7 Best SMS Marketing Platforms for Salesforce in 2024

Connecting with customers and stakeholders is easier over text, and it works better than email—plain and simple. SMS messages have an unparalleled 98% open rate, and 34% of recipients read texts within five minutes of receiving them. This means more eyes on your business and more immediate customer engagement.

But to tap into these benefits, you need a system that consolidates every aspect of text marketing into one streamlined, capable app—especially one that integrates with a CRM like Salesforce. To help you out, we’ve zeroed in on this year’s top SMS marketing platforms that integrate with Salesforce: 

1. Mogli
2. Twilio
3. Attentive
4. SlickText
5. Tatango
6. Heymarket
7. Avochato

We’ll review each solution’s features, pros and cons, and pricing so you can make an informed decision on which tool to invest in. Before we dive into our top recommendations, let’s get up to speed on what exactly makes an SMS marketing app one of the best. 

What to Look For in SMS Marketing Apps

When it comes to SMS marketing software, you need a solution that meets your business’s unique needs. This will look different for everyone, depending on factors like budget, technical expertise, and the size of your customer base. 

However, we’ve compiled a list of top features that any business using Salesforce can benefit from:

• Intuitive interface: Not every business has the personnel and resources to perform complex software implementations or spend months training the team on new software. You want an SMS app that’s easy to set up and use. Avoid SMS marketing platforms that are really just APIs—opt instead for intuitive apps that are ready to use out-of-the-box.
• One-on-one and bulk messaging: You’ll need both capabilities to carry out a well-rounded SMS marketing strategy. One-on-one messages allow you to build individual relationships with customers, while bulk sends let you get the word out about important updates and announcements.
• Salesforce-native: Plenty of SMS marketing apps integrate with Salesforce, but not all of these are developed specifically for Salesforce users. When you choose a Salesforce-native app, you’ll be guaranteed functionalities that fit your needs and a customer support team that truly understands how to help you. Plus, it’ll be even easier to get up and running since it leverages Salesforce functionalities you’re already used to.
• Segmentation: Every marketer knows that tailoring messages to your audience is key, and segmentation makes this much easier. Look for an SMS marketing platform or app that allows you to create custom lists and campaigns and easily send bulk messages to those specific segments.
• Automation tools: Save time and never miss an opportunity for connection with automation. Your app should be able to automate everything from individually triggered reminders to complex text conversations. Go further with artificial intelligence (AI) features like chatbots to reduce your team’s administrative burdens.
• Reporting capabilities: To help you tailor your SMS strategy, look for an SMS marketing app with built-in reporting features that give you the full picture of your messages’ performance. 

Depending on your business needs and priorities, you may also look for features beyond those on this list. For instance, you might need WhatsApp messaging if your company has an international reach, intuitive scheduling if your business is appointment-based, or text-to-pay if you want to accept payments or donations via SMS. Consider your SMS marketing goals and any features that could help you reach them.

Along with these key features, you’ll want to pay special attention to pricing models. Most SMS platforms charge on a monthly, per-user basis, but some platforms charge per message. Ensure that you understand all your pricing options before you dive deeper into a specific app.

Quick Breakdown of the Best SMS Marketing Software

Top SMS Marketing Platforms for Salesforce: Reviewed

Keeping your goals in mind, let’s explore each of our top SMS marketing platforms in detail, starting with the #1 best pick.

1. Mogli: Overall Best Text Marketing App

Mogli’s extensive features, ease of use, and five-star, fully US-based support team put it at the top of our list of SMS marketing platforms. 

With Mogli, you can send one-to-one and bulk messages globally via SMS or WhatsApp. Leverage automation to create complex text surveys that engage customers and collect important data. You can even branch out with features like voice messages, chatbot, and Text-to-Pay. And the best part is that Mogli scales with you—add new users at no additional cost any time you need to.

Plus, Mogli is Salesforce-native, meaning that setup is easy and its features work seamlessly with any custom or standard Salesforce object. Whether you use Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or one of the education or nonprofit products, Mogli will fit right in.

Features

• Unlimited users: Most SMS marketing apps charge by the user, meaning that each additional user you want to add increases your monthly fee. Even with those fees, some apps won’t let you add more than a set amount of users. With Mogli, you can add as many users as you need for one set price.
• SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp: Beyond traditional text messages, you can send multimedia texts and WhatsApp messages, allowing you to reach international audiences with compelling text content.
• Automation: Mogli’s automation features directly leverage the Salesforce tools you know and love. Use process builder and flow to create complex automated journeys your customers can easily follow. 
• Text surveys: Create robust surveys with automated branched messaging. Intelligent responses will guide customers through the survey based on their previous responses, all while seamlessly adding their answers to your database.
• Mogli URL: Sending custom, shortened links to your organization’s website within your text messages helps you boost conversion rates. Mogli helps you create and track engagement with these URLs directly in Salesforce at the individual contact level.
• Scheduling: With Mogli Scheduler, you can streamline the meeting and appointment scheduling process for clients to just a few steps. Mobile-first scheduling features enable your contacts to schedule via text, while automatically syncing with Salesforce contacts and creating new leads as needed.

