7 Best SMS Marketing Platforms for 2024: Which One Is Right for You?

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SMS Marketing

Published on

Feb 29, 2024

Written by

Kayla Ellman

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SMS Marketing Basics

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Use this as a guide to help research potential SMS vendors and find the best-fit platform for your needs.

SMS is a powerful marketing channel—that's no secret. But the success of your SMS program is closely tied to the platform you choose.

That's why we've taken the time to create this comprehensive guide comparing the top SMS vendors in the industry. With the variety of options out there, it can be hard to know what to look for and how to choose the platform that's the best fit for your needs (both now and in the future).

Whether you're looking for the highlights on each provider or want to deep-dive into their features, this guide is for you.

What to look for in an SMS marketing platform

Make sure to consider each of these essential elements when evaluating potential vendors. Together, they’ll enable you to build a compliant and high-performing SMS program.

‍Robust suite of list growth tools: These tools should make it easy to grow a healthy subscriber base from different places like your website, email, social media, and in-person interactions. The more people you can reach and influence through SMS, the greater the revenue opportunity.

‍Sophisticated messaging capabilities: This should at least include standard SMS and MMS, dynamic triggered flows, two-way messaging, and advanced personalization and targeting tools.

‍AI and automation: AI enables marketers to improve their workflows and strategies. Look for a platform with built-in AI tools to help automate tasks like copywriting, building dynamic segments, and optimizing campaigns and journeys to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Flexible integrations to connect your tech stack: Make sure the SMS platform you choose works well with your CRM, ESP, e-commerce platform, loyalty provider, and any other tools and services you use to create a unified marketing ecosystem.

Expert guidance on compliance: SMS is a regulated channel with strict rules and requirements. Your SMS provider should be well-versed in compliance laws, and the platform itself should have built-in tools designed to help you stay compliant.

Dependable deliverability: You need to trust that your messages will reliably reach your subscribers, even as your list grows and especially during busy times like Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM). Look for an SMS platform with a strong delivery network and robust infrastructure to ensure your messages are consistently delivered to the primary inbox.

Comprehensive analytics and reporting: It should be easy to understand how your SMS program is performing and make data-driven decisions. Some features to look for include a user-friendly dashboard, flexible reporting to focus on the metrics that matter most to your brand, detailed data visualizations, and real-time performance insights.

Broad international reach: If you have customers around the world or plan to expand internationally, prioritize a platform that supports sending messages to different countries, so you don’t have to bring in different point solutions, and can help you comply with local regulations.

Specialized resources and support: Having access to the right resources and support can make a significant difference in your SMS marketing journey. Find a provider that offers dedicated support to get you up and running, plus ongoing guidance to advance your program. It's a bonus if they have a resource hub or knowledge base to help you level up and make the most of the platform's features.

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Attentive

Attentive is a market leader in SMS according to G2 reviews. Founded in 2016, the company has been managing SMS programs for many of the world’s leading brands for nearly a decade. The enterprise-grade platform is always evolving its products and features, including an email solution, and expanding into new markets, making it a smart choice for brands of all sizes and across industries.

Attentive SMS at a glance:

Offers its patented two-tap mobile technology to drive list growth
Mobile-first identity solution recognizes more website visitors
Offers SMS and email solutions for easy orchestration across channels
Significant investment in AI and development of platform-native AI tools‍
‍100+ integrations with top tech partners, plus open APIs and developer support for custom builds
Most expansive suite of compliance tools and resources (CEO is on the CTIA board)‍
Robust global network of 80+ carriers that handles billions of messages each month
‍Supports SMS in 20+ countries across the Americas, Europe, and the APAC region
Comprehensive and customizable analytics and reporting tools‍
Best-in-class customer support from onboarding to optimization

Want to know more? Deep dive into Attentive’s platform below:

List growth

Attentive offers an expansive suite of 30+ list growth tools to help brands achieve significant subscriber growth, all designed with compliance in mind:

Fullscreen
Bubble to Fullscreen
Partial (sits at the bottom of the page)
Spin-to-Win
Preference Collection
Landing pages (for email, social, and offline growth)
Instagram Stories
Text-to-Join
Checkout page
Plus more list growth tools in beta

It’s easy to create and launch high-performing sign-up units with pre-built templates. These templates are optimized for any browser or device with built-in guardrails to help you meet your desired level of accessibility, such as making sure there's enough contrast between text and background. They’re also fully customizable, with the option to upload logos, fonts, and colors to match your brand's identity. Additionally, display rules can be set to control when and where the sign-up units appear.

Attentive's patented two-tap mobile technology is one of the company's most notable innovations. The technology has been tested on over 8,000 brands and—even more impressive—has successfully captured half a billion sign-ups to date.

