Who Uses SMS Marketing Software?
Despite its name, several teams use an SMS marketing software.
Marketing teams: Marketing teams use text message campaigns for various purposes, such as offering discounts, soliciting feedback, and nurturing leads. Text messages are a more personal form of communication than other marketing channels because customers have a close relationship with their phones. Additionally, messages are tailored to a customer’s preferences and past behaviors. For example, a restaurant marketer might let their VIP customers know about an exclusive promotion, or a hotel marketer may text a recent guest to request a review on their stay.
Sales teams: SMS communication has become a powerful tool for salespeople to engage with their prospects and nurture leads. Some text marketing solutions offer contact management features, enabling sales teams to view a contact’s interaction history and track their leads through the sales pipeline.
Customer service teams: Due to the increasing popularity of mobile messaging, SMS marketing is becoming an increasingly common solution for customer support teams. Customer service products such as conversational support software and help desk software may support business texting features. SMS marketing software makes it simple for customers to contact customer service departments for help. These solutions include features like skill-based routing and customer lookup to ensure tickets are handled efficiently.
What are the Alternatives to SMS Marketing Software?
Email marketing software: Some email marketing software solutions also include features for SMS marketing. Email and SMS are popular marketing channels for communicating with customers and sending promotional messages. While email marketing is used to send longer messages, SMS campaigns promote short and quick communication and tend to have higher open and success rates than email.
Push notification software: Push notifications are another method of sending messages directly to customers’ devices. This software helps businesses deliver alerts, updates, and promotional messages to customers through mobile applications or web browsers. Push notifications typically include a specific call-to-action but do not allow for two-way communication between the business and the customer.
Proactive notification software: Proactive notification software helps organizations deliver important messages and alerts to customers across different channels, including email, SMS, and voice. These tools communicate useful information about an upcoming activity or action, such as appointment reminders, payment deadlines, personalized promotions, or emergency broadcasts.
Cloud communication platforms: Some SMS marketing solutions are cloud communication platforms. Developers use cloud communication platforms to connect a business’ applications to a phone’s SMS, voice, and verification features via API. This enables the developer to customize how the application interacts with SMS and communication features. Businesses may prefer to use cloud communication platforms to incorporate SMS features into their products.
Challenges with SMS Marketing Software
Some challenges with SMS marketing platforms include:
Character limitations: The standard character limit for an SMS message is 160 characters. These days, most phones rebuild and combine messages over 160 characters, so a message of 161 characters would still be delivered as a single text; however, the sender is charged for two messages instead of one. However, this depends on the company's text message marketing platform. Some companies will allow sending more than 160 characters and charge the same amount, but the user may need to pay more for this plan. It is a best practice to keep SMS messages brief, even though brevity can sometimes take away from the ability to market a story to captivate customers.
Opt-in regulations: When it comes to SMS marketing tools, businesses need to ensure they receive permission from customers to continue texting them to protect customer data and privacy. Customers should be contacted only if they opt to be on a business’s contact list. Subscribers typically opt in to receive SMS promotions when filling out a form on a business’ website or by texting a keyword to the business’ phone number, so you can’t send text message marketing campaigns to just anyone. Following opt-in regulations is simple enough, but companies should also strive to provide clear instructions on how customers can opt out of SMS updates.
How to Buy SMS Marketing Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for SMS Marketing Software
Suppose a company is launching a global campaign, engaging with local customers, or maybe trying to gain a larger reach. In that case, g2.com can help select the best SMS marketing software that suits the company’s needs.
Regarding text message marketing software, buyers should always determine their specific needs and use cases as this will influence the purchased software platform. In addition, identifying pain points related to marketing, such as low open rates, interactions and clicks, and engagement rates, will help determine the type of integrative SMS software and capabilities the business will need. If the company is trying to improve engagement and drive activity to their page or bolster brand awareness regarding promotions, new items, features, or announcements, SMS marketing will serve as an integral solution.
Creating a checklist will help your team identify pain points and streamline the understanding of the type of software needed to alleviate business problems. The checklist serves as a detailed guide that includes necessary and nice-to-have features not limited to: customer service support features, transaction logging, two-way messaging, pre-set message sending, message automation, and more.
Depending on the scope of the deployment, it might be helpful to produce an RFI, a one-page list with a few bullet points describing what is needed from SMS marketing technology.
Compare SMS Marketing Products
Create a long list
After determining pain points and solutions, buyers should start by filtering through the different software and adding only the ones to the long list that fulfill business needs. It may be helpful also to choose software products that are additionally included in the marketing automation category as these products have both SMS marketing capabilities and one other form of communication, typically email. It’s essential to make sure your long list is comprehensive.
Create a short list
After creating a long list of potential SMS marketing solutions, buyers should focus on narrowing down that list by prioritizing their pain points. Focusing on software that will solve as many marketing-related issues as possible should be a priority. In the end, buyers should narrow this list to about 3-5 products.
Conduct demos
Vendor demos are integral when deciding on the best SMS marketing platform for the company. Buyers should take full advantage of demos as it’s a great opportunity to understand a product's features, compare ease of use, and ask necessary questions. Here are some key business factors to inquire about when speaking with a vendor—monthly SMS text volume, number of customers on a contact list, the character limit of text messages, number of licenses needed, etc.
Selection of SMS Marketing software
Choose a selection team
SMS marketing software is not only reserved for a marketing team. Customer service teams often use it when providing customer support or sales teams when driving revenue. Including all three teams in the conversation is necessary when deciding on a product.
Negotiation
It is important to consider all of your options when purchasing SMS marketing technologies. Some companies offer free trials with no contracts or hidden fees when buying their software, providing a low-risk investment with great flexibility for the buyer. Some companies may even offer fixed prices for an unlimited number of contacts; others may charge solely based on the number of contacts. Overall, it’s typically the most cost-effective to opt for yearly payments compared to monthly, but it depends on specific business needs.
Final decision
Ultimately, SMS marketing is typically a low-cost, low-risk investment and an easy way to automate business marketing, especially once you’ve determined a plan within your price range that includes the features your business needs. After that, choosing a text message marketing platform should be fairly straightforward. The selected product should solve a business’ marketing-related pain points and be a quick and easy solution to implement.