Pros & Cons

Mogli pros: 

• Salesforce-native solution seamlessly integrates with your Salesforce instance and leverages all its best features
• 5-star support team is at your fingertips to provide top-notch technical help
• Intuitive and accessible for all your team members, and so much more

Mogli cons: 

• If your organization is new to Salesforce, there may be a steeper learning curve with Mogli than with other non-native platforms.

Pricing

For commercial businesses, pricing starts at $392 per company per month, while nonprofit pricing starts at $325 per company per month. Don’t worry about paying additional fees for each team member who needs access—every plan includes unlimited users, unlimited contacts, and unlimited keywords. 

Explore pricing in more detail by filling out a quick form.

2. Twilio: Best for Customization

Twilio’s core SMS offering is their “scalable, developer-friendly APIs,” which act as a blank canvas your developers can build on. This option is extremely customizable, but it takes a lot of work on your developers’ end to set up all the functionalities you need. Twilio also offers a less customizable, native Salesforce app with limited features if you need a solution with a faster setup. 

Features

• Flexible APIs to build your own SMS messaging features
• Multi-channel capabilities including text, email, video, and livestreaming
• Community CodeExchange library of code samples for different features

Pros & Cons

Twilio pros: 

• Highly customizable
• Essentially a blank canvas

Twilio cons:

• Extensive, difficult set-up process
• Designed only for developers

Pricing

The main Twilio platform operates on a pay-as-you-go model, with individual messages priced at $0.0079 per message sent and received. The Twilio Salesforce app starts at $15 per user per month.

3. Attentive: Best for Audience Targeting

Attentive is a self-described leader in “conversational commerce,” focusing on the value of customer text responses. This app’s most distinctive features are aimed at improving audience targeting and using AI to give customers a more personalized SMS experience. Attentive is not Salesforce-native, but it does integrate with Salesforce Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. 

Features

• Automatically generated, comprehensive customer profiles that show customers’ interests and purchase history
• Dynamic, automated segmentation for audience targeting
• Generative AI capable of predicting optimal send times and responding to customer messages

Pros & Cons

Attentive pros: 

• User-friendly
• Multi-channel automations
• Many conversational features designed to engage with customers

Attentive cons: 

• Not Salesforce-native
• Limited options for customizing audience segments
• Limited text message character counts

Pricing

Attentive’s pricing is custom, so you’ll need to reach out for a demo to receive pricing for your business.

4. SlickText: Best for Customer Loyalty Programs

If you want to use SMS for unique customer engagement opportunities, SlickText offers a variety of text gamification features. From custom rewards programs to automated text contests, these features can quickly encourage your customers to opt-in and stay engaged. However, SlickText only offers a Salesforce integration through Zapier, and it can quickly get expensive if you want to access all of its best features.

Features

• Customizable customer loyalty reward programs with SMS alerts
• Promotional contest tools including automated Text to Win sweepstakes
• Automated workflows and SMS drip campaigns

Pros & Cons

SlickText pros: 

• Unique customer loyalty programs
• Easy to collect opt-ins

SlickText cons: 

• Not Salesforce-native
• Expensive add-on features
• Limited one-to-one messaging

Pricing

After a two-week free trial, SlickText’s pricing starts at $29 per month, but this plan is limited to only 500 texts per month and doesn’t include automation features. They offer several tiers of pricing that increase in text capacity and features, going up to $1,250 a month for 50,000 texts.

5. Tatango: Best for Advocacy

Tatango specializes in serving nonprofits, political advocacy organizations, and businesses in need of especially high-volume messaging capabilities. The app enables users to run text fundraising campaigns and send bulk messages to millions of supporters at once. Tatango offers a “no code” Salesforce integration to sync your subscriber information. 

Features

• Ability to send high-volume mass text messages to millions of recipients
• Subscriber segmentation capabilities
• Built-in engagement and fundraising reporting, including open rate, click-through rate, and bounce rate

Pros & Cons

Tatango pros: 

• User-friendly
• Fundraising features
• Ability to send high-volume mass messages

Tatango cons: 

• Not Salesforce-native
• Limited customization
• User-reported technical bugs

Pricing

Tatango’s pricing is custom, so you’ll need to reach out to their team to get a pricing estimate for your organization. 

6. Heymarket: Best for Team Collaboration

Heymarket’s SMS marketing app aims to connect your business’s marketing, sales, and customer support teams so team members can collaborate on customer connection. With a shared inbox, team members can quickly delegate messages and manage conversations across platforms. Heymarket integrates with all Salesforce objects.

