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As the world becomes more acquainted with technology, businesses are realizing the need to become more modern as well. Nowadays, people have smartphones, and texting is king. Most people open a text within three minutes, and most customers prefer to interact with companies via text messaging. With this being the case, companies should start getting with the times and adjusting their marketing campaigns to fit current demographics.

Navigating the marketing world is a dangerous game, as for every legitimate company offering their services, there are 10 more looking to exploit a small business for their customer data. So, how can a small business identify the right marketing software and utilize it for their own campaigns?

We've compiled the best SMS marketing software and their relevant services. These businesses are well known in the marketing world for their technological innovations, and they all have good reputations after working with hundreds of clients.

Best Overall: Podium

Best Free Marketing Software: Bitrix24

Best Email Marketing: Constant Contact

Best Text Message Marketing Software: TextMagic

Best for Small Businesses: Attentive

Best for Large Businesses: Birdeye

Best for E-Commerce: Drip

Podium provides its clients with a range of marketing campaigns aimed at contacting customers through text messages. They've worked with over 100,000 businesses and have overwhelmingly positive reviews. Podium tracks and analyzes customer interaction data to find the best messaging campaign for your business, and will help you come up with the best overall marketing strategies.

Customers usually find it annoying and even unethical for businesses to contact them directly without explicit consent. This makes it a priority for businesses to make customers want to opt-in for text message sign-up lists that let them know about specials, deals or sales. Podium aims to come up with innovative texts that encourage users to sign up for businesses’ lists, which will significantly boost customer interaction and make businesses much more in touch with what their customers want.

Bitrix24 offers businesses quite a range of services with its free version, including email marketing plans that are pretty easy to master. While we much prefer the pro version of Bitrix24, which is available for only $99 a month, the free version still offers quite a lot when compared to other free SMS marketing software on the market.

Small businesses and startups that don't have much of a marketing budget would do well with going with Bitrix24 as their first marketing company, especially if they also want to learn the ropes of customer relationship management and lead management capabilities.

Constant Contact is a company dedicated to making their services available to businesses of any size. Small businesses need the tools to manage their email marketing, and Constant Contact provides just that: email marketing automation. They can help businesses come up with that perfect introductory email or figure out a schedule to send out carefully crafted automated emails.

It's important as a new business to establish your brand, and email marketing allows you to easily reach large audiences of potential customers. The problem with this approach is that it's sometimes very hard to come across as a genuine small business that offers legitimate services. Constant Contact can help you come up with the right approach when navigating the email marketing tightrope.

TextMagic focuses on helping brands establish their brands via text messaging. Like we mentioned earlier, texting is the way most customers prefer to communicate with their businesses, and for good reason. Texting is easy to do from anywhere, and feels less formal and more to-the-point than emailing a business directly. Plus, many customers assume texting business support is faster than going through an automated email system, and TextMagic aims to keep that expectation fulfilled.

TextMagic works by helping businesses fully incorporate text messaging into the way their businesses work normally. That means integrating texts into your business workflow, keeping staff updated and connected through texting platforms and, most importantly, communicating with customers primarily through SMS software platforms. Scheduled messages, automated messages, alerts, updates and warnings can all be sent as needed, and TextMagic can help your business decide when that is.

While we've highlighted a few companies that work with small businesses, Attentive is our favorite option for small businesses and startups. If you have a company that's just starting out, then it's not a bad idea to work with a well-established marketing company that can help you figure out what your brand is and what you're trying to say as a company.

Attentive made us notice them with their approach to personalized text messages that make every customer feel different and uniquely appreciated. In an increasingly digital world, it's important to differentiate your company from others, but how do you do that when your name comes up next to a hundred other businesses all offering SMS marketing services? Attentive lives up to their name by innovating new approaches to communicating with customers via text aimed at inspiring action and encouraging communication.

Birdeye works with businesses of any size to help them get even better at communicating with their customers. Even well-established companies that have hundreds of thousands of customers sometimes need to adjust their approach to marketing. The key to any successful business is growth, and successful marketing is aimed at generating as much growth as possible.

Birdeye helps convert leads from popular search engines and social media sites, allows customers to schedule meetings and review your business directly through text and a lot of other things. Any business looking to move into the modern world and fully engage with an SMS marketing software would do well with them. Their large scale of operations and amount of manpower makes them ideal for more well-known companies looking to move their marketing strategy into the 21st century.

Last on our list is Drip, a modern marketing software company that creates personalized texts and emails for businesses to better interact with their customer bases. We think any e-commerce brand needs a powerful online presence in order to grow to any major level. After all, there are a million e-commerce brands competing for similar spots, and unless your business is incredibly niche, you're likely competing with many similar competitors.

Drip offers clients the ability to come up with a unique identity when it comes to customer interaction. Instead of simply sending out sales notifications and encouraging reviews or feedback, Drip comes up with new innovative reasons for contacting a customer, and aims to come up with communication methods that feel natural and actively encourage customers to respond and interact. By developing a brand that communicates differently, we feel that an e-commerce brand will thrive best with Drip and its unique approach to customer interaction.

Source: Entrepreneur

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