15 Minutes to Inbound SMS Marketing

If you rely on email marketing, you also should take a look at SMS marketing. Here’s why.

Email is arguably the foundation of all successful marketing efforts due to its ubiquity, scalability and raw effectiveness is driving sales and building awareness. We love email marketing, and that’s why we’ve build some powerful email marketing automation on top of our cloud CRM system.

But as much as we love email marketing, the truth is that SMS marketing is even better. That’s because while a good email marketing campaign might have an open rate of 20 to 30 percent, SMS marketing has an open rate of 98 percent–and 90 percent of those opens are within 3 seconds of message arrival! SMS not only is built for mobile, it offers an immediacy and a perceived relevance that makes it hard to top.

We’ve already covered how you can get started with outbound SMS marketing through Agile CRM and Twilio integration. With our new SMS keywords feature, you now also can set up inbound SMS marketing–and get started in as little as 15 minutes of setup time. Here’s how.

Inbound SMS Marketing Keyword Setup

Keywords are the foundation of inbound SMS marketing. When a lead or current customer sends a text message with a particular keyword to your business, you can have Agile CRM automatically respond based on the keyword. The response can be a followup SMS message, an email, or even just a flag to have one of your sales reps give the customer a good old-fashioned followup sales call. The keyword initiates an automation campaign, so you can define any respond to the SMS keyword that you like.

Setting up inbound SMS with predefined keywords is simple and quick.

First, navigate to Triggers -> Add Trigger -> SMS -> Inbound SMS.

From within the Inbound SMS screen, fill out a few key details. Provide a user-friendly name for the trigger so you can remember it.

Next, specify the keyword on which the campaign should be executed. This is the keyword that the lead or customer will text your business that will initiate the inbound SMS campaign. You might specify a keyword such as “INTERESTED”, for instance, and tie it to a campaign that serves up basic sales data about your product or service.

Once you have the keyword chosen, specify the phone number that you’ll be using for the incoming SMS messages. This should be a number that you have tied to your Twilio account, a cloud-based SMS gateway service that is tightly integrated with Agile CRM.

After you’ve created the keyword and defined the number for receiving incoming SMS messages, next pick the campaign you want to initiate when someone sends you a message with the keyword. This campaign you choose is the action that happens when someone sends you a message with the keyword, and it could be a followup email, an SMS response, or a series of actions that are associated with the campaign.

Once you’ve filled out this basic info, just save the trigger and your inbound SMS marketing is operational and ready to use. It really is that simple.

For more on Twilio setup or setting up your automated marketing campaigns, head over to our Resource Center for tutorials and setup guides.