SMS marketing, or Short Message Service marketing, is a method of sending offers/updates from a company to consumers using the SMS communication protocol. Unlike in the past, businesses now use dedicated SMS marketing services to automate and handle all tasks involved in one dashboard.

SMS marketing has never lost its popularity since the 90s, so there are now countless apps and tools made for it. However, while having more choices is good, the number of text marketing services makes it hard to select which one to pay for and use. Thankfully, there are still things that anyone can use to know if a service is the right one or if it’s best to keep looking—and the following are the most helpful things to consider:

5 Steps To Find The Right SMS Marketing Service

1. Look for the leading brands

Although there are countless SMS marketing services, only a few are actually popular and have many users. In this case, the choices would be narrowed down to the most prominent brands.

If a company isn’t too specific with its needs/requirements for an SMS marketing campaign, then following what the public says is not a bad idea. After all, most of these services work for general use cases, and the users are from varying industries and lines of business.

2. Consider the company’s needs

Picking a text marketing service from a group of the most prominent brands will work. However, there will be features and functionalities that might be missing for businesses with specific requirements. Accordingly, it would be best to consider what the company wants to do and needs first.

In the real world, this could be looking for a text marketing service that can handle the number of desired subscribers to save, which might be thousands, for instance. Also, it could be about picking a service that can support photos or link attachments to texts. There are countless examples available—but the idea is to look for a service that fits the company and avoid compromising only to use a particular SMS tool.

3. Check the features

Regarding SMS marketing services, there are two feature types: core functions and extra features. First, the core functions are the ability to enroll subscribers, import/export contact lists, create campaigns, analytics, etc. When looking for a text marketing service, one should explore and test (if possible) such features to know if a service really works as promised. It’s also important that a tool has all the core functions of an SMS marketing service, as some brand cuts corners.

Next, extra features are additional functions that are not necessary but will provide benefits or make things better. Extra features should not be a deciding factor, but it’s still good to be able to access such things anytime. Regardless, examples of such functions are message preview (how a message appears on the phone) and interactive dashboard.

4. Consider integrations

Now that companies use more than one tool for marketing, integration support has become essential for software. Similarly, an SMS marketing service should also be able to integrate with other services, like CRMs, ad-tech providers, etc.

An SMS marketing service yields data frequently, and it’s not ideal to manually send/receive or copy data from it to another tool. Aside from the reasons that it’s time-consuming and prone to errors, integrations make real-time analysis possible, which is helpful in the current fast-paced market.

5. Verify the reliability

Having all core functions, offering extra features, and supporting integrations are necessary. However, all the mentioned things are nothing if an SMS marketing service isn’t reliable.

Reliability is the ability to protect data (e.g., subscribers, lists, analytics) from corruption and cyber threats. Also, it’s about fulfilling sending schedules, delivering messages successfully, and ensuring the correct functioning of keyword assignments (opt-in and opt-out keywords). Reliability can also be demonstrated in a service’s capacity to prevent downtimes and ensure that the software features are accessible all the time. Typically, these pieces of information are available through online reviews from other customers; a user can also personally check or test a service before paying if possible.

Choose The Right SMS Marketing Service

After following the five steps above, it’s now time to sign up for a particular SMS marketing service that meets the criteria. However, if you’re still undecided or don’t know where to look, then Textedly is an excellent choice. Textedly is ranked as a top text message marketing platform among countless alternatives. It has all the core functions of an SMS tool, offers helpful extra features, and is very reliable. Learn more or try it for free today!