salesforce text messaging and tatango

Many brands using Salesforce as their customer relationship management system (CRM) want to get into text message marketing. It’s the fastest-growing, most-effective marketing strategy to reach customers in real-time, grow revenue, and solicit donations from political groups and organizations. Not to mention, text message marketing has an average 99 percent open rate. We often hear questions from digital marketers such as:

  • Does Salesforce have text messaging?
  • Can you text message your customers’ phone numbers stored in Salesforce?
  • How do you integrate Salesforce with a text message marketing platform?
  • Does Salesforce text messaging integrate with Tatango?

In this blog post, we answer all those questions and more so you can make the best decision for your SMS marketing strategy.

 

What Is Text Message Marketing?

First things first, if you’re not familiar with text message marketing, you may be wondering how it works. Text message marketing is also referred to as SMS marketing (short messaging service) or MMS marketing (multimedia messaging service). Brands, businesses, nonprofit organizations, political candidates, and even celebrities use this marketing channel and communication tool to send promotional text messages to consumers and have ongoing conversational messaging with them.

For example, a retailer could text customers a promotion for a special sale or new product, or a restaurant could text a coupon for a special right around lunchtime. Many nonprofit organizations and political groups even use text messaging to solicit donations or invite people to events for their organizations.

Statistics show that 90 percent of all text messages are opened within three minutes of being received. That makes SMS apps a powerful way to get in touch with your consumers when many other marketing messages (such as email marketing or social media marketing like Facebook ads) go unopened or unseen for hours or days or never get opened at all. Contrary to popular belief, SMS texting is a more widely used feature than messaging apps since not everyone worldwide has internet access on their phones to use mobile apps.

Brands use SMS messages when they want to send short, plain-text messages since SMS messages are limited to 160 characters of text, including hyperlinks. Brands send MMS messages when they need room for more text—up to 5,000 characters—or want to send images, GIFs, videos, or sound files along with text messages. Both text marketing strategies are effective. Retailers, restaurants, and brands often use a mix of both.

 

How Does A Brand Set Up A Phone Number for Texting?

Your next question may be about how a brand acquires and sets up a mobile phone number for SMS marketing or MMS marketing. A brand will typically work with a text message marketing software (such as Tatango) to select a short code, a 5- to 6-digit phone number consumers can use to text the brand. The process is quite nuanced. Brands can choose between non-vanity (random) mobile phone numbers or vanity (non-random) mobile phone numbers. They then have to go through a short code provisioning process with the industry’s regulatory bodies before using a short code. (That’s why we’re here to help make it easy.)

Once a brand has an approved short code and is ready for text messaging, the brand must next choose a keyword that consumers can text to the short code to join the brand’s text message marketing campaigns. For example, if a retailer gets the short code 12345, they can choose a keyword like SHOES. If a consumer texts SHOES to 12345, they’ve automatically opted into the brand’s shoe campaign.

Again, even this process can be quite strategic. Some keywords are easier to type than others, some cause autocorrect issues, and some are harder for consumers to remember. Some brands have several keywords tied to different campaigns. If you’re just getting started choosing your SMS keywords and growing your text messaging subscriber list, we recommend our free SMS marketing e-book: How to Select SMS Keywords.

 

What Is Salesforce?

Many brands partner with Salesforce, the world’s most popular customer relationship management (CRM) system. The Salesforce platform is a great tool that enables companies to store customer data, track customer engagement, and connect customer data across social, email, online, e-commerce, and more. Essentially, it’s a massive online platform that marketers can reference for insight into all the interactions their leads, prospects, users, and customers have taken with their brand, as well as all the interactions the brand has taken with consumers, such as sales outreach.

In marketing language, according to Salesforce, “The Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides digital marketing apps for email, mobile, social, web, and marketing automation. It also provides data that makes it possible to create a single view of every customer, manage their journey, and deliver optimized content on every channel in real-time.”

 

How Does Salesforce Text Messaging Work?

