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The Best SMS Marketing Services of 2023

A lot of online marketers laugh at the idea of SMS marketing services because they think it’s more regulated than email marketing. Fortunately, that’s not true at all.

Watered-down, mobile-targeting tactics are costing you conversions, clients, and revenue. Meanwhile, SMS marketing is lurking in the background, waiting for you to capitalize on it.

In this article we cover the best SMS marketing services available, as well as why and how you should be using for SMS marketing to generate revenue.

Why is Chatbots.org free?

16 Text Message Marketing Platforms Driving
Revenue and Engagement for Business

Unlike a website, SMS marketing is a persistent channel. Your website isn’t a persistent channel, because when a lead leaves your website without you capturing any of their information, they’re gone.

SMS marketing services provide a persistent marketing channel because you can re-engage with those people over and over again, more strategically.

Furthermore, you own this channel (an owned phone number), the same way you own marketing assets like your website. That makes SMS marketing a win-win, because you both own the channel, and it’s a persistent channel.

The value of text message marketing is that it’s the most preferred way for billions of people to interact with one another. People keep their phones by their side at all times, and are always ready to use them.

Maybe that’s why SMS open rates are 82.1%, while open rates for email are at a dismal 24%.

What are SMS marketing tools?

SMS marketing, or text message marketing, uses permission-based text messaging to spread promotional messages, such as new product updates, surveys, or information.

People are normally required to opt-in to an automated system by texting an initial keyword or shortcode. However, the best platforms have other opt-in tools, such as pop-ups or website chatbots.

What are the advantages of of SMS marketing?

The best SMS marketing services should, at a minimum, have the following features and characteristics:

An intuitive dashboard
Automation tools and drip campaigns
Free incoming text messages
Custom keywords
Contact management tools
Comprehensive analytics and reports

When used properly, or advanced by the power of intelligent chatbots, SMS marketing services deliver an amazing ROI.

Here are just some of the advantages of SMS marketing:

Texting, by far, has the best engagement rate of any marketing channel.
SMS text messaging platforms can easily track who opened your message, what links they clicked, and who ignored the message.
Mobile messaging consists of highly engaging, interactive content, which makes it possible to get feedback from your recipients quickly through a quick tap on a reply button or click on a link.
Once you hit send, your message is delivered immediately. Mobile marketing is as fast as it gets for both delivery and replies.
Sending text messages to your audience can be highly personalized and targeted. Put a name to your message, and people will feel like they’re talking to your brand one-to-one.

What are the best SMS marketing platforms in 2023?

Now that we’ve established what chatbots are and how they work, let’s get to the examples.

The following 16 solutions have been highly vetted and qualified to make up the best SMS marketing platforms in 2023.

#1. Best SMS Marketing Services: MobileMonkey

MobileMonkey is an all-in-one chatbot platform that includes dozens of SMS marketing tools. The platform supports web chat, live chat, SMS and Facebook Messenger bots, and omnichannel marketing.

Mobile Monkey Features:

Multi-channel chatbot platform on web and mobile app
Advanced live team features
Native web chat, Facebook Messenger, and SMS marketing tools
Visual-flow chatbot builder and editor
Chatbot templates
Multilingual
Zapier and other integrations
Always mobile-friendly
AI bots route requests and automate repetitive FAQs
Custom live chat handoff triggers
Analytics and reporting

Pros - MobileMonkey:

Extensive suite of chatbot tools and automation.
Mobile chat app with advanced support features.
Surprisingly easy to use for such a robust platform.
Chatbot builder and workflows.
Works across many channels (SMS, web chat, Messenger) and unifies all conversations in one inbox.
Unlimited contacts and leads on all plans.
Huge user community.
Live bot to human handoff triggers for web and mobile inboxes.
Mobile chat app with advanced support features.

Cons - MobileMonkey:

Frequently updating user interface due to new features.

MobileMonkey Pricing: You can get started building bots with a non-expiring version of MobileMonkey for free. If you need advanced automation and integrations, pricing then starts at $14.25/mo and goes up to $299/mo.

#2. Best SMS Marketing Services: Heymarket

Heymarket Features:

Shared inbox
Chat assignments
Web and mobile applications
Chrome Extension
Audience segmentation
SMS drip marketing campaigns
Text enable landlines
Messaging templates
Custom fields
Web chat
Reports
Marketing automation tools
JSON API
Admin controls
Multiple messaging channels
OTT (over-the-top) messaging

Pros - Heymarket:

Good for teams.
Setup a sequence of tet messages to be sent on a schedule and get reports, templates, and ability to remove contacts who reply to keep campaigns current.
Over-the-top (OTT) messaging, which is messaging that works over data channels instead of SMS, is supported by most advanced business texting platforms. This means customers can text from channels like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, and Line - and receive replies from within the same channel.

