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How to Choose an SMS Marketing Platform
SMS marketing is one of the fastest-growing trends on the planet, and it’s no surprise. Last year, the number of SMS users clocked in at around 5 billion. Anyone can see SMS as the marketing goldmine that it is, but it takes a smart marketer to take advantage of this opportunity to reach their target audience, leads, and customers faster, more efficiently, and more effectively than ever before.
The trouble is that when it comes to SMS marketing platforms, there are enough choices to keep your head spinning indefinitely. And there is a boatload of features that you can get from each of the various services. Regardless of the size of your business, which industry, and who your target audience is, there are a few features that you just can’t (or shouldn’t) do without. Check out these 3 necessary SMS marketing features.
Integration
Manual data input and actions are so 2010. Today’s digital society runs at breakneck speed, and that means your SMS marketing campaigns need to run even faster just to stay ahead of the competition. This is why integration is so important. You need to make sure your SMS marketing platform can converse easily, seamlessly, and automatically with your customer relationship management software (CRM for short). You obviously wouldn’t have an office where team members weren’t able to communicate with one another about projects, assignments, and resources. In the same vein, you need to ensure that all of your “team members”, e.g., CRM, text marketing, analytics, and any other business management tools you use, can all communicate effortlessly with one another at all times.
Automation
Next up on your shopping list for top SMS marketing platform features is automation, and here’s why. People are uber busy these days. Nobody wants to wait around for a response, and nobody will wait around to be sold to. When a lead takes the initial clickbait, shows interest in a product, and takes the first step into the sales funnel, a market has to work fast if they want to gain that lead’s business.
But you’ve got hundreds of other tasks on your to-do list and (hopefully) thousands of leads to nurture. How is any marketing team supposed to juggle all of that simultaneously without missing a beat? Automation, baby. Automation means you never miss the opportunity to nurture the lead. The system will automatically send out the right message at precisely the right moment and with exactly the right content for gently nudging the lead along to the next stage. From aggregated customer responses to a well-timed discount code, automated SMS campaigns help you close the deal like nobody’s business.
