Text Message marketing is hot right now. If you want a way to reach your audience that boasts a 98% open rate, then you should look into incorporating SMS Marketing into your marketing plans.

Most email marketing platforms may have built-in SMS solutions to send out marketing messages. However, they may not be as robust or may need specific formatting depending on fields used, resulting in more time trying to configure the platform. That is why it is a good practice to use 3rd party SMS marketing solutions that integrate well with your email marketing platform of choice.

In this post we will look at a few of the top platforms you should consider.

Salesmsg is a calling and 2-way business texting platform. With Salesmsg your entire company can use one app to handle all of their text messaging and calling needs quickly.

• Features: With Salesmsg you get a full suite of features like a dashboard to send, receive and manage all of your conversations. The ability to assign team members messages within the dashboard. You can text using a local number, a landline phone number, or shortcode. You can also create private or shared inboxes for your team. You have the ability to see all conversations across your team and departments or set it up where each team member has a private inbox that they manage.
• Integrations: Salesmsg integrates with Activecampaign, HubSpot, Marketo, Aircall, Pipedrive, Keap, Zapier and their newest integration is Slack. They also have a Salesmsg API to integrate with your tool of choice.
• Ability to reply to messages: You can reply to messages from the Salesmsg dashboard or your phone.
• Ability to track opens / clicks: With Salesmsg you can track clicks, conversions and revenue all within the dashboard and built in reports.
• Shortcode availability: You can apply for a dedicated shortcode number with Salesmsg. It takes about 8-12 weeks to set up. Once set up you can create unlimited keywords.

Overall

Salesmsg is used by a variety of well known businesses to speed up the sales process using text messaging. They are constantly adding new features to make the platform even better. Just recently they have added Slack integration, improvements to their broadcast messages (including being able to add multiple segments, tags, and individuals to a single broadcast message), Call Whisper (the ability to play a short recorded message to whoever the message is forwarded to in order to give context before they answer the forwarded message), custom contact views and the ability to re-open closed conversations.

ClickSend is a business communication software tool that lets companies send and receive SMS, email as well as voice messages online through their web app or using API.

• Features: With ClickSend you can easily send out SMS and MMS messages using their various gateways. SMS Gateways are a way for you to send and receive text messages via a computer using your telecommunications provider. ClickSend connects you to your Online SMS Gateway through their online dashboard or by an SMS Gateway API. You can send marketing and transactional SMS with ClickSend.
• Integrations: ClickSend integrates with hundreds of CRM and email marketing platforms. Connect with either web app or API. You can explore their integration marketplace here.
• Ability to reply to messages: With ClickSend you can reply to messages right from your phone, computer or from an email using their SMS gateway.
• Ability to track opens / clicks: With ClickSend you have the ability to track messages through the history and reporting analytics on the dashboard. You also can track messages via Google analytics and using UTMs.
• Shortcode availability: ClickSend supports shortcode availability, but it takes about 6 to 12 weeks to set up in the US. Once the dedicated shortcode is set up you can create as many keywords as you like in the dashboard. Each keyword is free since you own the shortcode number. You also can have a dedicated long code (which is the full phone number). Just like the shortcode you can create as many keywords you want.

Overall

ClickSend makes it easy to get started with sending out automated SMS messaging online. Be aware depending on what CRM you are integrating with, once you remove a contact out of your list from a live data source it won’t necessarily be removed from ClickSend automatically. This is because some CRMs don’t delete contacts in a way that ClickSend can pick up on.

JustCall is an all-in-one cloud phone system. Instead of just having sms capabilities you would have an entire phone system with your own number and a full business phone management with the bonus of automated sms messaging.

• Features: Since JustCall is an all-in-one cloud system they have features that include making and receiving calls through the web, desktop app, or mobile apps and your own phone number in 70+ countries. Other cool features include tracking and recording calls (native integrations with your CRM allows you to keep them on the contact record), SMS workflows and analytics(enabling automated drip campaigns, group text messages or mass texts and finally a virtual call center with a call center analytics dashboard allowing you to track who is doing what with your team and contacts.
• Integrations: JustCall has native integrations with a lot of your favorite CRM and help desk software. If you want to be able to call directly from your CRM or email marketing system like ActiveCampaign or HubSpot you can do that with a click on the contact record. You can also log all calls, sms, and call recordings right on the contact record.
• Ability to reply to messages: You can set up automated replies in JustCall using their SMS bot. The SMS bot “trains” your SMS enabled number to send automated replies from your customers.
• Ability to track opens / clicks: JustCall provides a built in analytics dashboard where you can track SMS and Call campaigns.
• Shortcode availability: I could not find anywhere on their site or documentation that you could use a keyword or shortcode like the other solutions we mentioned. JustCall bots can look for trigger words when transcribing your call however.

Overall

JustCall is a solid choice if you want an all-in-one solution for both personal sms messaging and your business text messaging as well. Instead of using multiple resources to track your phone calls and messaging JustCall is a reliable option to bring everything in-house. The setup is pretty simple too.

Honorable Mention

We would be remiss to write an article about SMS without mentioning Twilio. Twilio has been the cornerstone powering many of the software solutions and still to date does that in SMS. It even looks like they are ramping up to offer their own SMS marketing solution within their platform. It is called MessagingX and you can learn more about it here.

Vybrynt is a SMS Marketing platform that was built specifically for ActiveCampaign. They give you the ability to connect your ActiveCampaign account and sync with your lists. Some features include being able to use your business name, use up to 11 characters for custom sender IDs, and start automations from webhooks(in ActiveCampaign and in Vybrnt). They can also be used to send messages in other countries like Australia and the UK to name a few. You can also create a library of automations and messages to use in your campaigns. They have an automation builder and campaign builder for your convenience.

Conclusion 

When it comes to SMS Marketing there are a lot of platforms available to make sure that you can reach your audience quickly and your message be seen. You always want to take into consideration deliverability (globally especially), uptime, security and pricing no matter what platform you choose. Some of these solutions are more technical and will require a tech team, and some are easy to get started with even with little tech knowledge.

Are you using SMS to power up your email marketing? If so, let us know which platforms you are using in the comments below.