Would you like to know the SMS marketing services I have found and the one I am currently using because this will be useful if you want to go from emails to text messaging?
SMS Marketing Services for Global Audiences — Twilio + Salesforce vs WhatsApp + Burner vs Community!
Do you want the very best text messaging marketing for your system, for your customers, for your business?
I certainly do because I see that marketing to these mobile devices is where it's at.
Email marketing is on its way out and for me, it already is out.
I do almost nothing with people via email and that brings a question into play. How can I do outstanding text message marketing as a business, especially global?
What's nice about email is that you can reach everybody worldwide with a consistent system. Unfortunately, popping notifications up on phones tends to be fairly challenging to set up and to get an organized system.
There's lots of things you can do on Facebook, on various applications to get notifications. The gold is in text messages.
Text messages are nearly universal, work almost anywhere in the world, get to people who may not even have email accounts and get read almost immediately.
Email rates are so low for open.
Text message open rates are so high.
In fact, text messages are often read immediately.
However, text messaging can go wrong very quickly and easily because of this.
The question is, what can you use to set up a great text message marketing system?
I tried googling "SMS marketing globally."
It looks like there are plenty of companies who can do just one country like the USA with a short code. I personally think that's not as effective as one I'm looking for.
I'm looking at a global solution that I can reach people all around the world and if you've got an online business, this is probably your case as well.
What can I use to send text messages to people in every country and get that quality customer experience?
I've got two basic options that I've worked out now that seemed to me to be ideal for doing marketing.
I'll show you each of them right now.
Number one, you need to know about Twillio and Salesforce.
As they say on their website, Twillio is a platform to build the ideal experience for every customer using Twillio SMS.
This seems to be what a lot of the big companies use to send you instant text messages anywhere in the world.
For example, when you request a confirmation code, it looks like these are coming either through their own systems or from Twillio.
Twillio has integrated marketing with other platforms such as Salesforce.
Salesforce is a customer relationship management platform.
These are also very valuable skills to know.
What Twillio has is an integration with Salesforce where you can directly connect Twilio's text messaging, ability to Salesforce where you can manage customers and have workflows where you can set up text messages both automatically, and to have back and forth text messaging with leads.
This seems to be an ideal setup for doing this at a larger scale. If you've got a lot of customers you want to do text message marketing with, Twillio with Salesforce out of the research I've done seems ideal.
What I noticed, googling "text message marketing companies," most of them seem to just be using Twillio.
They use Twillio, they make their own app on it. Then, they run it for you. You pay a much higher cost and depend on them when you could just use Twillio yourself.
What seems challenging is to actually use Twillio yourself, which is why their companies do it.
Salesforce, if you can connect these two, the integration appears to only be $25 a month or so when you click on "Get the App."
This means for about $50 a month plus the costs of messaging, you get to start with a free trial.
It looks like for about $50 a month and a few cents per message, you can integrate these two.
I've seen tutorials online from Keller Williams that they've already got the Twillio for Salesforce integration directly in their system, which is a good indication that this is a very effective system on a large scale to use, which is why this is what I've been considering to do for my business.
This is an ideal solution if you want to send a lot of free text messages out to people.
The downside with this is the cost and complexity of getting started with it.
If you've just got a few people you want to build a little bit of a list, make some basic contact with people, you probably don't want to go through all of the work to set up Twillio, get it connected with Salesforce and manage your leads that way.
There is an alternative.
One I'm using for my business is a simple combination of WhatsApp and Burner.
Burner gives me a free phone number, a $5 a month second phone number that I can use for calling, texting and picture messaging.
I've got this as a number I can give out more widely without giving my actual phone number out. It's a nice convenient application on my phone. I already made an in detailed tutorial about this.
This, when you combine with WhatsApp, provides global messaging.
Burner unfortunately does not do global text messaging, it just does USA and Canada.
