SMS messaging platforms are revolutionizing the world of digital marketing and for a good reason. Not only do they give you the ability to reach a much larger target audience, but they also offer instantaneous engagement, which can be leveraged in a variety of powerful ways. Even so, it can be difficult to pick the right SMS platform for your business. With that in mind, let’s go over the features you should be looking for when selecting a text-marting platform.
1. Large Volume Text Broadcasts
This is perhaps the most basic feature of an SMS platform, but it is still extremely important. When it comes to online SMS messaging for marketing purposes, there are times when you want to limit your reach through segmentation, but other times when you want everyone on your list literally to get your message. This method of large-scale text broadcasting is useful in improving your total number of conversions, if not your conversion percentage itself. It is also great for sending out company-wide messages if you’re using SMS for workplace communication.
2. Segmenting Your Target Audience
On the other side of the spectrum is the ability to segment your target audience. This allows you to divide up your subs into specific groups based on what they need an want. As you can probably guess, sending more personalized offers using this feature will get you better conversions and improve your relationship with your subscribers. Remember, if you send out too many unfocused messages, subs may unsub from your list. Knowing when to use the large volume approach and when to send messages to specific segments of your list is crucial when it comes to audience retention.
Another big benefit of segmentation is that it will drastically improve workplace communication. For example, you may want to send a text-only to the management or executives at your place of work. A company-wide text broadcast obviously won’t work in this situation, but an SMS service that has segmentation will allow you to send the message only to the groups that need it. This helps to streamline your workflow and maintain privacy on important information.
3. Easy Campaign Management
Probably the most useful feature when it comes to SMS messaging platforms isn’t a specific feature in and of itself, but rather how easy it is to manage your campaigns with the various features they offer. In fact, SMS services are typically so easy to use that literally anyone in your company could oversee them and handle your SMS campaigns. This is because the systems these platforms use are intuitive and require practically no training. Once everything is set up and ready to go, managing an SMS campaign using a text alert platform is very straightforward.
4. Subsciber Managment
A feature that you should look for when it comes to SMS platforms is subscriber management. Yes, pretty much all of them have this to one degree or another, but you want the ability to not just see who’s on your list but the ability to handle tasks such as growing your list, creating a fully legal unsub option and data capturing. If you take all of this into account, you begin to see just how important this level of subscriber management is when it comes to optimizing your campaign. You’ll do a better job of getting new subs on your list while at the same time minimizing your unsub rate as well.
5. Text Scheduling
Another basic yet extremely important feature. Instead of manually having to send out texts every time you have a new promotion, you want an SMS service that allows you to set up a text alert schedule. This will allow you to create an SMS marketing campaign that works almost on autopilot. Sure, there will be times when you want to spontaneously send out a text, such as one promoting a special time-limited offer, but being able to plan out and execute your camping weeks or even months in advance is invaluable.
Taking Your Business to the Next Level with SMS Platforms
Overall using an SMS platform for your text message marketing campaigns is pretty much a requirement these days. Just like how no one in their right mind would try running an email campaign without an autoresponder, no one would think to try and run a text-based marketing campaign without an SMS platform to tie it all together. Once you know what to look for in a platform, finding a good one to work with is easy.