Cons - Heymarket:

For the price and the target market Heymarket is going after, there are many tools that come to mind that can do all of these things, but better, at a slightly higher price tag. Most notably intelligent chatbot platforms that are feature rich.

Heymarket Pricing: Heymarket has four pricing tiers which range from $29 per month to $199 per month and above.

#3. Best SMS Marketing Services: ClickSend

ClickSend is a messaging gateway service for business that you can send bulk SMS, email, fax, and letters from.

ClickSend Features:

Send and receive SMS and MMS messages
Text-to-speech voice calls
RCS and WhatsApp messaging
Email client
Fax client
Digital letters and postcards
Automated messaging

Pros - ClickSend:

Great tool to connect to other marketing channels and tools in your tech stack to, as ClickSend has plenty of integrations, including Zapier.
Send someone both a text message with a short summary of a special offer and send an email with full details on how they can claim it.
Planning to release solutions for Facebook Messenger and other channels soon.

Cons - ClickSend:

Lacking messaging channels where the most human beings are active and easily engaged, such as Facebook Messenger.
Hard to imagine that Fax is a widely coveted feature in 2023.
Complicated pricing model makes it difficult to know just how much you should expect to pay every month.

ClickSend Pricing: Go to ClickSend’s pricing page for details.

#4. Best SMS Marketing Services: Trumpia

Trumpia has a wide-range of text message marketing features, such as audience segmentation, SMS drip campaigns, autoresponders, data capture and contact management tools.

Trumpia Features:

Mobile keywords
Online sign-up pages
Data capture
Mass texting
Two-way / 1-to-1 texting
Appointment reminders
Landline texting
API and integrations
Auto responses
SMS coupons
SMS, MMS, email, and voice
Yes/No response
Analytics and reporting

Pros - Trumpia:

Contact tools do more than simply capture someone’s phone number. We can automatically collect more information as they sign-up, so you can accurately target every message.
Feature rich and built for companies looking to scale their SMS marketing.

Cons - Trumpia:

Pricey platform, but built for larger clients with many enterprise-grade features.
Still hard to justify pricing when you compare this platform with AI/machine learning chatbot platforms that do a lot of the same and more - at a lesser price tag.

Trumpia Pricing: Trumpia’s pricing is best left to them to describe on their pricing page. However, plans start at $195 per month and go up to (and beyond) $3,995 per month.

#5. Best SMS Marketing Services: Imperson

Imperson builds chatbot solutions that automate as much of the customer journey as possible through human-like conversation. It is an AI chatbot platform that develops enterprise bots for its customers.

Imperson Features:

Full-service creative and implementation
AI/machine learning, NLP
Fully managed bot services
Messenger, KiK, Twitter, website, Slack, SMS, Skype integrations
Supports text, audio, video, and soon to come to AR and VR
Chatbot performance monitoring and customization from Imperson team

Pros - Imperson:

Conversation navigator uses AI and NLP to analyze and determine how to lead conversations based on dialog context, user intent, and relationship memory.
Offer end-to-end deployment for bots and integrations

Cons - Imperson:

In the present, their technology to create truly human-like conversations needs more time and development.

Imperson Pricing: You will need to contact Imperson for details on pricing.

#6. Best SMS Marketing Services: TextMagic

TextMagic is a text messaging service for businesses that allows sending notifications, alerts, reminders, confirmations and conducting SMS marketing campaigns.

TextMagic Features:

Send texts online
Email to SMS
SMS gateway API
App for iOS and Android
SMS distribution lists
Zapier SMS integrations
Enterprise SMS solutions
Carrier lookup and number validation
Reporting and analytics

Pros - TextMagic:

Quick and easy to get started.
Feature rich for an SMS service.
Send text messages up to 918 characters in length.
Known to have very little issues reported from customers.

Cons - TextMagic:

Not feature heavy for marketing tools, however, everything you need from a text messaging platform is included.
Can be costly when your lists get large.

TextMagic Pricing: TextMagic has a “pay as you go” pricing model. You can either use TextMagic’s pricing calculator to estimate your monthly costs or get in touch with their sales team.

