It can be challenging to choose an SMS marketing automation platform. While each provider of bulk SMS marketing services may claim to offer dozens of useful tools for businesses, not all of them deliver.
Choosing the right text message marketing platform is essential for the success of any new strategic marketing channel. With a platform’s tools, a company can automate its bulk SMS marketing services or text messaging in order to generate campaigns at scale. Individualization, categorization, split-testing, analytics guided by AI, and more fall under this category. To begin tailoring your text messages for maximum engagement and tracking SMS attribution as part of your holistic marketing funnel, you need the best bulk SMS marketing services platform for your company’s requirements. Regarding your advertising plan, this is of the utmost significance.
3 most popular SMS marketing software
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Traditional service tools and platforms, such as Salesforce, for text messaging can be complicated.
Maintaining complex or outdated solutions can be prohibitively expensive for even the largest of companies.
- Inefficient campaign execution results from their complexity and difficulty of usage for your marketing team.
- As a result, crucial releases are delayed, like missing BFCM, for months while they are being implemented.
This takes more time out of your marketer’s day because these solutions have the poor processing power and can only hold a small amount of data. Both upkeep and personalization are known to be somewhat pricey.
2. With apps like Attentive and PostScript, you may send and receive text messages with ease.
Oftentimes, when organizations first start to experiment with the SMS marketing channel, they start with a point solution. Nevertheless, point solutions only cover one or two channels and provide minimal data collection and reporting across all channels, so they aren’t ideal. The problem is that these technologies tend to exaggerate the positive effect they have on your bottom line, just as Facebook advertisements did before Apple released an iOS update that corrected the problem.
3. An integrated SMS and email marketing platform, such as CloudContactAI
Hence, we suggest that you use a unified customer platform like CloudContactAI to develop the most effective SMS marketing strategy possible for your company. In this case, because:
- With CloudContactAI’s assistance, top companies may send highly customized messages to their customers via email and text message (SMS).
- The use of artificial intelligence (AI) by CloudContactAI in SMS marketing can improve the accuracy and efficiency of client segmentation and targeting, as well as the automation of processes like scheduling and sending messages, allowing marketers to save time and receive better results.
- Last but not least, CloudContactAI features store individual customer data so that marketing efforts may be segmented to the right audience and internal data can be used to increase revenue.
- CloudContactAI provides MMS features also. Using MMS, you can add multimedia content to your text messages, such as videos, images, GIFs, music files, and more, greatly enhancing the quality of your outgoing and incoming communications. The use of MMS facilitates continued client interest.
You can better build up automation and precisely analyze the efficacy of campaigns when you use a unified marketing platform or software that brings together email and SMS marketing services under one platform. But maybe we’re jumping the gun here. Let’s lay out exactly what we mean by “platforms” and name the top options now available.
When referring to marketing tools, what exactly does “SMS marketing platform” mean?
To compose and deliver text messages to a targeted group of mobile phone numbers, marketers often turn to an SMS marketing automation platform or SMS tool (also known as a text messaging service or software). Marketing through text messages can be used for a wide variety of purposes, including but not limited to alerting customers to sales, confirming orders, alerting customers when items are back in stock, reminding customers they have abandoned their carts, and many other uses.
The majority of them also let you send MMS and SMS campaigns, as well as automatic SMS messages that are triggered by the likes of a customer signing up for text alerts or seeking more information about a product.
Top SMS Marketing platforms
This is by no means an all-inclusive list but rather is intended to illustrate the breadth of possibilities open to businesses of varying sizes, objectives, and clientele.
Let’s start.
CloudContactAI
When it comes to managing customer engagement via text message, businesses can benefit greatly from using CloudContactAI, an AI-enhanced mass texting service. It has a number of features that can help you manage your contacts with consumers, including as automatic responses, multi-channel assistance, polls, and statistics. You can use the software’s built-in tools to better target specific demographics of customers with strategic advertising. CloudContactAI’s mission is to help businesses stay in touch with their customers and win their loyalty.
Klaviyo
In terms of cost, the Klaviyo SMS tool allows you to deliver SMS campaigns and automation to up to 50 profiles for free. After that, Klaviyo provides affordable rates that increase with usage. Inquire about the costs of sending an SMS. For those interested in SMS marketing, Klaviyo has powerful capabilities that are simple to use and accessible to organizations of all sizes. After Shopify, Klaviyo is one of the most popular ecommerce software options with over 100,000 paying clients worldwide. There are around 10,000 people using the Klaviyo SMS service.
Postscript
Price: Free 30-day trial; $.01 per message after that; $25 monthly minimum
SMS marketing for Shopify stores, SMS automation, segmentation, Chats, campaigns, revenue and ROI tracking for SMS, and text compliance are just some of the capabilities in the postscript.
Attentive
Very Reasonable Rates Upon Inquiry
Features such as SMS compliance, revenue, and ROI tracking, segmentation, triggered texts, signup forms to develop your list, text campaigns, and more!
TextMagic
Free trial- Cost: $0.04/sms
Sending texts online, email to SMS (where you or your app send an ordinary email that is transformed into an SMS and delivered to the receiver), two-way SMS, integrations, reporting and analytics, and the SMS STOP command are all available with TextMagic.
Simple Texting
Plans for SimpleTexting begin at $25 per month after a free trial.
Two-way texting, scheduled texts, autoresponders, contact import, keywords and shortcodes, data collecting, and segments are just some of the capabilities available in SimpleTexting.
Key capabilities of an SMS marketing platform
Many things to consider when selecting a text messaging platform for your SMS marketing efforts.
- Promotes global regulatory conformity via SMS via an integrated system.
- Provides access to toll-free and shorter-form phone numbers
- Forms requiring multiple steps, forms requiring a click-to-text, and a permission form at checkout
- Combinations with external data collection methods
- Text message split testing
- Interactions between the brand and the client in the form of two-way text messages
- Statistics and future projections
- Customization and information collection via left-open tabs, multimedia messaging services, dynamic pictures, and discount coupons
Methods for Successful SMS Advertising
Following is a set of steps to take before sending out an automated or SMS marketing campaign. That way, your messages will reach their intended recipients and be read. When researching SMS marketing software, make sure that it facilitates and simplifies the completion of the following to-do list.
- Images sent via MMS are crisp and not pixelated.
- As opposed to sending out a mass email to everyone, you will instead target certain groups or segments of your audience. Advertising via Short Message Service
- Before sending the message, or as part of this send, incorporate an A/B testing component to compare the results to the benchmark and identify areas for improvement.
- If you’re using sms platform, use smart send time; otherwise, you scheduled the sending of your message at a convenient time. Don’t message someone in the US before 9 a.m. or after 8 p.m., as that would be sending them an unwanted message.
- No spammy jargon has made it into your communications.
- One call to action / link is all you have in your message.
- It’s appropriate and consistent with your brand’s voice that you employ emoticons in the message.
- Text marketing services allows for brief, easy-to-understand messages.
- That the text message’s call-to-action (CTA) link actually works is something you confirmed, right?
- Urgency is communicated in your communication.
- Keeping with the spirit of your brand, your message has an approachable tone or casual voice.
- As a result of reading your message, your intended audience will feel special.
- The animated GIF of yours is either directly related to the message’s subject matter or works in harmony with it.
- In this case, you get to decide whether to use short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), or electronic mail.