The Marchex Blog

What to look for in a text message platform

If your business is hoping to optimize your communications and improve your customer’s experience by implementing a text messaging platform, you may wonder where to start. You know SMS can make you more efficient, and that it’s a customer’s preferred method of communication, but it’s important to pick the right platform and maximize these strengths. Let’s run through some things to look for in a text message platform…

Smart campaign management

To implement a successful texting campaign, you need to organize your audience into well-defined groups and ideally you should send these groups highly targeted messages. A smart texting solution in today’s marketing world should help you build the right audiences with criteria filters. Timing is important too. Depending on where in the customer journey a buyer is, you will need to send messages at different times. Send immediately, schedule for later, or send automatically with workflow triggers – an involved marketer will likely need all these options.

Find a text message platform that can give your connect and conversion rates a boost with flexible engagement strategies that break through the noise.

Efficient automation

Text messaging is a moment-to-moment channel, boasting a 4-minute average response time. You may be intimidated by that number – you need a communication platform that is efficient and low-maintenance for a busy team that wants to excel.

Fortunately, with the right platform, much of the SMS marketing process can be automated. The best time to answer a customer’s inbound text is immediately. With AI-enabled texting bots, businesses can gather basic info automatically from a customer in the minutes after a first text is sent, gauge a customer’s answers, and route the inquiry to your sales team when it’s time to close.

A texting platform shouldn’t make you do the busywork; it should respond, score, and qualify leads automatically. It should automate your campaigns and even integrate them into your existing workflows to completely align with your needs and processes.

Find a text message platform that can send highly customized messages and organize leads with minimal manual effort on your end.

Proven results

Find a text message platform that yields significant, measurable results. When real estate company Zillow implemented Marchex Sonar to connect their sales team with agents via SMS, they saw 98% agent engagement.

When Bangs Shoes used SMS to grow their ambassador program, they increased their shoe sales and ramped their program from 500 to 6500 ambassadors.

To learn more about what Marchex Sonar can do for your company with its text messaging platform, get a demo.