#7. Best SMS Marketing Services: Flow XO

Flow XO is another more complete solution for building chatbots, hosting them and deploying them across different channels/platforms. Although it fits into the enterprise chat software category, Flow XO has very reasonable pricing and solutions for small and medium-sized businesses as well.

Flow XO Features:

Virtual welcome mat for visitors
Lead capture tools
Live chat
Ability to answer simple questions
Accept payments through your bot
Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Twilio, web chat

Pros - Flow XO:

No coding skills required and easy to use user interface (UI).
Not only limited to Facebook Messenger. You can also build chatbot widgets for your website or integrate them with suitable third-party platforms.

Cons - Flow XO:

Although the user interface is elegant, the ability to actually create a bot in a reasonable amount of time is a problem.
No easy human to bot handoff, making your bot largely responsible for all customer and site visitor interactions. Lots could go wrong here.

Flow XO Pricing: Flow XO has a free account to get started. Paid versions start at $19/month, which gets you 5,000 interactions and you can add 25,000 by paying an extra $25/month and add five more bots for an extra $10/month.

#8. Best SMS Marketing Services: Snatchbot

Snatchbot is a chatbot builder intending to remove the complexity of adding AI/machine learning to your messaging applications. They have smart bots for multi-channel messaging.

Snatchbot Features:

Chatbot builder, no-coding required
Bot templates based on events
Advanced security features
Robust administrative controls
Messaging channels: web chat, Skype, Viber, FB Messenger, Slack, email, Twilio, Line, and others.
Webhooks, API, plugins
Broadcasting
Sentiment analysis

Pros - Snatchbot:

Import to enterprise clients, Snatchbot has robust administrative features and enterprise-grade security to comply with regulatory mandates.
Bot building tool is suited for your marketing and sales teams, as well as developers to create more custom solutions.

Cons - Snatchbot:

It can be complicated to get used to, and you may freak out the first time you use the platform. There are a lot of tools to use and some can be confusing without a previous tour on how to use them.

Snatchbot Pricing: Snatchbot has a free and pro plan. The Free plan provides access to all the basic platform features, including live chat, broadcast, all messaging channels, and more. The Pro plan gives you access to all features, and is based on how many messages are sent/received. This is tiered, starting at $30/mo for 10K messages, and goes all the way up to $999/mo for 1Million messages.

#9. Best SMS Marketing Services: Octane AI

Octane AI is focused on direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands and provides chatbots geared towards ecommerce websites, and works primarily with Shopify stores.

Octane AI Features:

Facebook Messenger bots
SMS text messaging bots
Messenger ads
Third-party bot analytics integrations
Follow-up messages
Audience segmentation
Order tracking, cart abandonment tools

Pros - Octane AI:

Built for Shopify, with many ecommerce platform integrations.
Fairly robust platform with many options for ecommerce bots.

Cons - Octane AI:

To get access to all features, the platform becomes quite expensive compared to other competing products.

Octane AI Pricing: Octane AI has a 30 day free trial period. There are three pricing tiers after the 30-day trial. The Basic plan starts at $9 per month and includes unlimited Facebook messages, automated campaigns, and automated customer support. The Pro plan starts at $209 and includes SMS as well (at the additional cost of $0.02 per message). You can get the Premium, targeted at SMS-heavy merchants, for $999 or more, depending on your preferences.

#10. Best SMS Marketing Services: ActiveChat.ai

ActiveChat is built for ecommerce and customer service. The platform works across Facebook Messenger, Twilio SMS, and has integrations for Shopify and WooCommerce.

ActiveChat Features:

Available channels: Facebook Messenger, Twilio SMS
Ecommerce platform integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce
CRM integrations
Conversational AI and NLP (natural language processing)
Visual chatbot builder
Can connect your live chat support framework

Pros - ActiveChat:

Easy to get started with visual chatbot builder and LEGO for chatbots.
Ability to add timers and delays which make the bot more natural feeling than many other chatbots.
Ecommerce tools for cart abandonment.

Cons - ActiveChat:

Pricing is high compared to competitors who have more robust feature sets.

ActiveChat Pricing: Free plan provides single bot with up to 500 monthly active users, but lacks many features. The Starter plan is $19 a month and gives you one bot with up to 1,000 monthly active users. Architect plan is $49 a month where you get access to all features. And the Agency bot is $249/mo, which gets you ten bots for 50K monthly active users and access to all features.

#11. Best SMS Marketing Services: Avochato

Avochato is a platform to manage conversations in one application. It is built for support, operations, and sales teams.

