How to Find the Best SMS Marketing Services Provider

With your customer’s glued to their smartphones just waiting for their next text message, it’s not hard to convince marketers of the potential value of SMS marketing services and strategies for your business.

The ability to reach high volumes of people almost instantly is very attractive but you have to make sure you’re using smart strategies to contact people on your list. Failing to use proper strategies for this method of communication will result in lost marketing dollars and even worse lost trust with your contacts.

Continue reading this article to learn how to choose the best SMS marketing services company so you can get the results that you want out of your next campaign.

Choosing the Best SMS Marketing Services Company

We applaud you for staying up to date with the latest strategies in marketing. Many people fall behind and their competition takes their customers. If you want to make sure you’re not left behind, use the following tips to find an SMS marketing service that can help you today.

Available Features

Before you get started with a company, you need to ensure they have all of the available features you need. Make sure to ask questions and ensure you don’t need any add-ons. You want the SMS service you use to be able to integrate with services you already have like Oracle Eloqua and Marketo.

Next, it’s important to look for services that allow you to SMS and MMS messages to a variety of campaigns and target lists that you’re working on. Then, the service should have tracking options and reporting that allow you to see data related to inbound and outbound messages.

After that, there are a handful of key features that you should check for to make you are able to make the most of your SMS marketing service:

• You should also have a variety of options to send SMS from local numbers, international numbers, and shortcodes.
• The ability to send automated replies to messages with certain keywords is a must-have convenience factor. And don’t forget about ease of ability to personalize messages with proper integration.
• Option to add short URLs for tracking
• Ability to pre-populate forms with contact data
• Allow you to send messages through industry-leading SMS gateways.

Reliability

Once you know a company provides all the bells and whistles that you need, it is time to look at the company itself. Are they reliable? If there are bugs and glitches that are going to keep your messages from going out, this is a significant problem.

Make sure to ask about any problems they might have with their systems. Do they experience a lot of downtime or maintenance time?

Don’t be afraid to ask these questions since service outages can cause major problems with your ability to profit from your campaigns.

Reputation

The tech world is a small space. If you ask around, you’re likely to find someone that knows about the company and their founders.

Ask about any experiences these people have had with the company and if they would recommend them. You can also look at popular online review websites to see what customers are saying.

Speak to the company directly and ask for references of people that use their service. Many companies have customers that are willing to take a few moments to set your mind at ease when you’re making a decision to work with a company.

Benefits of SMS Marketing Services

Now that you know how to choose an SMS marketing service, let’s do a quick overview of the benefits of using SMS marketing in your business.

1. Instant Delivery

When you send the SMS, it’s there. Not only is it delivered immediately but it is often opened immediately. People have their cellphones at their sides with notifications on and text messages on average are opened and read quicker than emails.

2. High Adoption Rate

You don’t have to wonder if people have cellphones. Almost everyone has a cellphone and most people have smartphones which allow them to access the internet.

3. High Open Rate

To make a text message go from unread to read, you have to go — well, read it. At least click on it to make the notification go away.

Since text messages are short and to the point, most people read the message even if they were only going there to get rid of the notification.

4. Easy to Opt-out and Opt-in

Having an easy opt-out and easy opt-in will allow you to provide great customer service. You don’t have to worry about people getting frustrated with your text messages bugging them. All they have to do in most cases is send the message — STOP.

5. Great Support for Other Campaigns

If you’re running campaigns through social media, pay per click or other platforms, SMS can be an amazing support.

You can draw people from other platforms and get them to input their information. Maybe you have an upcoming webinar that you want to make sure they show up for. Offer to send them an SMS alert 15 minutes before the webinar starts.

SMS reminders will boost your attendance by reminding people that may have otherwise forgotten about the time of the event.

You can think of other creative ways to support your existing campaigns using SMS. SMS has similar benefits to email marketing, like the ability to grab people’s attention after they’ve gotten distracted.

While email does have this benefit, SMS is even more effective since the open rate is higher than when using email marketing. When used properly together, you will be able to reach your customers wherever they are and in the form that’s most likely to get their attention.

Grow Your Business Revenue with SMS

Now that you know how SMS marketing services can help your company, why not get going right away? We help companies just like yours every day.

Request a demo today and see how we can work together to help you grow your business’ revenue.