In the world of text message marketing services, SUMOTEXT is the resident heavyweight. This product shows its strength in its extensive feature set and reporting capabilities, which enable you to win the attention of your consumers and open up two-way communication. You will be hard-pressed to find an SMS marketing service that will so effectively augment your marketing strategies, which is why we are pleased to give this service our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award.
As a text message marketing service, SUMOTEXT goes above and beyond in creating a solution to help any business improve communication with their customers. We found the interface intuitive and comprehensive in scope, allowing us to easily create texting campaigns while at the same time enabling us to monitor real-time results of current conversations taking place. Whether you want to send out coupon codes, polls, auto-responders or open up conversation with a simple text, this service will easily suit your needs.
Features is an area where SUMOTEXT was not found to be lacking. We feel that the underlying message of this service is facilitating two-way communication, which they do quite well. You can set up auto-responders that will send preset messages whenever a contact messages in a specific keyword or phrase. You can set up polls and voting where contacts can respond with specific keywords that will automatically log into SUMOTEXT’s databases. In addition, surveys can be set up to follow up with different questions based on a contact's response. We even found functions that allow you to create contests where one in every 20 responses “wins” a price of your choosing.
Subscription management is one area they offer particular emphasis on. The service enables you to create an unlimited number of contact lists based on things like keywords and groups. You can easily create new groups, edit current ones and remove subscribers all from one accessible screen. One option under the Subscribers section is Subscriber Statistics, which allows you to view all subscribers and see what short codes they are sending to, the keywords they’ve responded to and even the number of texts they’ve sent.
Data collection is critical to effectively measuring the impact of your marketing campaign efforts. SUMOTEXT assists in identifying the demographics of your target audience through the use of the opt-in form that you can place on your company’s website. This form can be altered to request as little or as much information as you would like. You can simply ask for their phone number or you can request their name and address as well. And better yet, any data you’re able to collect from these opt-in forms can be used to personalize your future text messages. This means you can insert information like a person’s first name into the body of a text message.
Inbound messages, or replies to messages you’ve sent, are automatically free. Outbound messaging is the feature that’ll cost you though. Pricing for this service is somewhat higher than most of the competing services out there. While it might seem cliché to justify the price with an exceptional service offering, such would have to be the case here. This product further distinguishes itself by offering clients every feature listed for no hidden cost. We felt that the high monthly fee is actually fair for the quality and features of this excellent product.
With regard to short codes (the phone number your contacts will be dialing in to send texts), you have two options with SUMOTEXT. You can either share a short code or enlist their assistance in applying for an assigned short code. The difference between the two is that sharing a short code means that several other businesses will be utilizing the same short code as you. The end result of sharing a short code is that you may not have access to specific keywords, you’ll get SMS responses that may not pertain to your company, and you stand the risk of losing the code if another company abuses use of the short code.
However, if you choose to get your own dedicated short code, the good folks at SUMOTEXT will help you in applying for an assigned short code (at $500/mo) or for a vanity code of your own choosing (at $1000/mo) through the Common Short Code Administration (CSCA). Once your code is reserved, SUMOTEXT will work to gain access to wireless carrier networks, a process that may take upwards of eight weeks.
SUMOTEXT offers the most diverse set of reporting tools out of all the competition, enabling you to effectively gauge the reach and effect of your SMS marketing conversations. Immediately when you log in, you are greeted at the dashboard with four reporting statistics. The first one shows how many text messages you have sent for the current billing cycle. The second categorizes the number of subscribers you have by carrier, and then again in the next report by state. The report along the bottom of the dashboard then gives a bar graph representation of the text messages sent for that month.
The Delivery Reports function is a rather comprehensive report that lists off all important contact information for an SMS campaign during a date range. This report offers information on the delivery status of each individual contact in addition to when delivery was confirmed. You should note that the status will vary as different carriers will provide different progress levels. For example, Sprint will generally call a successful delivery “Sent,” whereas AT&T will report “Delivered.”
While an all-black interface isn’t generally the best way to go from an aesthetics standpoint, the navigation and layout of SUMOTEXT is intuitive and allowed us quick access to all of its features. Through a series of buttons along the top portion of the screen, you can navigate to each page and fulfill a variety of functions. You have four main icons that will navigate you to the Dashboard, Message Center, Subscribers and Settings. Clicking on any of these will bring up a series of sub-menu options for items such as creating a new message, delivery reports, campaign statistics, keyword settings and more.
While live chat support was not available, SUMOTEXT still offers several useful avenues for figuring out their software. You can obtain immediate assistance through the use of phone and email support, or you can watch the numerous video tutorials offered. These videos provide a quick overview of the service and make understanding how to develop your own mobile marketing campaign a cinch. The videos, however, are by no means comprehensive. So if you encounter an issue or have a question, you can easily contact one of their support representatives via email or phone.
SUMOTEXT dominates the mobile marketing field with a strong service backed by communication tools. We feel that the software is simple in design and yet comprehensive in scope. It has been successfully designed to meet a wide range of needs and cultivate an environment of two-way communication with consumers through such features as auto-responders, polls and coupons. And even more impressive is the reporting features offered. This service will easily put you in touch with measurable results that help arm you with the knowledge you need to increase the effect of your SMS marketing conversations. SUMOTEXT is, without a doubt, the titan who makes the ground shake in the mobile marketing arena.