Avochato Features:

Shared inbox
Keyword-activated responses
Contact management system
Mobile app for iPhone and Android
Conversation tracking analytics that update hourly
Messaging templates
Live chat widget for website
Automated text-messaging surveys
Broadcast messages
Zapier integration

Pros - Avochato:

Their text-to-landline features allows you to send and receive text messages through your business phone number with no changes to your voice service. When a customer sends a text message to your landline, it shows up on your Avochato dashboard. The key benefit here is that you don't need to have separate phone numbers for calls and texts.
Great customer support reported by Avochato users.
Surveys, drip campaigns, and broadcast messages are nice new additions to the platform.

Cons - Avochato:

Not very feature rich, but has almost everything you need from text messaging tool for business.
If you go over 160 character limit, Avochato sends multiple texts and counts each text message towards your monthly messages. This not the case with many other SMS platforms.
Reporting and analytics tools are sub-par.
Pricing is a bit high compared to other tools with similar and/or more features and use cases.
Incoming messages are not free, which is not the case with some other platforms.

Avochato Pricing: Avochato has three pricing tiers. The Core plan starts at $99 per month for 2,500 messages and 1 unique phone number. The Standard plan is $199 per month for 5,000 messages and 3 unique phone numbers. The Pro plan is $399 per month for 10,000 messages and 10 unique phone numbers.

#12. Best SMS Marketing Services: Salesmsg

Two-way business texting software that makes it easy for small and local businesses to send and receive text messages online.

Salesmsg Features:

Unlimited contacts
Canned responses
SMS and MMS text messaging
Rich media such as emoji’s, GIFs, and vcards
Local or landline numbers
Call forwarding
Auto responses
Broadcast messaging
Shared team inbox
Schedule text messages
Archive conversations
Tag segmentation
Calendar and Zapier integrations

Pros - Salesmsg:

Good for small business and local businesses.
Power-up Salesmsg by integrating it with your existing tech-stack. Integrations available via Zapier.
Salesmsg can tex-enable your existing landline business phone number or provide you a new one for you to use.

Cons - Salesmsg:

Not feature rich or built for large / enterprise-level clients.
Limited to U.S. and Canadian SMBs. However, a great solution for that demographic.

Salesmsg Pricing: Salesmsg has a free 14-day trial, and then there are three pricing tiers. The Pro plan is $35 per month for 5K contacts and 750 messages. The Premium plan is $300 per month with unlimited contacts and 7,500 messages. Anything above that will require you contacting Salesmsg for custom pricing.

#13. Best SMS Marketing Services: Textedly

Textedly is an easy to use text message marketing platform with great analytics, a large character count allotment, and a pricing structure that allows for free incoming messages.

Textedly Features:

Mass group texting
Message scheduling
Automated responses
Real-time data and analytics
Full user history, time stamps, activity feed

Pros - Textedly:

Textedly is one of the only SMS apps to offer the ability to send a text message with over 300 characters. Most other tools only allow for 160 characters.
Free incoming messages.
Great analytics in comparison to the competition.

Cons - Textedly:

Lacks major features such as drip campaigns, audience segmentation tools, and surveys.
Pricing is expensive when compared to chatbot platforms with superior features and similar, if not superior SMS capabilities.

Textedly Pricing: Textedly has 8 easy to understand pricing tiers. There’s a free 14-day trial, and then pricing begins at $29 per month for 1K messages and 1 custom keyword. In the middle of the pricing tiers is their “Elite” plan, which is $70 per month for 5K messages and 4 custom keywords. At the highest tier, Textedly’s Premium plan is $350 per month for 25K messages and 10 custom keywords.

#14. Best SMS Marketing Services: SimpleTexting

SMS marketing and text marketing with SimpleTexting is a simple and effective way to increase customer loyalty or drive demand.

SimpleTexting Features:

Built-in apps for surveys, polls, and sweepstakes
Autoresponders
Keywords and short codes
2-way messaging
Text scheduling
iOS and Android apps
Custom fields
Audience segmentation
Link tracking
MMS marketing
API and integrations
Reporting and analytics

Pros - SimpleTexting:

Intuitive, easy to use interface.
Built well to run quick marketing campaigns from the “Campaigns” tab.
Good analytics that offer details of new subscribers, what keyword they used to join, how many autoresponders have triggered, number of unsubscribed users, and what responses you have sent.
SimpleTexting’s built-in apps allow you to conduct more technical marketing efforts like running surveys, polls, and sweepstakes.

