RCS Business Message Types: A guide to RCS for Business message

Each one lands in the same place: your customer’s native texting inbox, under your verified brand name and logo rather than an anonymous number.The naming can get confusing, because carriers label these types differently by region – “Rich” and “Rich Media” in the U.S., “Basic” and “Single” almost everywhere else. Underneath the labels, the choice is simple: how rich does this message need to be, and do you want a one-way notification or a two-way conversation? And here’s the good news – if you already send SMS, you’re most of the way there, because RCS reaches the same native inbox and falls back to SMS automatically.In this guide, we’ll break down what RCS message types are, walk through all three, compare them side by side, unpack the interactive building blocks, and show you how to choose – with real examples from brands already doing it.

A Single message is where RCS starts to feel like an app. It carries text beyond 160 characters plus rich media – images, GIFs, videos, rich cards, and carousels – along with suggested replies and suggested actions like opening a link, dialing a number, or dropping a pin on a map. U.S. carriers call this a “Rich Media” message.

A craft note on carousels, learned the hard way by teams migrating from MMS: don’t treat the format as one big image with everything crammed in. The campaigns that perform pace the story across cards – the first card earns the swipe like a teaser, and each card that follows advances one chapter of the offer until the last one carries the call to action. Carousels also update in minutes when an offer changes, which is exactly where video assets – slow to re-edit – tend to fall behind the business.

Single messages are still one-way: you send, the customer sees a visually engaging message, and they can tap a button to act. That makes them a natural fit for marketing campaigns, product showcases, and promotions where visuals do the selling – RCS marketing campaigns deliver 3 to 7 times higher click-through rates than rich SMS, and interactive campaigns can lift average order value by nearly 10%.

The third type is the one the ladder is built toward: conversational messages. Here the message opens a genuine two-way thread. The customer replies, and your brand – or an AI agent – responds inside the same inbox, handling everything from product questions to returns to support triage.

This matters more than it sounds: in Sinch research, 28% of consumers say one-way messages frustrate them when they can’t interact or ask a question. Conversational RCS answers that directly. It’s also where billing changes – when a customer replies and your brand responds, a 24-hour session opens, and pricing typically shifts from per-message to per-session. Whether a message is conversational is defined by the agent type you register – non-conversational for one-way sends, conversational for two-way sessions – rather than by the format itself.

What makes Single and conversational messages feel app-like isn’t the “type” – it’s the interactive components inside them. These are the pieces you’ll actually design.

The one component that appears in every type, from Basic to conversational, is the verified sender profile – which is worth its own section.

You don’t have to launch every message type at once. The brands that get RCS right tend to grow into it in three phases:

So what does this look like in the real world? Two brands show the range – one at the Basic end of the ladder, one further up.

EasyPark Group, a leading digital parking app, relied on multiple vendors to send SMS parking reminders across dozens of markets. After consolidating with Sinch, the team upgraded those SMS reminders to RCS Basic messages for RCS-capable devices.

The payoff was trust. Drivers on Android now see the verified EasyPark brand as the sender and know the reminders are genuine – no small thing when 75% of organizations report SMS phishing attacks (Proofpoint’s 2024 State of the Phish). For drivers without RCS, nothing changed: they still receive SMS reminders, so every driver stays informed thanks to automatic fallback.

Nespresso, the premium coffee brand, wanted to guide French customers toward its subscription program. It led with a Single message – a striking visual and concise copy – whose suggested replies opened into a guided, chatbot-led conversation.

The result? That conversational experience earned a 15% click-through rate and a 36% completion rate – and generated 2.3 times more completions than the Rich SMS fallback. The visuals and interactive buttons did the heavy lifting, and every reply became an opening for deeper engagement.

Weighing the types for your own program? Keep these factors in mind.

The message-type question comes down to one thing: matching the format to the job. Basic messages upgrade your alerts with trust and branding. Single messages bring the visuals and interactivity that drive campaigns. Conversational messages turn a broadcast into a relationship. And a verified sender profile makes every one of them unmistakably yours.

The brands seeing the strongest results didn’t wait for the perfect strategy – they upgraded one SMS campaign, learned, and scaled. With RCS reaching more inboxes every month across a market projected to grow from around $3 billion in 2025 to roughly $9 billion by 2030, there’s real upside in starting now.