5 SMS Marketing Tools You Might Not Have Heard About

SMS marketing is most often associated with bulk SMS. However, there are many sophisticated tools at its disposal worth getting acquainted with. It goes without saying that the efficiency of marketing in a particular channel depends on how well you know it. I will try to introduce the lesser-known SMS marketing tools and provide hints on what to use them for.

1. SMS Branding – text message with a company name

The majority of SMS marketing platforms allow sending messages from random GSM numbers and a custom sender name. You might have received an SMS with a custom sender ID that contained a name and not a number.

Branded SMS is an excellent way of increasing brand awareness among its recipients. It also boosts the credibility of a message. Sender name can contain up to 11 characters (excluding all diacritical marks and special characters).

Sender ID – How to Send Branded SMS Messages with the Company Name Instead of a Number?

The SMS branding feature is free of charge. It’s available to all registered users of SMSAPI. To maintain the customers’ high standards of security and privacy, all sender names are verified and approved by our staff. If you want to register the sender ID quickly, do it during the working hours of our office (Monday-Friday, 08-17 CES).

2. SMS Newsletter – widget for GDPR-compliant database building

If so far, you have associated the word newsletter with e-mail marketing. It is time to think twice! Our SMS platform has a ready-made SMS Newsletter tool that you can use for collecting phone numbers. You can easily embed the widget on your website by copy-pasting the code.

Apart from collecting numbers, it can also ask the subscribers’ name, address, date of birth and all other data needed for your campaigns. The fields are fully customizable. Furthermore, it allows you to gather marketing consents in accordance with GDPR.

Text message with a short link
Cut.li in action

This function is based on adding a website URL to the message. Instead of sending texts with long addresses that would take up most of the 160-character quota, you can use the shortened link (via our cut.li service), unique for every message recipient. It opens many opportunities for a marketer.

First of all, you save characters for the proper informational or advertising message. Use those extra characters to present your offer better. Remember that most text message inbox apps preview the links, so make sure that the thumbnail of the linked page is correct.

You can also measure the CTR, which eventually means measuring the efficiency of the campaign. Furthermore, short links are invaluable for injecting UTM parameters into URLs, essential for conscious and effect-based marketing.

Tracking traffic in Google Analytics – video tutorial

4. Virtual Mobile Number – 2-way SMS communication

Virtual Mobile Number (VMN) is a tool of 2-way SMS communication. In short, it’s a number used to send and receive SMS. Most importantly, the cost of sending a message from any GSM network to such a number is calculated according to the standard rate within a particular network.

The VMN can be used to spark up interaction with a client (customer care, satisfaction surveys, contests, polls) and generate sales leads.

The ability to receive messages from your customers opens up a possibility to run out-of-the-box campaigns. For example, the API integrated with an LED screen allows you to run interactive billboard campaigns. You could even use it to conduct contests during live events.

5. Advanced SMS API – integration with any system

SMS communication is a scalable solution. Whether you run a small business or a multinational corporation, thanks to the Application Programming Interface (API), you can automate the interaction with your customers!

All professional SMS marketing platforms make their API interface available to clients. Using ready SMS API programming libraries allows for easier and faster integration

Examples of SMS API libraries

SMS API comes in handy when you automatically introduce SMS communication into your service or software. Pretty much any software (marketing automation, e-commerce platform, CMS, EOD, CRM, ERP, RCP, etc.) can be integrated.