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What is SMS Marketing?
Also known as “Short message service marketing” is a strategy that allows businesses to establish communication with their customers via text. The aim is to advertise special offers, updates and some other important messages creating urgency in people.
With SMS massive campaigns you can send texts to a larger audience, anytime, anywhere. It is an ideal complement to increase the results of a multichannel marketing strategy due to its effectiveness and ease of use.
What are SMS marketing tools used for?
Companies generally utilize SMS marketing to increase brand awareness, boost engagement and also generate sales by sending time-sensitive offers among some other uses described below:
Temporary promotions for retail or e-commerce businesses
Rolling out offers and promotions will help you drive more people to your store or website.
SMS is the perfect channel to communicate limited-time sales because you will make sure more people will hear about it even if they are on the move.
Customer orders’ updates and high priority events
With text messaging you can keep your customers up to date about any changes, cancellations, general information or updates with better engagement than email or other channels.
Appointment reminders
To prevent your clients from showing up late to your appointment or even failing to show up at all, SMS software sends reminder texts to make sure people don’t forget their meeting and attend the right time.
Internal Alerts
There might be some urgent messages your employers need to read on time. Of course, you could send them an email but sometimes that channel is not as effective as SMS because not everyone checks their email account regularly.
By sending text messages you will make sure everyone receives the information on time.
Advantages of using SMS marketing
Low-cost alternativeEffectiveEasy to track statisticsLow cancellation ratesEasy to set up
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How it might benefit your company?
SMS marketing is a perfect complement to other ways of marketing automatization. Imagine you sent a series of automated emails sharing information about an event you are going to launch. By using text services you will make sure you will get your customer’s attention increasing engagement.
Mobile marketing is extremely fast and reliable, as the message gets delivered immediately. You can schedule custom automated SMS to be sent with event-related promotions such as Black Friday or Ciber Monday which are usually time-limited offers.
It has also much higher open and response rates because as research shows, customers in America prefer receiving texts over other forms of communication.
As social media is full of daily notifications, people tend to lose interest in reading them. Instead, by using text services you will make sure you will always catch your customer’s attention, boosting engagement.
Global Wizard’s top 3 SMS marketing tools
Our team is expert in advertising marketing solutions, our knowledge will help you make the best decision to get started with your SMS marketing campaign.
Let’s take a look at the most popular tools in the market and compare them in terms of pricing and key features.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is simple, trustworthy, intuitive and affordable. This awesome tool offers complementary features to take your business to a higher level.
What makes them stand out is that all plans come with unlimited contact storage, which means you can enlarge your client’s list without worrying about your budget.
Using the free plan you will be able to have access to SMS marketing, workflow editor, page tracking, transactional emails and SMS, real-time reporting and more.
As your business grows, you can upgrade to a better plan without paying small fortunes as you would do in other companies.
The Lite plan costs only $25 and offers A/B testing and some advanced statistics. If you sign up for Premium, you pay just $65 per month and access to marketing automation, Facebook ads, multi-user access, and telephone support. For corporate marketers who need to reach in the most effective way possible, there is an Enterprise plan which has top-shelf advanced features that will make the difference.
Optinmonster
Optinmonster is considered a good alternative because it works really well.
One cool feature is its drag and drop builder that helps you to build stunning opt-in forms in minutes.
It is the perfect software if you have trouble designing a good-looking form.
Maybe it would be desirable to have updated form designs a bit more often. Also, the user interface is not as intuitive as desired, so it may not the best option if you are a novice because it will take you a while to learn how to use it.
As regards pricing, Optinmonster doesn’t offer a free plan. You can start with $9 using the Basic plan and scale up to a $49 Growth plan. However, some users reported having major issues with the billing arguing that Optinmonster charges for common features that competitors usually offer for free and also saying that they ended up paying more than the amount agreed because of company mistakes.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is one of the best marketing automation tools available too.
It allows you to set up any automation you can think of like flash sale notifications, appointment reminders, triggered campaigns and so on.
Also, It offers reporting on many areas such as geo-tracking and page visits.
It is probably not the best option if you need a beginner tool because it may take you some time to get around to it.
There is no free plan available. Their most popular plan (Professional) costs around $129 per month which means that are cheaper options to choose from if you are looking for a simple tool.
Conclusion
These three SMS marketing tools work perfectly well and have very interesting features to establish better and effective communication with your clients. Using these marketing tools you will reach a larger audience making your company grow.
To our view, Sendinblue is the best choice not only because it offers an excellent feature set, combining an easy-to-use interface with awesome support -even with the basic free account-, but also because it allows customers to complete their marketing strategy with email marketing, chats and inbox messages. You can get tools big companies use at a very reasonable price.
Although the free plan lacks some pro attributes, it is super recommended to those who have just started using marketing tools. You can try if it meets your expectations perfectly fine before you buy a higher plan.