Cons - SimpleTexting:

For a feature rich and scalable platform, their pricing is justifiably higher than the competition, however, still quite expensive if you do your homework on platforms that have greater capabilities, such as AI chatbot platforms with SMS features.

SimpleTexting Pricing: Use SimpleTexting’s pricing calculator to estimate your monthly costs. Pricing starts at $25 per month for 500 “Credits” and goes up to (and beyond) $625 per month for 50K credits.

#15. Best SMS Marketing Services: SlickText

SlickText is a solid text message marketing service for small businesses that’s easy to use and has a good range of useful tools.

SlickText Features:

Text-to-win, text-to-vote, text-to-join
Messeage scheduling
Audience segmentation
SMS autoresponders & automation
MMS marketing
SMS short codes
Text to landline
SMS Rest API
Analytics and reporting
Contact management
SMS surveys, polling, contests, drip campaigns
Zapier integration
iOS and Android app

Pros - SlickText:

SlickText has an intuitive user interface and supports all the top text message marketing needs such as polling, voting, contests, drip campaigns, keyword management, and personalization.
The number of contacts and customer groups you can create is unlimited. Additionally, inbound messages are free, and outbound messages have a cap depending on which plan you’re on.

Cons - SlickText:

Although SlickText’s pricing is average when put up against their direct competitors, it’s still expensive when compared to chatbot platforms with superior features and similar - if not superior - SMS capabilities.

SlickText Pricing: SlickText has a free plan and then eight pricing tiers after that. Pricing starts out at $29 per month for 500 texts and 2 keywords. In the middle of the pricing tiers there’s a plan for $189 per month for 5K texts and 14 keywords. And then at the highest tier you have “The Monstro”, which is $1,250 per month for 50K texts and 30 keywords. After that, you’ll need to talk to SlickText for custom pricing.

#16. Best SMS Marketing Services: EZ Texting

EZ Texting Features:

Text forwarding
Recurring messages
Sign-up forms for website
Reminders
MMS picture messages
Text-to-vote SMS polls
One-to-one messaging
Short code services
IOS app
Keywords
Text-to-landline enablement
SMS drip campaigns
Mass texting
API
Reporting and analytics

Pros - EZ Texting:

EZ Texting has an intuitive dashboard, automation tools, drip campaigns, free incoming text messages, custom keywords, contact management tools, and comprehensive analytics and reports.
Targeted engagement and personalization.

Cons - EZ Texting:

For any company seriously looking into using text message marketing at scale, you’re going to blow through there pricing tiers quickly and need to negotiate custom pricing.
No Android app
Again, when compared to the intelligent chatbots on the list, EZ Texting simply doesn’t get you as much bang for your buck.

EZ Texting Pricing: EZ Texting has a free 14 day trial, then three pricing tiers. The Plus plan is $39 per month for 1K credits and 1 custom keyword. The Select plan is $75 per month for 2K credits and 2 custom keywords. And the Elite plan is $119 per month for 3,300 credits and 3 custom keywords. If you go beyond that, you’ll need to talk to EZ Texting sales team for pricing.

The 16 best SMS marketing services for business in 2023

We hope you’ve found the best SMS marketing platform for your business.

Please let us know what you think and if you feel other more qualified platforms should have made the list. Thank you!

The Best SMS Marketing Services of 2023

16 Text Message Marketing Platforms Driving Revenue and Engagement for Business

What are SMS marketing tools?

What are the advantages of of SMS marketing?

What are the best SMS marketing platforms in 2023?

#1. Best SMS Marketing Services: MobileMonkey

#2. Best SMS Marketing Services: Heymarket

#3. Best SMS Marketing Services: ClickSend

#4. Best SMS Marketing Services: Trumpia

#5. Best SMS Marketing Services: Imperson

#6. Best SMS Marketing Services: TextMagic

#7. Best SMS Marketing Services: Flow XO

#8. Best SMS Marketing Services: Snatchbot

#9. Best SMS Marketing Services: Octane AI

#10. Best SMS Marketing Services: ActiveChat.ai

#11. Best SMS Marketing Services: Avochato

#12. Best SMS Marketing Services: Salesmsg

#13. Best SMS Marketing Services: Textedly

#14. Best SMS Marketing Services: SimpleTexting

#15. Best SMS Marketing Services: SlickText

#16. Best SMS Marketing Services: EZ Texting

The 16 best SMS marketing services for business in 2023

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16 Text Message Marketing Platforms Driving
Revenue and Engagement for Business

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