SMS automation can help you generate more revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and maximize your marketing budget. Setting up automated messages that are effective in achieving these goals requires:
- Choosing the right SMS marketing platform that fits your business needs.
- Using proven SMS templates and automation strategies that are easily customizable to your workflows.
- Having reliable data on customers’ needs, interests, and preferences to ensure your messages are as relevant as possible.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about SMS automation — including what it is, how it works, proven strategies, and five of the best SMS automation tools for small, midsized, and enterprise businesses.
What is SMS automation?
SMS automation means using automated tools to trigger text messages to recipients based on predefined conditions, schedules, or actions.
The idea is to avoid manually sending individual messages and instead set up automated workflows in advance, so SMS messages are sent when certain conditions are met.
For example, you can use SMS automation to welcome new users, promote products, remind customers about upcoming events, or confirm orders. When set up properly, these automated SMS messages can help you:
- Save time and streamline operations.
- Improve customer satisfaction by providing timely and useful information.
- Drive customer engagement and conversions via relevant and contextual promotions.
Proven SMS automation strategies and flows (& how to set them up)
As you can see, text message automation includes a broad range of strategies and tactics that can vary depending on each business’ goals. However, there are some proven automations that nearly all companies with an online presence can leverage, including:Transactional updates.Transactional SMS is a type of automated text message that businesses send to customers to deliver non-promotional information, like order confirmations, shipping updates, and account alerts. These messages are not just useful — they’re a must as customers expect to receive them. That’s why setting up proper transactional automation is key for maintaining customer satisfaction.
- Personalized product promotions. This can include a whole range of messages aimed at convincing leads or customers to buy a product, like sending bulk SMS messages to promote flash sales and other special offers. For maximum results, it’s best to personalize each promotional message, depending on the recipient’s needs and interests in terms of brands, prices, sizes, and other relevant attributes.
- Price drop alerts. These alerts are promotional messages that trigger whenever the price of a relevant product gets reduced. For example, most eCommerce stores let website visitors mark items or brands as favorites. Automated price drop alerts send SMS messages to those users whenever one of their products gets a price reduction.
- Cart reminders. Another eCommerce classic, abandoned cart messages remind customers to come back and complete their purchase. They’re usually triggered multiple times — e.g., an hour after a customer starts their purchase without completing it and then again the next day. They can also be combined with other tactics like discounts to maximize engagement and conversions.
- Event and appointment reminders. For example, these can include hotel reservations, upcoming flights, doctor’s appointments, concerts, and much more. It’s also useful to include relevant information with each reminder, like reservation numbers. This ensures your messages are as useful as possible which helps improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Setting up these and other automations requires the use of a specialized SMS marketing software. There are tons of solutions in this category, most of which offer some form of drag-and-drop functionality for building each message and a canvas-based automation tool.
For example, the screenshot below shows how you can create an SMS message with Insider — our omnichannel customer engagement platform. As you can see, you can easily add elements like recipients’ names, recommended products, coupons, and more by selecting from a list.
For the automation part, you can use Architect — our customer journey builder and marketing automation platform. The process requires selecting a channel (in this case SMS) and choosing various automation triggers, conditions, and wait times.
For example, you can trigger SMS messages based on:
- An event, like a customer opening a page, adding items to their cart, completing a purchase, passing by your physical store, or any other action.
- An attribute change, like a customer moving up to a higher loyalty tier after spending over a certain amount with your brand.
- A dynamic date, which is a great option for celebrating customer milestones (like birthdays or anniversaries) or running replenishment campaigns.
- A price drop or restocking of an item that customers are interested in.
- And more.
Again, building each message and setting up automation doesn’t require any coding or technical expertise.
However, there are platforms built specifically for developers that enable the programmatic creation and control of SMS marketing campaigns via APIs. For most brands, this is more of an expectation since most workflows don’t require that level of control but we’ll still cover one platform that enables this use case in the next section.
Below, we explore five of the top SMS marketing tools. We’ve included solution providers that serve different use cases for various business needs, like:
- Simple autoresponders, follow-ups, and purchase confirmations.
- High-volume SMS for sending thousands of customized messages to leads and customers.
- Two-way messages, either via live customer service agents or AI-powered conversational assistants.
- Integrating SMS into a broader omnichannel marketing strategy spanning email, WhatsApp, push notifications, and other touchpoints.
The first two options — Insider and Twilio — are suitable for larger companies and workloads, while the last three — HubSpot, JustCall, and SimpleTexting — are geared towards midsized and small businesses with simpler needs.
#1 Insider: Best for midsized and enterprise companies looking for advanced SMS features and omnichannel capabilities
Insider is our AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform.
It enables 1200+ leading brands, including Adidas, Samsung, and Puma, to deliver personalized customer experiences across 12+ channels — including SMS, WhatsApp, email, push notifications, on-site, mobile apps, and more.
G2 customers rank Insider as the best SMS marketing platform, as well as the top solution in 10 other categories like personalization software, mobile marketing, and customer data platforms (CDPs).
Our platform’s extensive SMS marketing capabilities can enable you to:
- Launch campaigns fast with proven templates: You can expand your contact list by collecting phone numbers with engaging opt-in templates, like Wheel of Fortune or Pick a Gift. You also have plenty of proven SMS templates for various use cases, like confirming orders, informing customers about delivery status, sending personalized birthday wishes, reminding customers about upcoming events, and many others.
- Send promotional, transactional, and bulk SMS messages: Insider enables you to take full advantage of SMS’ potential as a marketing channel. You can set up all sorts of SMS workflows — from highly-targeted automated price drop alerts and event reminders to mass personalized messages, one-time passwords (OTPs), account alerts, and more.
- Segment your audiences and personalize each message: Our platform lets you segment audiences based on standard, predefined, and predictive characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage via SMS, and discount affinity. This means you can send highly targeted messages to customers, based on historical and real-time data, resulting in better engagement and higher conversion rates.
- Generate segments, journeys, images, and copy: Sirius AI™ (our Generative AI solution) can create customer segments, journeys, images, and text based on simple text prompts. This can help you drastically speed up SMS campaign creation and achieve up to 60% higher productivity.
- Have two-way conversations to market, sell, and support customers: For example, you can rely on our Conversational AI to have data-driven, contextual, automated conversations that engage leads, drive conversions, and boost loyalty. You can also set up rules for transferring conversations to live agents when necessary for more complex queries.
- Access a plethora of advanced SMS marketing features: These include end-to-end customer journey analytics, risk mitigation, SMS hygiene, cost efficiency via short-URLs, and much more.
As we showed earlier, Insider also offers a customer journey builder for setting up and automating all sorts of SMS flows and campaigns.
Plus, since Insider is a true omnichannel solution, you can use the journey builder to coordinate your efforts across all channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email, and more by:
- Selecting the best channels and optimal send times: Insider can analyze users’ behavioral banners to select and automatically trigger messages on the channels and at
