Discover 5 powerful SMS marketing platforms to boost customer engagement, automate campaigns, and integrate with your existing tools. Learn how to leverage 98% open rates.
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The first text message was delivered 30 years ago. Its content? “Merry Christmas.”
Since then, text messages, also known as Short Message Service (SMS), have become ubiquitous. Real-time data from GSMA Intelligence shows that as of Q3 2023, there are more than 5.5 billion unique mobile subscribers worldwide.
Unsurprisingly, businesses across industries have turned to SMS as a marketing channel to engage their customers with tailored offers, discounts, order updates, customer service tasks, and more. In addition to reaching so many consumers, SMS enables highly targeted, near real-time connection and engagement at scale without the fluctuating costs inherent in other marketing channels. Plus, because SMS requires a mobile phone, it integrates well with other marketing channels, like email, that consumers use their devices for and through which brands can encourage SMS signups.
The results speak for themselves: SMS has a 98% open rate and a 45% response rate, compared to email, which is 20% and 6%, respectively.
You can enhance your SMS marketing strategy, from asking for reviews and disseminating rewards to connecting the channel to email for a powerful nurture program, using the different tools on the market.
To that end, we’ve researched the best SMS marketing platforms that enrich SMS capabilities and functionality by helping you do things like build a loyal customer base, aggregate customer data, and increase ROI. We hope this list helps you determine the best strategy and systems for incorporating SMS into your omnichannel marketing efforts.
1. Bird
Bird offers all the standard SMS marketing features businesses need. You can build contact lists, create text message campaigns, schedule messages, and track delivery rates. The platform makes it easy to set up automated messages for things like order updates, appointment reminders, and promotional offers. It also helps you manage customer responses and track how well your campaigns are working.
But Bird is more than an SMS marketing platform. It uses AI to combine customer data from all channels and lets brands connect with customers through both automated systems and real people. The platform's AI helps with everything from writing messages to planning customer journeys, so marketers can create campaigns that change based on how customers respond.
One of Bird's main strengths is how it handles two-way conversations. AI chatbots take care of simple questions, while more complex issues go to human support teams. The platform works with common marketing tools and customer databases, so brands can manage all their communication from one place.
Bird can send SMS messages worldwide through its delivery network, handling millions of texts daily while following rules like GDPR, 10DLC, and CCPA. With up-to-the-minute tracking and performance data, marketers can keep improving their campaigns to get better results in any country.
2. Stamped
Stamped bills itself as a “reviews and loyalty platform for Ecommerce.” It aims to help brands build customer trust by rewarding them for completing product reviews and surveys. It’s a valuable system for marketers because it integrates with the tools they already use, such as email and SMS marketing platforms, enabling omnichannel delivery and measurement. Some of the SMS-related features and use cases Stamped powers include:
Automated review requests through SMS, email, and Facebook Messenger — all with premade templates — followed by the ability to reward customers for those reviews
NPS surveys that are customized, personalized, and optimized for desktop and mobile, so customers can respond directly via text message, email, or website
A number of channels through which customers can promote your brand, including SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and email
Branded referral incentives based on whatever specific business goal you have, plus multiple reward types, such as free shipping and percentage discount, tiers, and flexible rewards rules
Customer rewards properties, such as referral URLs and balance points, are incorporated into email marketing campaign templates, which works well in conjunction with SMS
An analytics dashboard to help track customer engagement, retention, spend, and more across channels
3. Technically Creative
Technically Creative offers solutions for unified data governance, including enrichment for SMS/MMS. Technically Creative Oversight Controls (TCOC) is a data flow platform customizable to a brand’s needs that automates, orchestrates, and integrates data between platforms. Data examples include records, full emails, chats, social media, and user data. Brands can use data aggregation or aggregation with TCOC for SMS/MMS. The benefits of Technically Creative include the ability to:
Connect a phone number to an individual and their email region.
Differentiate between employees, customers, and unknown users.
Archive and combine all related SMS/MMS conversations into a single chat.
Recognize, categorize, and understand images like emojis and GIFs as ideas or statements.
3. MailMonster
MailMonster offers SMS verification so brands can prevent users from creating more than one account on their websites to receive extra promotional offers. MailMonster’s tool ensures every user only creates one account for each mobile phone number, so brands validate information as they collect it from across marketing channels. Marketers can also differentiate between landlines or mobile numbers to comply with regulators. Benefits include:
Keeping open lines of communication with customers
Boosting the quality of organizational contact information
Streamlining data entry processes
Contacting customers with the right phone number
Facebook doesn’t do SMS marketing directly, but it offers a powerful opportunity to generate and nurture leads through text. Through Facebook Lead Ads, users can simply click the call-to-action button of an ad that appears in their Newsfeed. A form that’s already populated with their Facebook contact information then pops up. Then, the user submits the form, giving brands the opt-in they need to send follow-up marketing messages to them, which you can do via email and other channels like SMS.
To combine Facebook and SMS marketing, you must select a checkbox to add a custom disclaimer to your Facebook Lead Ad so that you can explain that you plan to reach out to the user via text. You then need to connect your Facebook Business Account to your SMS marketing platform using an integration service like Bird. Once you authenticate and choose the action you want from the SMS marketing app, such as sending a message, select the data to send between apps. The beauty of connecting Facebook and SMS marketing is that it is all mobile-optimized.
Combine all your SMS marketing tools into one platform
Once you have the right SMS marketing platform in place, consider using solutions like these to incorporate text into your omnichannel marketing strategy and reap better ROI. Bird’s omnichannel platform can help marketers like you send and receive SMS messages globally to millions of people via our smart routing engine. With more than integrations into the most popular tools possible, the ability to communicate across channels from one platform, compliance with regulations–such as the GDPR, 10DLC, and CCPA–and real-time performance analytics, Bird is a one-stop shop for your SMS, email, social media, and messaging marketing needs.