Here's how it works: Attentive's patented two-tap mobile technology uses double opt-in to confirm the user’s intent to sign up for messages, validate that the user has access to the phone number, and ultimately, accelerate list growth. To sign up for SMS, potential subscribers simply need to tap a button and a pre-populated text message will appear on their phone. Then, they can just then hit "send" to confirm and start receiving messages.

Messaging capabilities

Another standout feature of Attentive’s platform is the Magic Composer for building, scheduling, and sending SMS and email campaigns. Whether you need to create a simple one-time campaign, or orchestrate a multi-touch, multi-channel campaign, you can do it all from one screen. The Magic Composer also has built-in logic that retargets subscribers in real time based on engagement.

GIF showing how to create a campaign with Attentive's Magic Composer

‍SMS and MMS

Attentive supports sending both SMS and MMS, including a wider range of media options for MMS than other platforms: static images, GIFs, audio, and video in MP4 format.

Triggered messaging

Attentive Journeys allows brands to send targeted messages to subscribers at critical points in the customer lifecycle based on specific attributes and actions. This includes foundational SMS journeys to engage shoppers when they take common actions, like signing up for texts, visiting your website, viewing or adding a product to cart, and making a purchase.

Plus, more advanced SMS journeys that use sophisticated triggers and e-commerce data to engage customers at key moments. These triggers include winback eligible, joined a segment, low inventory, price drop, and back-in-stock.

Attentive’s pre-built journey templates are optimized for engagement and conversion. They’re fully customizable and support multiple levels of nesting like: wait steps, branch steps that split the journey into different paths based on device type or product data, A/B test steps, and more.

Attentive is also always introducing more ways to personalize SMS journeys, with options like cart link macros and re-subscriber welcome messages.

Conversational messaging

Attentive has a range of conversational messaging tools that empower brands to create engaging, interactive experiences:

Two-Way Journeys™: Collect valuable preference data and build sophisticated customer segments by using conversational keywords to trigger specific replies (i.e., recommendations, product details, special offers, and more)
Attentive Concierge™: Handle shopper inquiries in real time with on-brand replies via SMS, using responsive AI and a team of trained live agents to remove barriers to purchase and increase conversions
LiveSMS™: Capture otherwise lost revenue and grow your subscriber lists at the same time with on-site live chat powered by SMS (also managed by Attentive agents)
Multiple CX integrations: Automatically escalate specialized inquiries to your in-house team so you can resolve them quickly

Personalization and segmentation

Attentive's identity solution recognizes more website visitors using their email address and phone number. With a large identified SMS subscriber base, the solution can identify 20% more on-site email subscribers with refreshed cookies from SMS clicks.

With each sign-up, Attentive builds a rich profile of the subscriber, including their phone number, email address, browsing and purchase behavior, device type, and more.

All this valuable data comes together in the Attentive Consumer Passport, alongside zero- and first-party data collected through email, SMS, and integrations. You can choose from pre-built segment templates or create your own to develop highly personalized campaigns and triggered flows tailored to each individual.

SMS and email orchestration

Attentive has two options for combining your email and SMS channels. You can orchestrate them across two different platforms via integrations, or you can consolidate both channels and create a unified strategy by migrating your ESP to Attentive Email.

When Blenders Eyewear brought their email program over to Attentive, it greatly improved their email performance. But the ability to create multi-channel campaigns and journeys on one platform gave their already successful SMS program a performance boost, too, including a 52% increase in total revenue.

With everything housed under one roof now, we can clearly see how our message copy, CTAs, sign-up units, and designs have become so much more cohesive and uniform.

– Kyra Stickford, Marketing Retention Coordinator, Blenders Eyewear

AI and automation

Attentive is making significant investments in AI, developing a suite of AI tools specifically designed to enhance creativity and performance. These tools are seamlessly integrated into the platform's UI, so customers can easily incorporate them into their current workflows for creating and sending messages:

Magic Message uses generative AI to suggest copy that fits your brand voice and transform your product catalog into on-brand images
Automated Campaigns maximize engagement and revenue by using AI to accurately segment audiences, predict the best-performing content and send times, generate personalized product recommendations, and more
Magical Journeys uses predictive targeting and triggered sends to engage high-intent shoppers with personalized messages at the perfect moment
AI Audiences analyzes your audience to segment and target customers more intelligently

Attentive AI™ is trained on a foundation of 2+ trillion data points, from 90+ billion high-performing messages sent across 70+ verticals. These insights are used to power Attentive's AI tools, and save marketers time while boosting performance.

Rest assured: Attentive has robust data governance and advanced security measures in place to protect sensitive information, regularly scanning systems for vulnerabilities and patching them promptly. They also require multi-factor authentication (MFA) to enhance account security.

