Businesses of all sizes use SMS as a marketing channel. However, enterprises face unique obstacles when trying to maximize their text messaging efforts and budget — like massive contact lists, huge product catalogs, and customer data spread across many martech solutions.
As a result, they require vastly different functionalities from their messaging platform beyond standard bulk SMS and simple personalizations that are enough for most small businesses. These include:
- High-volume capacity.
- Versatile and easy-to-deploy integrations.
- Advanced segmentation and personalization.
- Flexible templates for different industries and use cases.
- Two-factor authentication, uptime guarantees, or other similar security and reliability capabilities.
- Automation capabilities to streamline workflows, set up strategic business texts, and integrate SMS with their other channels.
In this guide, we’ll show you how Insider — our enterprise text messaging and omnichannel platform — helps large marketing teams build successful SMS campaigns and tailored customer experiences across all touchpoints.
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Complete enterprise SMS marketing capabilities
Insider offers everything enterprises need to run a successful SMS marketing strategy — from opt-in and message templates to advanced segmentation, real-time personalization, 100+ premade integrations, and AI-powered campaign creation.
Thanks to these capabilities and our expert support teams, customers rank Insider as the best SMS marketing platform for midsized and enterprise companies.
Opt-in and SMS templates for all use cases
Growing your contact base — whether by collecting phone numbers or emails — is easy with Insider’s versatile opt-in templates. For example, you can use:
- Standard lead collection overlays and pop-ups that appear once certain conditions are met (e.g., time spent on page).
- The “Pick a Gift” template, which lets visitors pick a surprise gift box in exchange for their phone number.
- The “Wheel of Fortune” template, which entices visitors to spin a wheel and win a prize after providing their contact information.
- And many other templates.
You also have plenty of message templates for all sorts of industries and use cases — like sending price drop or back-in-stock alerts, congratulating customers on milestones, triggering timely cart abandonment reminders, and much more.
You can easily customize and deploy these templates across your website or mobile app without any technical assistance. For real examples of these templates in action, check out our case studies with:
- Clarins, which achieved a 45% increase in lead capture and identified 8500 new users.
- Puma, which observed a 231% uplift in lead submission rate and a 163% increase in coupon code usage
- Yves Rocher, which achieved a 6% increase in lead generation and got an additional touchpoint (email) for converting leads into customers.
Bulk, promotional, and transactional SMS
As a complete enterprise SMS service, Insider lets you build, personalize, and automate all kinds of messages, including:
- Promotional messages for flash sales, limited-time discounts, and other time-sensitive offers.
- Highly targeted price drop alerts, appointment reminders, and cart abandonment messages for specific users.
- Transactional messages, including, purchase confirmations, order updates, one-time passwords (OTPs), account alerts, and more.
Our platform also makes it easy to create and personalize these messages by adding dynamic content, such as last abandoned or browsed products, wishlist items, customer milestones, coupons, and more. This is done by simply selecting from a list of default and custom attributes, without the need for any coding or technical assistance.
Put simply, you can send various SMS messages that help you achieve goals like driving traffic to your website, generating sales and revenue, and improving customer satisfaction.
Advanced segmentation and customer targeting
Segmentation is crucial in SMS marketing, as it enables you to home in on the right audiences for each message and campaign. Our platform offers a plethora of segmentation options across three broad categories:
- Standard, which includes characteristics like users’ locations, demographics, and devices.
- Predefined, which includes automatically created audiences like cart or browser abandoners, mobile app users, and new leads.
- Predictive, which includes likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a specific channel, discount affinity, customer lifecycle status, and more. Learn more: Everything you need to know about predictive marketing.
These segmentation options enable you to engage audiences with relevant, timely messages and personalized product recommendations that are tailored to their preferences, behaviors, and needs.
AI-powered campaign creation, automation, and optimization
Insider lets you harness the full potential of AI to build effective SMS marketing campaigns. Specifically, Sirius AI™ — our patent-pending Generative AI solution — can:
- Quickly discover profitable customer segments. Instead of building segments manually, you can instruct our AI to create them for you based on your end goal, such as driving engagement, conversions, repeat purchases, and more.
- Build customer journeys in seconds. Our AI can also build entire customer journeys from scratch. These can span across multiple SMS messages (e.g., follow-ups, reminders, and so on) and even multiple channels, as we’ll discuss in a bit.
- Create campaign copy and images. You can use AI to quickly generate suggestions for titles and any other marketing copy or image. Again, you just need to provide a simple text prompt with your end goal.
Additionally, you can set up all sorts of contextual SMS automations with Architect — our customer journey builder and marketing automation platform.
As you can see below, Architect lets you build automated flows and journeys with a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor for selecting triggers, channels, wait times, conditions, and more. Plus, it also enables you to integrate SMS with your other channels for a cohesive omnichannel customer experience.
Lastly, our platform’s best-in-class customer support teams ensure you can deploy and see value from your SMS marketing strategy as fast as possible.