When a business works with Salesforce, any online forms that the business uses flow into Salesforce data. For example, suppose a customer goes to a website and provides their mailing address, email address, and mobile number through an online form. In that case, that information automatically syncs with Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Did you catch what just happened there? It’s pretty powerful stuff because if a customer provides their mobile number to a business that uses Salesforce, that business now has a phone number it can use for SMS texting marketing. (The only catch is that the business needs to ensure it uses the proper disclosures and compliance information when collecting phone numbers to ensure that consumers are aware they’ll receive recurring text messages.) Once that’s all taken care of, the business can now send this consumer coupons, promotions, special deals, and mobile alerts.

The only thing is that even though the Salesforce platform is a very robust service cloud, it isn’t a text message marketing software. But Tatango is.

 

What Is Tatango?

Tatango is an SMS marketing software platform designed specifically to enable businesses to text message their subscribers’ mobile devices. Because many businesses use CRMs such as Salesforce, Tatango easily integrates with Salesforce and other CRMs so businesses can take all the mobile phone numbers uploaded into the Salesforce app, then integrate seamlessly with a text message marketing provider such as Tatango to send text messages to subscribers. Salesforce isn’t a text messaging platform, but its API allows it to work with a texting service provider like Tatango to take care of all the steps between a phone number being uploaded and a brand sending a text message to that phone number.

Without Tatango, you’d have to do a lot more work to ensure that your text messaging subscriber list reflects all the numbers in your Salesforce database, that you have all the right approvals, and that you’ve unsubscribed all the right people to avoid violating text messaging laws, which can cause a lot of headaches and complications.

 

Why Tatango?

Tatango has been the industry leader for the past 13 years, specializing in SMS marketing, MMS marketing, and even RCS chatbot business messaging. At Tatango, we’re experts in the entire SMS marketing process. We can help you get your short code, select strategic keywords, create opt-ins that grow your subscriber lists as fast as possible, and design eye-catching text messages that grow your revenue and business. While we love CRMs and what they bring to the table, no one knows SMS message texting like Tatango, and using us will dramatically improve your text messaging results.

Here are a few more benefits.

  • Tatango can send messages faster than nearly every SMS marketing provider out there. Fast delivery is essential when sending real-time bulk SMS messages such as lunch specials, weekend sales, and urgent news alerts or when soliciting donations for nonprofits or political groups after key events.
  • Tatango is the only text message marketing provider that can send up to 5,000 characters per message. That’s great if you have more than a tweet’s worth of content to send, as most incoming SMS message software allows.
  • Tatango also offers SMS templates so you can easily create your marketing campaigns.

To top it all off, the Common Short Code Administration has awarded Tatango their highest designation of Premium Partner. With the best deliverability, speed, segmentation, and analytics in the industry, we can ensure that all your messages get where they need to go—right on time. And we love working with enterprise retailers, restaurants, candidates, and nonprofit organizations. (We love it so much that we even created the industry’s first search engine for text message marketing examples, SMS Archives.)

 

How Does Salesforce Integrate With Tatango?

Enough about us. Let’s talk about how a business like yours can integrate Salesforce with Tatango so you can get started text messaging today.

Fortunately, the Salesforce integration process is simple. To get started, all you have to do is contact one of our friendly text message marketing experts. We’ll guide you through the entire setup process and answer all your questions, seamlessly integrating Salesforce with Tatango so you can focus on what you do best—the marketing.

 

Can Tatango Integrate with Other Companies?

Most businesses use a variety of digital marketing partners. Tatango has other integration partners such as iContact, HubSpot, Eloqua, WhatCounts, Emma, Lyris, Experian, Silverpop, Infusionsoft, Campaigner, VerticalResponse, AWeber, Responsys, and Constant Contact. If you use another digital marketing partner, chances are we work with them. Get in touch with us to find out.

 

Get Started Text Messaging Today

Are you a Salesforce user ready to start SMS messaging? We’re ready to help! Contact us.


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