The Ultimate Text Message Partner RFP Guide
There’s a lot of information out there when it comes to choosing a partner to launch your first text message marketing campaigns, and it can be difficult to cut through the noise and evaluate which vendor is the best fit for your business.
On the surface, it seems most text messaging vendors are comparable in terms of price, capabilities, and service, but this is far from the case. To help you determine the perfect text messaging vendor for your specific needs, we’ve developed a RFP that outlines four major components: enterprise capabilities and list growth, implementation and support, reporting and analytics, and fees and pricing.
This quick guide should help you discover if a partner has the ability to support your marketing efforts with one-to-messages across text and email, while maintaining industry-level compliance, at an appropriate price. You can download the full RFP here, but first, let’s touch on why these qualifications are important when vetting a text messaging vendor.
Enterprise Capabilities & List Growth
When choosing a text messaging partner, you want to ensure they’re able to support your enterprise marketing campaigns and scale your list-growth strategy across channels.
What campaign management services do they offer? What on-site list growth experiences do they have available? How do they identify site traffic beyond cookies? Your potential partner should also be able to outline the support they provide for send strategies, design, implementation, and integrations.
With Wunderkind, we offer list-growth strategies based on the business goals of our partner. For example, if the focus is on list-growth at lower incrementality, you may want to pair text and email capture together. But if the goal is to maintain moderate growth and incrementality, empowering visitors to choose the channel that works best for them may be the way to go.
But for list-growth strategies to work, identification capabilities are key. Look for identification technology like Wunderkind’s that goes beyond cookies to help you recognize your customers and new prospects during their visit. Once in place, you can then automate onsite experiences to capture both emails and phone numbers. Because having a truly effective opt-in strategy means you shouldn’t just be focusing on text messaging, but rather on all your owned channels.
Maintaining Compliance
It’s important to determine what a partner would do to help you craft one-to-one messages across text messaging and email while maintaining industry-level compliance.
Ask the vendor to outline their TCPA compliance and share what CTIA Messaging Principles and Best Practices they follow. Do they have in-staff and external counsel used for compliance support (they should) and what are their backgrounds?
For example, before Wunderkind even begins running campaigns, the first thing we do is obtain consent from the audience. Whether it’s by using pop-ups, in-person or virtual events, or in our first message with the shopper, we ask their permission to communicate via text message. We also always offer a way to opt-out of text messaging. With relevant content and reasonable frequency caps, this isn’t typically an issue, but we ensure we’re maintaining compliance nonetheless.
Fees & Pricing
It’s much more expensive to send a text than an email, and vendors structure their fees differently. This is why it’s important to understand what the cost of running campaigns with a partner will be and if they’re overcharging you for their services.
How does their pricing work? What is their shortcode fee? Do they charge premiums on aggregator and carrier fees?
Many text messaging vendors charge a premium to help retailers reach their consumers. In addition to platform fees, some of the biggest vendors in the space charge brands a premium on the aggregator fees associated with sending messages. This means vendors are incentivized to send as many texts to your customers as possible, leading to a poor brand experience and decreased engagement with your audience.
Wunderkind has always completely disagreed with a send-based, expensive-to-scale philosophy. We pass through send fees at cost, only charging based on our partner’s subscriber list — with that cost dropping drastically as their subscriber count goes up. This ensures their returns don’t suffer in the second year of their texting messaging program while also incentivizing for CRM list growth which will help them in the long run.
Take a look at how Wunderkind’s pricing compares to others in the industry.
Choosing the right text messaging partner is the most critical step in ensuring performance and ROI on your text messaging program. Ready to move forward with a demo to see how Wunderkind can help you launch high-performing, personalized SMS campaigns? Let’s get started.