What's really nice about Burner is it's cheap. It's only $5 a month, which on Twillio if you send about a hundred or maybe even less messages, depending on the countries, you have already spent $5 given also Twillio on Salesforce costs $50 a month to get set up,
Many other companies that are offering basically to use things like Twillio on your behalf with their own application will also charge significant fees.
This is the lowest cost approach that you can use.
Burner is $5 a month and WhatsApp is free.
What you do is you get a Burner number, and you can do text messaging in the USA and Canada with it.
I imagine there are similar applications to Burner worldwide as well. This is the one I'm using in the USA. I get my Burner number, then I use the Burner number to verify my WhatsApp.
I give the Burner number out as both my text messaging for USA and Canada, and I give that out on WhatsApp.
At various points I've tried putting the number out there for free and I personally found it was too much time and energy exchanging text messages back and forth with people, and that also lowered the incentive for the customer to want to buy.
Why bother buying anything from me when I'll sit there and text you all day to answer all your questions for free?
What I've done now is I've got my Jerry Banfield University membership and one of the benefits I put up for that is that you can text or WhatsApp me in the membership.
That way, when you join Jerry Banfield University, you get that one-on-one messaging with me, which is ideal because for me this is just basically providing quality customer service.
You might ask about scalability.
I currently have a very manageable number of subscribers. I can afford to do one-on-one messaging. When someone asks more detailed questions, I've also got forums and a Facebook group I can point them to.
For doing a smaller scale, easy to start and low cost, this is ideal.
I like this because this allows me to focus on just connecting with my customers. I give my customers a great experience. I don't need a massive list of people I'm text messaging for free in order to have great connections.
I already put out a lot of things totally for free on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. I have all kinds of free content and free posts. The nice thing with this system is it only costs me $5 a month. It does something I should be doing anyway, which is providing a great customer service, and it makes it so I've got a small focused audience I can individually message directly back and forth.
A system like this, however, is not appropriate as you get to bigger levels because while I've easily can respond to the hundred or so people that I'm accountable to for my customer support that have bought my lifetime bundle, who are subscribed as members or partners, what happens when this gets over a thousand people?
Even if only a small percentage of people message me every day, I'm looking at getting lots of inquiries and I'm stuck handling all of it myself on this phone with Burner and WhatsApp.
I could scale that up by having someone else sign into my WhatsApp and sign into my Burner on their devices. Unfortunately, doing that, I've lost the personal touch with it.
That is something I could do if it got to be too much. However, what if I need two or three people to help me for it?
At some point I might transition to doing something like Twilio for Salesforce.
However, the cost for that is so much, if you want to do free text messages with people, it's prohibitive.
If you've got a big following and you want another alternative, there is an application called "Community" that you might've seen some celebrities using.
If you see some celebrity is using Community.com, you can try, but I've personally being on the receiving end of it and I found this completely unsatisfying.
However, some big celebrities, some big names are using this to have a lot of communications. I'd imagine Community is built on something like Twillio if not exactly on Twillio.
The thing with Community, is how do you actually get access to it? How much does it cost?
I'm guessing something like Community is pretty expensive.
If you look at people who are using this, you've got Gary Vaynerchuk, Ellen, DDG, Marshmellow and Jennifer Lopez.
Something like Community could easily cost $5,000 or $10,000 a month to use it.
I also am not sure how global Community is with the text messages.
Therefore, if you're a celebrity, I might be able to do Community.
I'm figuring that it'd probably cost more than doing just something like Twillio and Salesforce for myself.
I hope with this video, I've given you a good look at how you can set up an outstanding text message marketing strategy, both at scale if you wanted to use Twilio on Salesforce, or the way I'm doing it on my website with whatsApp and Burner.
If you want to get to that celebrity level, you want something simple that is scalable, other people are using Community.
Thank you very much for watching this.
I hope it's helpful for you.
I love you.
You’re awesome.
I appreciate the chance to serve you today and I will see you again soon.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
Originally published at https://jerrybanfield.com.