SMS is one of the most personal and effective ways to connect with your audience, whether you run a small business, nonprofit, educational institution, association, or global brand. Texts make it easy to share anything from details about your latest promotions, upcoming fundraising events, or routine appointment reminders.
But without the right technology, managing these communications can easily become its own full-time job. This is where automation comes in.
SMS automation allows you to set up autonomous workflows that effortlessly send timely, relevant messages to your customers or supporters. In this guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about SMS automation:
There are many reasons to swap out your manual SMS process for automated workflows—we’ll break them down next.
SMS automation involves sending text messages to individuals or specific groups based on a set schedule or predefined triggers (e.g., a customer receiving a text survey after visiting a business). It offers many benefits to businesses, educational institutions, nonprofits, and more by:
Additionally, automation can ensure nothing falls through the cracks. For example, you'll never forget to follow up with that new prospect again, increasing conversion rates, generating more revenue, and encouraging more engagement with your brand and organization.
SMS automation is a versatile tool that can be used for everything from supporting marketing efforts to maintaining compliance with laws and regulations. Here are some of its common use cases:
For drip campaigns, your organization will create a series of automated messages that are sent to the target audience over time. Welcome drip campaigns are triggered when a new supporter or customer takes a specific action—this could be signing up to receive texts from your organization, making a purchase, donating, etc.
For instance, a first-time donor might receive a thank-you text and follow-up messages that educate them on the cause and point to additional involvement opportunities. The goal of these campaigns is to nurture new relationships without placing more strain on your staff.
These messages are instant responses that confirm a text subscriber's action. They are typically triggered when the subscriber texts a certain keyword (like “AGENT” in our example above).
Automatically follow up with a new sales lead, potential donor, or university applicant after they take certain actions (e.g., making a first-time donation or submitting a “Contact Us” form). Not only does this instantly engage the prospect when their interest in your organization is at its highest, but it also ensures you don’t miss out on key opportunities and potential future revenue.
These are time-based messages that are automatically sent out prior to a certain event. This could be a reminder to attend a fundraising event, schedule an appointment, or even abandoned cart CTAs and reminders to complete a purchase. You can set the scheduled time or cadence of these automated texts, ensuring your recipients get confirmations, reminders, and even follow-up messages for any appointments, events, or actions they take (e.g., “Your appointment is in 2 days!” and “We’ll see you today at your 2:00 appointment!”).
Automated reminders reduce no-shows, missed payments, and nudges for CTAs, strengthening your revenue and reducing the need for staff to manually take action on similar issues.
Automatically share intuitive surveys that allow you to collect valuable constituent insights via text message. Depending on the complexity of the survey, you can create either:
Typically, surveys are set to trigger after a purchase or other interaction, such as attending an event, asking the audience to measure their satisfaction. For instance, a business might ask them to rate their experience at their recent appointment.
These texts are scheduled to automatically launch on a repeating cycle, such as weekly, monthly, or annually. This type of automated message is best for sending out things like weekly promotions, monthly payment reminders, or “Happy Birthday” messages or discounts.
Setting up automated texts typically isn’t difficult, but the exact process varies depending on the technology you use and the type of message you need to configure. Here are the steps to sending automated texts for the most common SMS automation solutions:
For business-to-person texting needs, it’s best to use dedicated SMS automation software. These apps streamline SMS marketing and make bulk messaging possible on a larger scale. In addition to offering a more robust suite of features, these solutions typically have built-in frameworks for maintaining compliance.
The set-up process will vary depending on your software, but the basic steps look something like this:
Mogli offers a comprehensive SMS automation tool that’s built on and for Salesforce, allowing you to configure and send messages directly from your Salesforce CRM. We’ll discuss Mogli’s offerings in more detail later in the guide.
There are a few options for using Salesforce to automate text messages. But first, you’ll need to take one of the following steps to be able to send SMS from Salesforce:
You can use a tool like Mogli that fits seamlessly into your Salesforce org. Mogli is built on and for Salesforce, meaning you can send texts directly from your CRM and easily integrate automated messages into existing workflows and journeys. It also allows for unlimited users and provides unmatched support.
Mogli offers the easiest way to text and includes the specialized SMS automation features you need to engage your target audience.
SMS messages offer an immediate, personal way to reach your customers or supporters—and with an average open rate of 98%, SMS is one of the most effective marketing channels. Automated text messages enhance timeliness and personalization, all without increasing the burden on your staff.
But to get the benefits of this channel, you need effective SMS marketing and automation software. Our top recommendations include:
Mogli is an SMS texting platform built on and for Salesforce. As a specialized SMS marketing tool, it offers an impressive set of features, providing unmatched flexibility. Additionally, Mogli can grow alongside your organization—add new users at any time for no additional cost.
Use Mogli to send both one-to-one and bulk messages via SMS or WhatsApp, and leverage its automation capabilities for everything from automated reminders to agentic engagements. Mogli’s top features include:
Mogli’s interface is intuitive and accessible, making it easy for your team to learn and understand how to use the platform—even if your team is brand-new to Salesforce or seasoned users of the platform.
To learn more about Mogli’s pricing, submit this quick form.
Twilio’s SMS marketing product is known to be highly customizable, scalable, and developer-friendly. Its flexible APIs allow you to build your own custom SMS messaging features, and you can manage two-way, cross-channel messaging via SMS, MMS, chat, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Developers can also rely on the Code Exchange library to access and use code samples for specific customizations.
While Twilio’s customization options allow you to configure the tool to your unique needs, it will require significant time and effort from developers to both build and maintain. This can slow down implementation timelines and hinder your SMS marketing progress. Twilio does offer a Salesforce app that can be used out of the box, but it’s not as comprehensive as the full solution. This means you will have to build your own user interface for end-users and handle things like notifications and gateways yourself.
Twilio uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and pricing per message varies based on message type, phone number type, etc. The Salesforce integration app is $15 per month per user.
Attentive offers an SMS marketing platform designed to engage customers with promotional, transactional, and conversational messaging. It prioritizes creating personalized experiences that lead to two-way conversations between senders and recipients.
The software automatically generates detailed customer profiles that break down insights like purchase history and special interests, and the tool integrates AI to pinpoint the best times to send messages. Attentive can also automatically create audience segments to enable personalized messaging. However, the tool is not built on Salesforce, and it can be difficult to customize audience segments on a deeper level.
Attentive offers custom pricing depending on each client’s needs.
Now that we’ve covered SMS automation basics and top providers, we can break down a step-by-step process for getting started with our top recommended SMS automation tool: Mogli.
Mogli leverages the standard automation functionalities offered in Salesforce to help you enhance and automate your SMS and WhatsApp communication strategies. No matter what your Salesforce instance looks like, Mogli makes it easy to launch automated texts in a few simple steps:
To see Mogli in action, check out this video demo:
Setting up automated messages will help your organization move the needle on key goals and initiatives, from boosting audience engagement to enhancing customer support. Because Mogli is built on Salesforce, all responses, engagement data, and recipient actions will automatically be tracked in your database.
SMS marketing is an effective, engaging communication channel—but what makes it stand out is its innate authenticity, immediacy, and personal nature. Leveraging SMS automation effectively helps you better harness these unique traits by communicating more quickly and offering more relevant, personalized experiences.
The right technology can help you do this without placing additional strain on your team. Choose Mogli and get all of the benefits of the most robust SMS solution that’s designed for Salesforce.
To learn more about how to optimize your text marketing strategy, explore these additional resources: