With over 6.5 billion people owning a cellphone globally and half of them spending 5-6 hours daily using their mobiles, mobile marketing has been gaining momentum. It has become a key aspect of businesses marketing efforts because this is where potential customers are.
How can you tap into the great potential of mobile marketing? SMS marketing enables businesses to send updates, company news, and promotions to customers using text messages. Featuring a stunning open rate of 98% compared to the average email open rate of 21.5%, text messaging is an imperative tool that helps companies stay on top of their competition.
Let’s go through the benefits of implementing SMS marketing software and highlight seven top options that are worth trying.
First things first.
Table of Contents
What is SMS Marketing software?
SMS marketing software offers a platform that streamlines the design, running, and measuring of your text messaging marketing campaigns. Typically, it comes as a cloud-based SaaS solution, so you can use text message marketing services in a straightforward, efficient, and organized way from any desktop or mobile device.
Leveraging the huge opportunities offered by SMS marketing and implementing an SMS marketing strategy would be almost impossible to do manually. Dedicated software allows you to create an automated workflow and achieve the best results almost effortlessly.
Benefits of implementing an SMS marketing solution
Technology enables you and your team to work smart rather than hard. You can focus your resources on developing the strategy and finding the target audience, and then leave the actual execution to the SMS marketing software. Here are the main advantages it brings to your business:
Text messaging is fast and reliable
Text messages are delivered immediately and opened by close to 90% of recipients within 3 seconds upon arriving. In addition, you can reach your prospects even on a basic phone and irrespective of the availability of an Internet connection.
SMS is direct and user-friendly communication service
It comes by default as a basic mobile phone feature and doesn’t require installing any additional application on a customer’s mobile. Plus, everyone knows how to use it.
You can get your marketing message across effectively
Nearly half of customers expect to receive brand news and important updates via SMS. Also, by using this communication channel, you avoid the risk of your message ending up in spam or junk folders.
Text messages feature high engagement and response rates
The outstanding open rates translate into correspondingly increased engagement. Recipients are nine times more likely to interact with the content and click on the links they receive via SMS as compared to emails, for example.
What are the most important features of SMS marketing software?
By implementing a text messaging marketing solution, you can benefit from the following functionalities:
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Mass text messaging |
Allowing you to send bulk messages to all your contacts, groups, or subgroups |
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Contact segmentation |
Organizing your contacts in groups and subgroups, allowing better targeting and personalization |
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Message scheduling |
Automatically sending group and individual messages at a specified time |
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Automated responses |
Sending replies automatically after receiving a text message |
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Toll-free numbers |
Allowing fast, secure, and cost-efficient sending of text messages |
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MMS functionality |
Sending images, videos, and clickable links |
7 Best SMS marketing platforms to put on your radar in 2022
There seems to be an endless variety of SMS marketing platforms you can choose from.
While all of them offer more or less similar features, the following seven options stand out as the best text marketing services for their reliability and range of functionalities:
1. TextMagic
TextMagic is an all-in-one business short text messaging platform designed to cater to the demands of businesses of all sizes for fast, reliable, and cost-effective communication. If you’re looking for SMS software to target customers in any country and make sure they receive your messages at the desired time of the day, TextMagic is an excellent solution. This user-friendly platform is particularly efficient for sending bulk messages. It allows users to import individual and multiple contacts and create SMS distribution lists, making running marketing campaigns and maintaining internal and external communications easy and time-effective.
You can easily schedule messages in advance, personalize them using custom fields, analyze message delivery reports, and manage your contact lists. It also comes with advanced features, such as practical integration with Zapier, voice call forwarding, useful templates, contact list management, email to SMS service, SMS surveys for collecting feedback, and various free tools, such as conversion, response, and churn rate calculators, password, invoice, and QR code generators, text-to-speech and speech-to-text converters, phone number validation, and many more.
TextMagic is pay-as-you-go SMS marketing software that offers free setting up and running of an account while using all of its premium features.
Pricing: No setup and monthly fees and an average price per text of $0.050, depending on the country
Free Trial: Yes
2. SlickText
SlickText is a text marketing cloud-based solution for sending texts to customers to increase customer engagement and revenue for businesses of all sizes. SlickText is easy to use and comes with Mass text messages, 2-Way Text Messaging, Auto-Replies, Text to Vote & SMS Surveys, MMS / Picture Messaging, Loyalty Rewards, and Mobile Coupons. It also features Workflows, a text message automation tool, and allows you to craft a more personalized message marketing approach.
