Top 5 SMS Marketing Platforms for 2024
Did you know people look at their smartphones 96 times per day on average? People are always on their phones, which is an excellent opportunity for brands to reach their target customers.
Updated on 15 Aug 2024
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Successful brands worldwide are tapping into the power of SMS: Slazenger launched an SMS strategy combined with email to create powerful, personalized, contextual messages to engage customers across their favorite channels. It gained 49X ROI within just two months and recovered 40% of revenue from a single campaign.
In this article, we’ll explore the world of SMS marketing platforms, what they are, the benefits they can bring your business, how to find the best platform for you, and the best SMS marketing platforms in 2024.
What is an SMS marketing platform?
SMS marketing involves using short message service (SMS) to engage customers and deliver promotional or informative content through text messages. Unlike other marketing channels, SMS open rates often exceed 90%, making it a highly effective tool for a systematic and streamlined approach to reaching and engaging customers.
‘SMS marketing platform’ or ‘message marketing automation platform’ refers to the ability to send and deliver SMS communications at scale. However, not all SMS marketing platforms offer the same features, so choosing the best one can be complicated.
As a marketer, you need to step back and clarify what you need from the SMS platform and what you want to achieve. That way, finding the right solution will be much easier.
The benefits of an SMS marketing platform
- It boosts conversion rates and revenue
SMS marketing is great for driving more traffic during the holiday season. After analyzing its customer base, Insider found that brands that sent customers SMS messages over Black Friday weekend saw an incredible 30.21% CVR from the channel.
SMS marketing platforms have proven to be highly effective because the immediacy of text messages means that customers are more likely to engage and take action promptly. This timeliness can lead to immediate conversions. Plus, SMS marketing allows for direct and personal engagement with customers. This personalized customer experience approach can lead to stronger customer relationships for your brand.
- It allows for immediate communication via SMS
One of the main benefits of SMS is that it’s an immediate form of communication compared to email. Texting drives a two-way conversation at a faster speed. SMS marketing platforms allow marketers to reach customers immediately with an SMS campaign. You can message directly to their phones, without having to wait for them to check their email or visit your website. By using a seamless SMS marketing platform like Insider, marketers can launch SMS campaigns in minutes, saving time and allowing them to concentrate on other areas of their marketing efforts.
- It enhances the customer experience
Did you know that SMS messages can be customized based on customer preferences and behaviors? Customers who receive SMS messages that are relevant to them feel valued and understood. That way, a personal touch can make your customers more loyal to your brand.
Plus, SMS marketing provides customers with another convenient way to interact with your brand from their smartphone—whether it’s purchasing, seeking information, or receiving promotional updates. SMS automation platforms enable you to send notifications such as real-time alerts, order confirmations, and back-in-stock updates to keep customers informed and engaged.
- It builds loyal customer relationships
Text messages, by nature, are more personal and likely to be more urgent than emails or notifications from social media. This makes people pay more attention to SMS messages. By personalizing messages, sending relevant product recommendations, and providing useful reminders to your SMS subscribers, you can win customer loyalty and deepen customer relationships.
- It leads to better engagement with your audience—wherever they are
SMS marketing allows businesses to engage better and more often with their subscribed customers. People typically always have their phone on them, so you can reach them immediately via SMS—they don’t even need an internet connection. What’s more, Gartner reported SMS open and response rates were as high as 98% and 45%, in contrast to open rates of 20% and 6% for email.
How do I choose the best SMS marketing platform for my business?
Here are some key questions to ask when selecting an SMS marketing platform for your brand.
Is it easy to set up and launch new SMS campaigns?
Ensure nothing stands out in the way of the ability to send, schedule, measure the performance of messages, automating and creating targeted market segmentation, and more. Consider how much guidance you’ll receive from your SMS partner and if they offer training or support for your team that will help you reschedule your strategy.
Does it offer SMS message personalization?
Choose a platform that allows you to customize messages based on customer data, behavior, and preferences. Why? Because personalizing your messages is critical to delivering impactful content that resonates with your audience.
For the best results, you need an SMS marketing platform that lets you personalize your messages—from welcome messages and cart abandonment reminders to post-purchase messages, back-in-stock updates, peak season offers, and more.
Does it comply with the required regulations?
Ensure that the platform adheres to all relevant regulations, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the United States and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.
Remember, you can’t send SMS messages to your customers without their explicit consent. You also need to make sure you make it easy for them to opt in and opt out. Safeguarding subscriber’s data and ensuring data protection and security are also critical aspects of compliance in SMS marketing.
Does it offer automation capabilities?
Seek a platform that offers SMS automation features like drip campaigns, triggered messages, and scheduling.
A great SMS automation platform will allow you to segment your audience easily to send targeted campaigns depending on your goal—whether that’s retention, acquisition, or awareness. You can also check for testing and optimization capabilities, such as A/B testing of copy and timing to find what resonates most with your audience.
What integration options are available?