We’ve been trying out AI Audiences as well, and it’s been really interesting. When I’m setting up segments manually, I always wonder who I’m missing or what I could be doing better. So it was really cool…to test out the feature, specifically for identifying people we’re leaving behind who might be ready to purchase.
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– Faith Bukauskas, Email Marketing Manager, Hot Topic

Integrations

Attentive offers 100+ integrations with leading tech partners, including Bazaarvoice, Movable Ink, Friendbuy, Gorgias, Simon Data, and Shopify. The platform prioritizes building integrations with the most common and impactful tools, to ensure easy orchestration across your entire tech stack.

If there isn’t an integration for a specific software or platform that you use, or if you have a more complex set-up, Attentive provides open APIs and SDKs to create custom solutions. There's also a full team of developers on deck to support custom build requests with fast turnaround times.

Uncommon Goods built a custom 'Perks' API with Attentive. The SMS platform essentially acts as the brand's loyalty provider, allowing them to segment subscribers based on their membership status and encourage Perks program sign-ups.

Compliance

Attentive’s commitment to compliance goes beyond having safeguards in place. Attentive has a dedicated in-house legal team that focuses on TCPA, CCPA, CTIA, GDPR, CASL, ADA compliance, and more to provide the tools you need to safeguard yourself from potential risk.

The company's CEO is on the board of the CTIA, the wireless communications industry group that regularly interacts with lawmakers and the FCC to shape policies and regulations, making Attentive one of the only SMS marketing platforms with this unique advantage. Attentive is also a member of the CWTA.

This all helps ensure that Attentive stays on top of the latest developments in the ever-changing legal landscape with strictly enforced compliance regulations.

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Attentive has an expansive suite of compliance tools and resources, all informed by industry best practices, to help brands meet legal requirements and stay compliant:

List growth tools built with compliance in mind (double opt-in to re-affirm consent, accessibility guardrails)
Automatically-recognized opt-out keywords, plus fuzzy opt-out tools that direct subscribers who no longer want to be subscribed how to opt out
Confidential and proprietary list of over 50K numbers known to be associated with a TCPA, FTSA, or SMS-related lawsuit or claim (the Attentive platform automatically suppresses messages to phone numbers identified as on this list)
Full audit trail for each subscriber’s interactions with the Attentive platform, capturing the date and timestamp of subscriber activity, including opt-in, opt-out, message history, and other relevant information

Deliverability

Every message sent and received through the Attentive platform flows through the Attentive Delivery Network (ADN), a robust global network of over 80 carriers that handles billions of messages each month.

In addition to built-in features designed to help keep text messages out of the spam folder, Attentive has a dedicated deliverability team that proactively monitors for potential issues. The team is there to provide an extra layer of assurance on top of:

Patented two-tap mobile technology to validate users’ access to phone numbers
Contact cards to improve brand recognition
Smart Sending and Quiet Hours to ensure optimal delivery times

Attentive also regularly stress-tests the platform to maintain optimal and dependable deliverability rates, especially during high-traffic periods. Preparation starts months in advance for peak holidays like BFCM, ensuring the platform’s robust and proven infrastructure can handle the increased message load.

That dedication pays off. Over Cyber Week 2023, Attentive customers sent a record-breaking 2.2 billion messages, generating over $1.8 billion in revenue.

Analytics and reporting

Attentive's comprehensive analytics and reporting tools are designed to be user-friendly and customizable. You can work from pre-built report templates and tailor them to focus on your specific goals and KPIs, with flexible options for grouping and filtering data.

The Analytics Dashboard gives a high-level overview of your program's performance, while in-app Reports allow you to dig into the data and track trends over time. You’ll have the flexibility to report across email and SMS, view individual subscriber data, generate performance snapshots, and more.

Other features:

Save reports, export them, or schedule them for automatic review later
Enable secure sharing of reports and insights across teams and departments
Add custom tags to each campaign message, then use those tags to filter reports and analyze performance at a granular level

International reach

Attentive supports sending SMS in 20+ countries across the Americas, Europe, and the APAC region, and in multiple languages. You can manage your global SMS channels from one platform using the Single-Account Management (SAM) feature, which includes region-based segmentation for campaigns and region-based branching logic in journeys.

On top of that, the platform has region-specific compliance tools for international brands, including sign-up units built with localized opt-in requirements in mind. There's also a team of regional experts who can advise on localized best practices and make sure your messages are relevant to the local audience.

Claire’s has successfully launched SMS programs with Attentive in the US, UK, France, and Ireland, with plans to expand into other European countries, including Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy.

Resources and support

Attentive's Client Strategy team is known for providing unparalleled support to help you launch and scale your SMS program quickly (read more in this report). That support includes best-in-class strategies that have been developed through extensive experience working with some of the industry's biggest brands.

Compared to other platforms that ‌are more self-service oriented, Attentive is committed to setting customers up for success at every step of their journey with:

Hands-on support during migration and onboarding
Assisted set-up to ensure an optimized SMS program from day one
Specialized guidance, including customized messaging, curated strategy, and personalized list growth support
Industry-leading resources, including message recommendations, an educational resource hub, extensive help center, and customer events

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