
  • Monitor unsubscribes
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Frequently Asked Questions About MMS Marketing

After nearly a decade of sending MMS messages, we’ve received a lot of questions. These are the most common.

MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service. It is often referred to as “picture messaging.”
The main difference between SMS and MMS messages is the type of content you can send. With SMS, everything you include has to be plain text and fit within 160 characters. (With extended SMS, you can send up to 306 characters.) MMS allows you to send images, videos, audio, and GIFs. You can also include up to 1,600 characters of text.
SMS messages cost one credit to send and MMS messages cost three. All incoming SMS messages are free, while incoming MMS messages cost 1 credit. This is a standard difference attributed to the extra bandwidth required to send extended messages. View our full MMS and SMS marketing pricing on our pricing page.
File types supported by MMS marketing vary based on the number the messages are sent from. Toll-free numbers (e.g. 888-555-555) can upload GIF, PNG, JPG/JPEG, TXT, and animated GIF files (P.S. Don’t forget to have your toll-free number verified). Short codes (e.g. 94090) can upload also GIF, PNG, JPG/JPEG, TXT, and animated GIFs, too. In addition, short codes support VCF, PDF, and MP4 files.
In the U.S., MMS messaging is currently supported by AT&T, MetroPCS, Sprint, T-Mobile USA, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon Wireless. This covers the majority of contacts across the country. If your message is being sent to a number that isn’t on one of these networks, they’ll receive a text message linking them to the content. That way, you’ll still get your message across!
Yes! People can reply with an image or other MMS supported file type, and you’ll see it appear in your inbox the same as a regular SMS message.