SMS is one of the top-performing marketing channels, and it becomes even more powerful when integrated with existing systems, such as your CRM, email marketing tools, and eCommerce platforms.
Integration with your existing tools helps ensure a cohesive omnichannel marketing automation that will help you with your SMS marketing efforts and ensure consistency across all marketing touchpoints.
What delivery and reporting analysis is available?
Check the platform’s delivery rates and reporting capabilities. Reliable delivery ensures that your messages reach your audience.
Robust reporting helps you track performance and make data-driven optimizations. This is one of the most important aspects you must consider because continuously analyzing and optimizing SMS marketing performance ensures you’ll drive the best results and improve your program in the long term. You can follow key results such as subscriber growth, message engagement, opt-out rates, revenue attribution generated via SMS, and more.
Does the provider offer support and training?
Assess the level of customer support and training the platform provider offers. You might need assistance or guidance on best practices, so you need to find a provider that offers the right level of support for your business to stop you from hitting roadblocks.
The top SMS marketing platforms for 2024
The best SMS marketing platforms are built to automate text messages to make your life easier. Here’s a rundown of your options:
Insider
Insider brings together the most extensive personalization and automation capabilities for SMS. Marketers can effectively reach their target audience and boost engagement by maximizing their marketing efforts with relevant and timely SMS campaigns.
With Insider, you can:
- Empower seamless cross-channel experiences with integrated SMS event data: Insider’s journey orchestrator, Architect, seamlessly integrates SMS as one of 12+ marketing channels. This unified approach ensures a consistent, cohesive experience for your users, inspiring them to actively engage with your brand across multiple touchpoints. Combine event data from SMS marketing to elevate customer experiences and drive conversions by over 60%.
- Leverage AI-powered campaign automation and predictive segmentation: Leave a memorable impression on your audience with relevant, timely messages and personalized product recommendations that are finely tuned to individual preferences, behaviors, and needs. By leveraging predictive segmentation and campaign automation, you can precisely target the right users with personalized messages, ensuring each interaction is relevant and timely.
- Deliver personalization at scale: Create the perfect customer journey, every single time with AI-powered scalable personalization. With features including time optimization – schedule messages based on timezone and likelihood of interaction and dynamic content based on users’ most recent purchases, and interactions, you know that every SMS message your customers receive will be relevant and timely, all thanks to Insider’s industry-leading AI and machine learning capabilities.
- Ensure risk mitigation: Insider provides strategic governance to assist you in creating a fail-proof SMS setup and safeguarding against data loss.
- Maintain SMS hygiene: We’ve integrated with leading providers to guarantee high message deliverability within seconds.
- Use pre-approved templates: We’ve taken the stress out of creating the perfect message with 60+ pre-approved message templates for every objective, industry, and occasion.
- Ensure cost efficiency: Reduce the cost for bulk SMS with free short-URLs, and no-cost unsubscription links.
Braze
Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform supporting SMS. It allows you to streamline your SMS program to drive revenue and reach your subscribers with the right message. In terms of automation, Braze has a tool called Canvas Flow that comes with many features for building and automating cross-channel campaigns. Braze’s Flow missing crucial channels and capabilities in journey orchestration, such as pre-build templates and channel recommendations.
Learn: 11 Top Braze Competitors and Alternatives
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a cloud that combines various products for customer data aggregation, cross-channel campaign orchestration, marketing, and sales automation, and content management that provides SMS solutions for marketers. You can send targeted bulk SMS and MMS to engage with your customers.
Learn: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud Competitors and Alternatives
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an established, powerful tool for marketers for omnichannel user experience, including engagement with SMS. However, Klaviyo is limited with Email & SMS omnichannel experience.
Learn: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives
Attentive
Attentive is a point solution provider for SMS and RCS marketing services. For omnichannel user experience, Attentive only provides SMS messaging channel solutions for their users. Plus, for the send time optimization feature for messaging channels, Attentive has this feature in solo campaigns but not in multi-channel journey flow. They can provide SMS, MMS, and support GIF’s and videos within the social media channels.
Power your SMS marketing efforts with the right SMS marketing software
Book a demo to discover how global brands, including NA-KD, Slazenger, MAC Cosmetics, and more, use Insider’s SMS marketing platform to reach and engage their audience and drive revenue.
SMS Marketing Platform FAQ
You can automate text messages using SMS marketing platforms that allow message scheduling, trigger-based messaging, and audience segmentation.
SMS marketing platforms are software solutions that facilitate sending promotional and transactional text messages to customers, offering features like scheduling, segmentation, analytics, and integration.
SMS marketing remains a popular and effective channel for businesses. It’s popular for high open rates and engagement levels, making it an essential part of many marketing strategies, especially for reaching mobile-savvy audiences.
Personalizing SMS marketing involves using customer data to tailor your messages. This can include addressing a customer’s first name, sending relevant product recommendations based on their purchase history, and crafting personalized offers to create a more meaningful and engaging experience for each recipient.