SlickText’s user interface is intuitive and features detailed explanations on the platform including videos teaching you how to create an account, set up autoreply, and more. You can also integrate this software with Facebook, MailChimp, Constant Contact and other applications and monitor your mobile marketing campaigns.
Pricing: Starting at $29 per month (for 500 texts) to $1,250 per month (allowing a maximum of 50,000 texts).
Free Trial: Yes
2. SimpleTexting
SimpleTexting is another comprehensive SMS marketing platform for both medium and large businesses. It allows you to send bulk text messages to your contact list and run your text message campaigns easily. You can automate your messages and reminders, schedule them for any time, and take advantage of ready-to-use templates.
You can also utilize text message data collection to get more valuable insights into your target audience demographics. SimpleTexting allows you to use two-way messaging to streamline follow-up.
Pricing: Monthly and annual tariff plans, ranging from $29 per month (for 500 credits) to $899 per month (for 50,000 credits), The cost of SMS and MMS is 1 and 3 credits respectively. Note that additional fees may apply.
Free Trial: Yes
3. EZ Texting
Next on the list is EZ Texting – a text messaging software for businesses of all sizes to send short text messages. It is an easy-to-use service that enables you to send mass SMS from a six-digit shortcode or a 10-digit number. When you purchase one of their packages, you also get a free keyword that you can use for your customers to subscribe. In addition, you can send texts to landline and use the text-to-speech feature if the recipient number is eligible for this service.
EZ Texting allows you to bulk add contacts and create groups for targeted marketing campaigns. You can also personalize your messages by choosing a template, inserting links, and emojis, and adding your own media. Users can use Zapier to integrate this software solution with other programs to automate tasks and save time.
Pricing: Monthly and annual tariff plans, ranging from $24 to $374 when billed monthly, depending on the features you opt for.
Free Trial: Yes
4. Heymarket
Heymarket is a platform primarily focused on businesses looking for a single, integrated solution for all their needs. It is an SMS marketing software designed to help businesses of all sizes increase their consumer outreach. Heymarket provides businesses tools to streamline executing marketing campaigns through communication channels. In that sense, it’s a bit different than other platforms because it centralizes Facebook and text messaging.
Heymarket readily integrates with many solutions and applications, allowing you to automate your communications. Its main feature is “shared inboxes” that everyone on the team can use. It also enables quick communication between the team members via private comments and instant messages.
Pricing: Monthly and annual tariff plans, ranging from $59 to $239 per month, depending on the features included.
Free Trial: Yes
5. ClickSend
ClickSend is a cloud-based SMS provider that lets you organize your SMS gateways and interact with customers by using bulk SMS, MMS, email to SMS, or even voice. While some other marketing solutions offer more robust insight-tracking features, ClickSend is ideal for small businesses looking for low-cost apps with basic daily reports.
ClickSend features an intuitive dashboard and allows you to send reminders, bills, and invoices, manage communications with suppliers and streamline HR communications. This cloud-based SMS solution also offers integrations with many business applications so businesses can manage communication in a single dashboard.
Pricing: The prices depend on the country, the network used, the services you opt for, and the number of subscribers. Typically, it includes a cost per outbound SMS.
Free trial: Yes
6. Tatango
Finally, Tatango has been a cloud-based mass text marketing company in the business for over 13 years. They consider their main use case to be a political campaign, such as fundraising or local election campaigns, but there’s no reason not to use Tatango for e-commerce, retail, and similar purposes. The available SMS features include messaging automation, subscribers’ lists, A/B testing, real-time reporting, and more.
Since it’s designed for high-volume mass text messaging, Tatango offers messaging speed, and personalized support to help enhance marketing campaigns. For personalized targeting, Tatango allows you to manage subscribers within the system and sort them into segments. You can also integrate Tatango with third-party systems for a seamless data sync.
Pricing: On request.
Free Trial: No
Marketing Done Right
In the information and communication technology age, poor communication can cause immeasurable damage and impede achieving your company’s goals. SMS is still one of the most efficient ways to reach your target audience and blow your competition out of the water.
After choosing the SMS marketing software that best suits your business needs, all you have to do is give your campaign a fresh start and enjoy the benefits of text message marketing.