With 99% open rates, SMS messaging is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your followers, customers, and constituents. However, we understand that researching SMS messaging software can be a daunting process! There are many SMS messaging technologies on the market, and figuring out the best one for your organization is an important step. Not every SMS messaging platform is right for every type of user. Before jumping into demos with SMS marketing software providers, it’s important to identify your organization’s texting goals and what you want from an SMS messaging solution.
To help you determine the SMS messaging platform that’s best for your organization, we’ve created this blog post comparing Tatango and Twilio. Below, we briefly summarize each platform and outline the differences and similarities between them.
About Tatango
Whereas Twilio is built for developers, Tatango is built for marketers. Tatango is a leading SMS marketing software that partners with political candidates, agencies, and nonprofit organizations to send SMS messages to their supporters. With Tatango, political organizations and advocacy groups raise donations, increase voter turnout, share petitions, and send important updates to their followers.
Marketers can segment their subscribers, create automated campaigns, send both SMS and MMS messages (text messages that include videos, gifs, and images) and pull detailed reports to help improve the ROI of every SMS message sent. Many Tatango clients see a return of $5 in donations for every $1 they spend on text message marketing.
About Twilio
Twilio SMS is built for developers. Businesses can use Twilio SMS to embed phones, VoIP, and messaging into web, desktop, and mobile software. With Twilio, developers can integrate various communication methods into their software and programs, such as placing and receiving calls, or sending and receiving text messages.
For example, if you have ever received a text message from a food-delivery app, that’s an example of a developer using Twilio’s API to add a messaging layer on top of another application or business. Other popular examples of Twilio include package alerts, shipping notifications, re-order reminders, or ride-sharing notifications.
Tatango vs. Twilio SMS
Both Tatango and Twilio enable organizations to send SMS messages to their desired audiences. However, Twilio is designed to send transactional messages (such as package alerts, delivery updates, and appointment reminders) whereas Tatango is designed to send promotional or fundraising-driven texts from a candidate or organization to its subscribers. Although both Twilio and Tatango offer SMS message services, each one provides a different experience and is designed with a completely different user in mind. Let’s dive deeper into these differences below.
Tatango vs. Twilio: Type of User
Tatango and Twilio provide different experiences to their users. Tatango is designed for marketers to develop SMS marketing campaigns and easily draft and send text messages through the software. As a marketing automation tool, Tatango enables marketers to segment audiences, build out multiple campaigns, personalize messages with merge tags, and tap into reports to guide changes to current and future texting campaigns.
With Twilio, developers can build integrations using the Twilio messaging API. For example, if a company wants their app to include a texting feature that notifies customers about orders and shipments via SMS, the company’s developers can use Twilio’s API instead of building that backend feature from scratch.
Both Tatango and Twilio allow companies to communicate to customers via text message, but they’re created for different use cases and offer very different user experiences. If you’re a marketing professional looking to add the SMS channel into your marketing toolbox, Tatango would be a better option for you. If you’re a developer, Twilio is right for you.
Tatango vs. Twilio: Features and Functionality
Because Tatango works primarily with political groups and advocacy organizations, its designed for marketers working on behalf of these organizations who who need to quickly send mass text messages to a high volume of subscribers. As such, Tatango has prioritized highly efficient messaging speeds—sending up to 100,000 texts per minute or 6 million texts her hour.
With Twilio, you wouldn’t necessarily need to send a single text message to millions of subscribers at once. You would just need your developers to confirm that your triggers are working properly to send individuals a single text message when they need to be notified of something.
Another feature difference with Tatango is that, because we work with high-profile political candidates across the highest levels of politics, we have invested in additional security protocols to ensure political campaigns don’t get into the wrong hands. Tatango has built several political security features such as two-factor authentication, secure sending, and automated logout to protect who can access text message campaigns or send the messages. Whereas, Twilio’s text messages are typically automated messages that don’t require the same additional political security precautions.
Additionally, because Tatango is built for marketers, it comes with many features that help marketers segment their lists based on location, interest, and engagement. Marketers can insert merge tags into their messages in order to personalize messages with a subscriber’s first name or other identifiers. Tatango has also built its software to create the most eye-catching messages possible, so marketers can add images, gifs, videos, and up to 5,000 characters of text in each message. Marketers who use Tatango get access to robust analytics to delve into each text message to determine what worked and what they can improve on for future campaigns to increase every text message’s ROI.
Tatango vs. Twilio: Types of Messages
As mentioned above, even the types of messages you would send with Tatango vs. Twilio differ. With Tatango, you would send marketing messages. Most of our clients are political candidates or nonprofit organizations who use SMS messages to drive donations, increase votes, encourage signatures on petitions, and communicate important updates to their supporters in real time.
Whereas, with Twilio, companies typically send automated alerts such as shipping notifications, appointment reminders, and arrival alerts. These aren’t designed to be marketing texts, but rather informational texts that are triggered when something happens on a company’s app or website. These messages typically don’t contain images, gifs, or other eye-catching promotional graphics like Tatango’s SMS and MMS messages would, as shown below.
Learn More About SMS Marketing With Tatango
We hope the information in this blog post helped you get one step closer to identifying your organization’s ideal SMS messaging platform. If you need more clarification on how Tatango and Twilio differ, we invite you to watch this short video.
Or, if you’d like to learn more about how the Tatango platform can help your company achieve its SMS marketing goals, we invite you to schedule a time to talk with one of our SMS marketing experts.
