Choosing an SMS Marketing Solution

<h2 id="toc">Table of Contents</h2>
<a href="https://www.podium.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-sms-marketing/">Chapter 1 &#8211; What is SMS Marketing?</a> 
<a href="https://www.podium.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-sms-marketing/opt-in-lists/">Chapter 2 &#8211; Growing your Opt-In List</a> 
<a href="https://www.podium.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-sms-marketing/text-campaigns/">Chapter 3 &#8211; Creating Great Text Campaigns</a> 
<a href="https://www.podium.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-sms-marketing/increasing-engagement/">Chapter 4 &#8211; Increasing SMS Engagement</a> 
<a href="https://www.podium.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-sms-marketing/measuring-performance/">Chapter 5 &#8211; Measuring &amp; Scaling Marketing Performance</a> 
<a href="https://www.podium.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-sms-marketing/solutions/">Chapter 6 &#8211; Choosing an SMS Marketing Solution</a>
<h2 class="p1">Choosing an SMS Marketing Solution</h2>
As you know, SMS marketing successfully means balancing a lot of moving parts. Local businesses have to effectively route conversations to representatives on the ground, customer service teams, and reception or service areas. 
They have to configure automations, send responses, and keep up individual threads—all while making sure no messages slip through the cracks. For multi-location businesses, teams also have to map conversations to the right locations for responses. 
All of this can be quite challenging for any team to take on—especially if they’re having to juggle multiple platforms to do it. 
That’s why messaging successfully starts with choosing the right messaging platform for your business. But how do you decide? Here are a number of key factors to look for, starting with simplicity of implementation. 
<h3>Your messaging solution checklist</h3>
1. Ease of implementation/set-up. Your messaging platform should be easy to set-up and simple to use, presenting all tools and features in a way that is easily digestible. It’s also going to be important that you take the time to evaluate what resources your technology provider offers to help you get started.
2. Compliance. Your platform should make it a breeze to conduct SMS marketing in a compliant way. It will be important that your platform make it easy for you to not only develop sign-up forms that follow industry regulations, but also manage contacts who have unsubscribed from your SMS marketing messages. 
3. Integration with your existing tech stack. When you choose a platform, you don’t want to add another tool to your stack of technological solutions. You want to find a platform that integrates perfectly with your existing tools, such as CRM’s, reviews tools, website forms, and other databases. 
4. Opt-in collection. Your platform should help to maximize opt-in opportunities, allowing every customer interaction to be an on-ramp for you to grow an engaged, compliant SMS database. The right platform makes it simple to upload existing opt-in lists and collect new opt-ins at a variety of existing touchpoints, including via website chat, after leaving a review, or while making a payment. 
5. Creative support. When you purchase a platform, you don’t have to do all the work yourself. Your platform should include campaign templates as well as the ability to personalize messages with variables such as a customer’s name, location, purchase history, etc.
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6. Targeted/segmented campaigns. Your platform should also allow you to easily segment customers so that you can send targeted messages to specific audiences or everyone at once. 
7. SMS marketing automation. The right messaging solution should also make it easy to automate personalized messages and create complex triggers. The ability to track multiple two-way conversations and allow customers to answer automated messages with more than letters or numbers is crucial.
8. 2-way conversations. Remember—successful SMS marketing means no more one-way blasts. The right platform provides a comprehensive customer conversation platform, powering a convenient, complete thread with each customer in a single inbox. 
9. Reporting. Measuring ROI is extremely important for marketers, allowing you to track and measure the outcome of your campaign so you can refine and improve for the future. Your solution should provide pre-built dashboards that surface digestible insights on unsubscribes, click rates, transactions, and more. 
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10. Campaign management. Finally, a high-quality platform makes it easy for businesses to manage responses at the location level. It’s purpose-built to field the needs of local business and provides ready message routing as well as a campaign specific inbox. 
Learn more about what to look for at <a href="https://www.podium.com/campaigns/">Podium Campaigns</a>. 
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This guide is for informational purposes only. It is not intended as legal advice or a comprehensive summary of the law. You are encouraged to retain your own legal counsel to review this guide and assess your unique text messaging business scenario. In addition, a business can do many things, including use of the Podium system outside its intended use, which can give rise to liabilities beyond those addressed in this guide.
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