If you have a small business and want to make sure your order confirmations, booking reminders, promotions, and the like are actually seen by your customers, SMS marketing tools are one of the best ways to do it. SMS marketing apps can be used to personally message your customers or send automated texts based on a calendar, marketing list, or other integrated app. Your customers can even text you straight back.
I've been covering technology for 10 years, and I've been responsible for updating this list for the past four years. In that time, I've deeply researched and tested more than 40 of the top SMS apps for small businesses. This year, I also have a personal stake: we're currently exploring adding SMS functionality at Snapsure, a photography alerts company I co-founded. So with that, here are my picks for the best SMS marketing tools.
Email is a terrible way to communicate with your customers. Inboxes are overflowing, apps like Gmail automatically separate your messages into a folder that's never checked, and many people just don't open them anyway—no matter how important they are. I can't count the number of times I've missed an important update to a booking or change to an order I've made because it was sent by email—especially over the last two years when everything has been so unsettled.
SMS or text messages, on the other hand, are opened up to 98 percent of the time, and often in the first few minutes after they're received. They're also a super convenient way for your customers to reply. Smartphone messaging apps are quick, easy to use, and fit into day-to-day life, while email is, to be honest, generally awful.
SMS marketing is a huge business around the world, so there are dozens of different SMS marketing platforms available. Most of them, however, aren't really appropriate for small businesses. Many of these apps are designed for enterprise companies, political campaigns, and other groups looking to send thousands of SMS messages a day as part of a marketing campaign, rather than smaller businesses that want to maintain a more personal relationship with their customers. Similarly, a lot of "apps" are actually API services that developers can use to add SMS functionality to their own projects, rather than a service you can sign up for and use straight away.
To cut through the huge range of options, we set five key criteria that we were looking for in SMS apps:
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