Features

• Assign customer conversations to individual team members
• Privately message other team members within a customer conversation
• Send messages from Facebook, Google, and SMS in the same conversation

Pros & Cons

Heymarket pros: 

• Team-focused platform
• Easy implementation
• Integrate SMS with Facebook and Google

Heymarket cons:

• Not Salesforce-native
• Clunky integrations
• Limits your list size to 800

Pricing

To use Heymarket with Salesforce, pricing starts at $66.50 per user per month. The Salesforce integration is an additional $7.50 per user per month and is only available with the two highest pricing plans.

7. Avochato: Best for Live Chat

Avochato is an SMS marketing app that integrates SMS with live chat via your website. Their goal is to help you avoid abandoned live chats by easily following up with chat users through text. Avochato’s Salesforce integration will automatically create leads in Salesforce and sync all live chat and text messages.

Features

• Customizable live chat website widget that leverages automation features
• Automated drip campaigns with customizable audience segments and time delays
• Organize and segment customers with a tagging system

Pros & Cons

Avochato pros: 

• Intuitive interface
• Responsive customer support
• Ability to use your existing phone number

Avochato cons: 

• Not Salesforce-native
• Difficult to find past conversations
• Expensive for multiple users

Pricing

To sync your Heymarket data with Salesforce, prices start at $42 per month per user plus a $210 per month platform fee. However, you can only add up to 10 users at this price. If you need more than 10 users, you’ll need to request a custom pricing plan.

Benefits of Using Text Marketing Apps

No matter which SMS marketing app you choose, you’ll be able to tap into plenty of benefits for your business. The top SMS marketing platforms allow you to:

• Streamline workflows. You already love Salesforce for its centralized, comprehensive view of all your customers and tasks. By adding an SMS marketing app into the mix, you can see the same benefits for your SMS marketing efforts. Simplify work for your team and keep all of your records in one place.
• Automate marketing. Customer personalization is much easier when you have intelligent automation tools at your fingertips. These tools save your team valuable time while giving customers responsive, personalized texts that align with their preferences.
• Meet a variety of SMS needs. SMS marketing apps have a wide variety of use cases. Send reminders, survey your customers, give them personalized discounts or rewards, and more.
• Track performance metrics. With custom reports and dashboards, your team can monitor the success of your SMS campaigns at a glance. Analyze data like open rates, response rates, conversion rates, and opt-outs to discover what works best.
• Boost conversion rates. Robust SMS platforms enable you to track and improve the number of conversions you get from text marketing messages. Set up conversion tracking, then pinpoint the types of messages that inspire customers to convert most often.

Plus, the best SMS marketing apps help you make the most of the benefits of SMS marketing itself, like high engagement levels with a low team time commitment. With effective tools powering your strategy, you’ll be able to see even better customer engagement results.

FAQs About SMS Marketing Software

Still wondering why and how you should use these SMS marketing apps? We’ve answered a few frequently asked questions below.

What is a text marketing app?

An SMS marketing app is a tool created to simplify and streamline text marketing for businesses and organizations. 

Robust SMS marketing software solutions allow users to populate text messages with information from their CRM, connect with customers individually and in large groups, and create custom automations that simplify SMS outreach. In essence, an SMS marketing platform serves as a central hub for all of your text communications. 

Who uses SMS marketing platforms?

Many industries leverage SMS marketing to build relationships with stakeholders, from commercial businesses to nonprofits to universities. SMS marketing apps offer unique benefits for each sector, such as making it easy for nonprofits to collect donations over text or for businesses to send personalized discounts for products. Mogli’s features can help organizations in any industry implement an influential SMS marketing strategy that converts.

Is SMS marketing effective?

SMS marketing is widely used for a reason. Texts have a 98% open rate and a 45% average response rate, much higher than email’s average of 8.5%. Because of high open, response, and opt-in rates, SMS makes for a highly effective method of connecting with customers and stakeholders. Plus, customers often prefer texts to any other method of communication from businesses.

Get Started with the Top SMS Marketing Platforms

Now that you’ve seen everything SMS marketing apps have to offer, it’s time to gather your team and do more extensive research on your top choices. Schedule product demos to get an up-close look at the apps’ functionalities, and request any necessary custom pricing plans. Once you’ve thoroughly evaluated your options, collaborate with your team to make the final decision of which SMS marketing platform to invest in. 

Not ready to dive into this research quite yet? Read up on SMS marketing app basics by checking out these additional resources:

• Salesforce SMS: How to Text from Salesforce & Why You Should. Dive deeper into how to add SMS capabilities to your Salesforce instance, best practices, and more in this article.
• SMS Marketing: Complete Guide to Finding Success with SMS. Read our complete SMS marketing guide to learn how to use your chosen SMS marketing app to improve your strategy.
• SMS Opt-In and Out Guide: Navigating U.S. Texting Laws. Choosing an SMS marketing platform with adequate compliance tools is essential, but it’s ultimately up to you to follow text marketing regulations. Read up on the basics in this breakdown.