This includes everything from guiding you through the setup to analyzing your customer data, providing relevant tactics and strategies, and migrating journeys from other platforms to our platform.
That’s why customers consistently rank Insider as a leader in categories like time-to-value, ease of setup, and ease of use compared to other SMS, mobile marketing, and customer engagement platforms.
For a real-life example, check out our case study with Tactics. This global retailer needed a platform that could deliver personalized and engaging customer experiences while also being quick and easy to set up.
Insider enabled the brand to implement SMS short codes in just two weeks and launch over 10 personalized email automations in four weeks.
Omnichannel marketing and customer engagement platform
Optimizing SMS as a channel is just as important as integrating it into your overall marketing and communications strategy.
By coordinating your efforts across all touchpoints, you can create truly personalized customer experiences that lead to higher engagement, more conversions, and a loyal audience.
This is where Insider shines as an omnichannel marketing platform that:
- Supports 12+ channels natively.
- Unifies customer data and creates 360 views of all customers.
- Lets enterprises create coordinated, data-driven journeys that reach the right audiences at the right times with the right messages on the right channels.
Data unification and flexible integrations
Unlike traditional point solutions for email and SMS, Insider lets you aggregate customer data from any source — including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, analytics platforms, PoS devices, APIs, and many others.
This is possible thanks to our customer data platform (CDPs) that:
- Brings together customer data from any online and offline source, so you can overcome data silos.
- Gives you 360-degree views of all customers to serve as a foundation for all marketing efforts. As you can see below, these include key insights into purchase behavior, channel interactions, likelihood to purchase, and more.
Plus, our 100+ pre-built connectors ensure you can easily integrate Insider with the rest of your marketing and technology stack. For example, we have connectors for solutions across 20+ categories like:
- CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
- Traditional data and analytics CDPs like Segment, mParticle, and Tealium.
- Data storage and warehouse solutions like S3, Snowflake, and BigQuery.
- Marketing automation software like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
- Ad networks like Google, Facebook, and TikTok.
- And many others.
Lastly, you can use our versatile API to share data in real-time with other systems you might be using, like legacy software, data management platforms, and so on.
Access to 12+ channels
With Insider, you can reach your customers across all brand touchpoints. Besides SMS, these include:
This unparalleled channel access, combined with our CDP, makes Insider a true unified marketing platform ideal for enterprise marketing teams looking to:
- Maximize their marketing spend, efforts, and return on investment.
- Unify their martech stack by consolidating their data, channels, and tools under one platform.
- Work more efficiently and be more productive, instead of constantly jumping between different tools and platforms.
Conversational CX
Among Insider’s many supported touchpoints, you can tap into a plethora of messaging channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and chatbots.
Our platform’s capabilities here go beyond just sending personalized messages. In fact, you can use Insider to have unstructured, two-way conversations with your customers at scale — a capability we call Conversational CX.
Our Conversational AI can handle repetitive queries and FAQs quickly to ensure maximum customer satisfaction. You can also set rules whenever you want a human agent to intervene in more complex situations that require a nuanced approach.
This makes Insider an even more versatile solution for enterprises that:
- Want to market and sell products in a conversational way. For example, you can use WhatsApp Commerce to build end-to-end buying experiences allowing customers to browse items, add them to their carts, ask questions, and complete purchases — all without leaving the app.
- Need to provide fast support to customers on the channels they prefer. You can build AI-powered digital assistants and deploy them on your messaging channels to ensure faster response times. For example, Renault used Insider to deploy a virtual assistant on WhatsApp, resulting in a 93% decrease in customer service wait times.
Customer journey orchestration and analytics
As we said earlier, Insider comes with an omnichannel customer journey builder. This AI-powered tool is ideal for enterprise marketing teams looking to integrate SMS into their broader strategy by coordinating their efforts across all channels.
For example, you can use Architect to easily build journeys spanning multiple channels like SMS, WhatsApp, email, and push notifications. You can also rely on our platform’s AI capabilities to optimize your journeys by:
- Automatically selecting the right times and channels for each message. Insider can analyze each recipient’s behavioral patterns to determine optimal channels and send times. This can save you weeks of guessing and manual experimentation.
- Guiding users to the winning variants in your A/B tests. You can A/B test pretty much anything in your campaigns — from subject lines and images to channels and journey flows. Our A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection feature can automatically guide users to the winning variant based on a metric you select beforehand (e.g., open rates, conversion rates, or revenue).
You can analyze the results of your campaigns and journeys with our advanced customer journey analytics software. For example, you have ready-made dashboards with key metrics like delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and revenue that you can break down by campaigns and channels.
Lastly, you also have plenty of behavioral analytics tools to dive deeper into other aspects of your audiences. Some of these include:
- Flow Analytics for finding the different paths your users take to reach your goals, fixing the inefficient ones, and enhancing the ones that work well even more.
- Retention Cohorts for discovering the long-term value of various segments and learning how to keep them engaged over time.
- Funnels for monitoring how users navigate key goals like purchases and uncovering where drop-offs occur.
