Hi, my name is Derek Johnson with tatango.com.
Today I'm going to walk you through one of our free resources at tatango.com, which is
our messaging throughput calculators.
Now, what is messaging throughput for text message marketing?
Essentially, it's how fast your software provider can send text messages from the software to
the wireless carriers.
Now, why does this matter?
Well, to be honest, if you have 100 or 1000 subscribers, it most likely doesn't matter.
Any messaging speed will work.
But if you have 1,000,000, 5,000,000, 10,000,000 mobile phone numbers in your database, it's
essential to know the messaging speed because even something like 30 messages per second,
which sounds crazy fast, means that if you have 5,000,000 subscribers, it could take
multiple days to get out just one text message to all your subscribers.
So, in discussions with text message marketing providers, you're gonna hear the term MPS,
M-P-S, messages per second.
And that's kind of the industry term and how people compare apples to apples in our industry.
What's confusing though is when somebody says they have let's say an MPS of 100, that would
be 100 messages per second.
For me, it's hard to tell, you know, how many hours that would take if I had 100,000 subscribers
or 250,000 subscribers or 1,000,000 subscribers.
So, what if I went from 100 to 150 MPS, how many minutes would that, you know, shave off?
So, essentially, what we did here at Tatango is we created some calculators that help maybe
people like myself that are a little math-challenged figure this out without actually having to
calculate it in their head.
So, here's how you access these calculators.
First, go to tatango.com, T-A-T-A-N-G-O.com.
On the top, you're going to see a tab that says "Resources."
Click on that.
Once you click on resources, there's gonna be a ton of resources that we offer, all free
resources.
US ShortCode Directory, Mobile Messaging Lookbook.
You're gonna wanna go down here, and you're gonna wanna find "Messaging Calculators."
Click on that.
And here are the two different calculators that you're gonna use, and I'll walk you through
how to use each one and why each one is used.
So, this is the Time to Send Calculator.
This is the one on the left-hand side here.
So, this is great when you have an existing list or you know how big your list is going
to be.
This will be the amount of phone numbers that you need to message, and then you know the
MPS, the messages per second that are being offered to you.
So, I would type in 1,000 let's say...or sorry.
This is 1,000,000.
I'll type in 1,000,000.
This is the number of phone numbers.
I know that the software provider is giving me let's say 40 MPS, and then I click calculate,
and what it's gonna do is it's gonna tell me how many minutes and how many hours it
will take to send the message based off the list size and the MPS.
So, you can see here for a list size of 1,000,000, if they're only offering 40 MPS, messages
per second it would take almost 7 hours to send that message to all those million subscribers.
Now let's bump that up to, you know, let's say 150.
You can see, big difference.
That now only takes about 2 hours or 111 minutes.
So, we break it up in the minutes and hours here.
So, this is great when know both those numbers.
Now, what if you don't know what MPS, messages per second, you're going to get, but you want
to figure out what MPS you need when looking for a software provider?
That's where the Required MPS Calculator, the one on the right.
That's where this one comes in.
So, similar to the last one I'm gonna put in a list size.
This can be my existing list or this could be what I envision my list to be and how big
it could be.
Then down here, instead of typing in the MPS, which I don't know, and I'm trying to figure
that out, I'm gonna type in the expected minutes to send to this list.
So, let's say I talked to my marketing department and we figure out, you know, three hours.
So, that would be 60 minutes times 3, 180, if my math is correct that's 180 minutes.
I'm okay with 180 minutes.
So, what I wanna find out is the required messages per second if I'm okay with 180 minutes
and it's gonna send to 1,000,000 subscribers.
I click calculate.
So, that is going to give me what the required messages per second should be, which is 92.
So, that's what you would go to your software provider, and say, "I need 92 messages per
second."
So, two different calculators here.
One is when you know the messages per second and you wanna see how actually long it's gonna
take to get out a text message to all those subscribers, and then the required MPS calculator,
which is when you don't know what your MPS needs to be and you wanna find that out.
Again, these resources are free.
Anybody can use them, even if you're not using tatango.com for your software, but you can
access these resources by going to tatango.com, clicking "Resources," and then scrolling down
to "Messaging Calculators."
Anyway, hopefully that helped.
Again, my name is Derek Johnson with tatango.com.