Engage your customers in meaningful ways through SMS using chatbots, surveys, appointment reminders, notifications, promotional messages, and more. Extend how you communicate with your customers with voice and video capabilities already built-in, and the ability to send up to 10,000 unique messages with a single API request.
Send and receive text messages in multiple character sets, and even using multiple languages per text. Engage readers with images, barcodes, QR codes, videos, v-cards, audio, and more with support for 13 outbound and 19 inbound multimedia formats.
The RingCentral API platform manages the distribution of the high volume messages to help keep your account in good standing with carriers. We also handle opt-in/opt-out, provide APIs to help you set up business rules for data retention and regulatory compliance (HIPAA, PCI, and more), and provide access and analytics for your messages through a secure and encrypted interface.
In 2021 carriers released new rules and regulations around SMS. They also introduced new fees including carrier surcharges and campaign registration fees. To help our customers, RingCentral has built in numerous new features and capabilities to help our customers remain compliant with these policies, and also have increased deliverability. This includes intelligent checks on our system to help prevent messages that may not be compliant from reaching the carriers, helping protect your business from being blocked or fined by the carriers for non-compliance.
Included Business SMS is intended for lower volumes of communications. Messages that are automated, marketing, or numbers that send at higher volumes will need to utilize a High Volume SMS solution which provides advanced built-in features including queuing and opt-out management.
More information regarding the limitations of Enhanced Business SMS and our SMS policies is available on our SMS/ MMS Messaging and Content Policies page.
Yes. Enhanced Business SMS supports 13 outbound media formats for MMS. Toll-free MMS, High Volume MMS, and international messaging (SMS or MMS) is not supported.
When using the included Business SMS, you are limited to sending a maximum of 40 messages per minute per RingCentral number. These messages must be manual in nature and the API cannot be used to create automated messages or notifications.
To send messages more quickly (up to 1 message per second for commercial long code and up to 3 messages per second for toll-free numbers) please contact developer support to have your RingCentral number High Volume SMS enabled, and utilize our High Volume SMS documentation.
High Volume SMS should be used when sending larger volumes of messages, you would like queuing to be handled for you (not API rate limit), you want built-in opt-out support, or you need greater insights into deliverability and SMS messaging errors.
Both long code and toll-free numbers allow you to send up to 40 messages per number per minute, or 50,000 messages per day per number. Long code numbers are enabled for SMS by default, and allow you to use your local number, or use numbers local to your recipients. Our long-code solution also offers the most feature support, including MMS support. Toll-free numbers provide a more generic number when used internationally, and have traditionally been used for higher volume sends such as marketing blasts. Toll-free numbers must be requested to have SMS enabled, and do not support MMS.
High Volume SMS (using either a long-code or toll-free number) should be used when primarily sending marketing or automated messages, and you do not need to utilize the RingCentral App for 1:1 conversations. High Volume SMS enables you to send up to 3 messages/ second, has built in queuing, and opt-out management. High Volume SMS does not support MMS.
You can complete registration with The Campaign Registry through the RingCentral Admin Portal for your standard numbers. Learn more about registering here.
Upon requesting to have a number provisioned for High Volume SMS, you will be required to provide the necessary information to register a campaign for your number with TCR through a manual process. This includes the legal name of your business, expected volume, use case, and a minimum of 3 sample SMS messages.
Unlike many providers, we do not charge additional per-message carrier surcharges on top of our SMS pricing. This means that the price you see is the price you pay per message - saving you up to 50% on every message sent and received!
Note, a message is defined by the carrier, meaning a concatenated messages or longer messages sent through the API may be charged as multiple messages based on length. Customers may be required to register individual brand and/or campaign information with The Campaign Registry (the mobile carriers’ preferred hub for managing SMS campaigns), which may result in additional fees.
The SMS Campaigns app is available in our App Gallery, and allows anyone on your team with a SMS enabled number to log in using their RingCentral credentials and send mass SMS either by copying and pasting numbers or uploading a CSV.
Learn more about our SMS Campaigns App here.
