Opt-It Review

best text marketing

Opt-It Review –

Opt-It is a SMS text messaging service providing their customers capability to market their business from the web through text. Of all the companies out there, and the list continues to grow, what does Opt-It have to provide that other companies don’t? In this review we will examine the Opt-It system including some of its features, the pricing, and the support to see if they keep up with the list of growing companies.

The first 2 things people think of when they see a product is: How does it work? How much does it cost? Lets inspect some of the features of the Opt-It system to see how it works.

Opt-it provides the basic services you would expect from a SMS text marketing provider, obviously the ability to send messages, receive them, and manage contacts that come into your database through opt-in. All of these features seem very easy to do from their web-based control panel. Opt-It covers the major carriers, but they have a smaller list of local providers. You will want to make sure to see if your regional providers are listed before you sign up. Now, lets look at some of the more advanced features of the Opt-It service:

  • Redemption tracking for coupons – allows you to effectively track your coupons you give out, where and how they are redeemed, and how much success your coupons provided your business.
  • Personalization fields – have you ever wanted to personalize the messages you send out but don’t want to go through the hassle of sending each individual person a message? You can simply add a personalization field, such as their first name, to the message and the system will automatically fill in the customers first name when it sends the messages out.
  • Text from your phone feature – you can send a message out to all your subscribers from your own cell phone. No web access needed.
  • Web widget – place the web widget on your website to allow customers to sign up to your database from the web.
  • Customized Analytics – keep track of your campaign through reports
  • Filters and queries – this is where Opt-It’s customer management system really shines. This gives you complete control to filter your contacts as well as query your customer database based on certain demographics. This really allows you to narrow down who you want to send your message to.

All-in-all, Opt-It provides some nice features, all of which are simple to use. If you would like to find out more about their features, they have a great help center on their website that describes (through text and picture samples) how their features work. Now that we have answered the “How does it work?” question, lets address the “How much?” question.

Opt-It only provides 2 package options, pay as you go and an unlimited plan. Prices for your pay-as-you-go option are 2 cents per message (that means both outbound AND inbound) and $20 for each of your keywords. Any opt-in and opt-out messages are free. They do offer volume discounts, but its only for customers who use more than 1 million messages a month.
The unlimited plan starts at $50 per month per keyword but the price goes up as you add subscribers. The pricing is broken down like this:

If you have 0-100 subscribers – $50 per month base price
101 – 500 subscribers – $75 per month
501 – 1000 – $150 per month

The prices continue from there as you add more subscribers. Each time you add 500 additional subscribers, you are automatically upgraded to the next payment tier. To determine how much you really owe, you need to look at how many subscribers you have per keyword. If you have 3 keywords (each having 150 subscribers) you would pay 3 times $75 per month. Your monthly payment would be $225.

Support options from Opt-It include phone, email, and FAQs. As mentioned earlier, they have a great help documentation section of their website. Through visuals, you can see how to use their system in your marketing. FAQs are plentiful, the page dividing them up into the categories:

  • Terminology
  • General
  • Pricing and Billing
  • My Account
  • Support
  • Messages

You should be able to find the help you need through the FAQs and help documentation.

Opt-It should provide for your basic text message marketing needs. It doesn’t boast too many features that aren’t found anywhere else. The pricing plans are limited and you need to look carefully at the unlimited plan to see if it will work for you and if its affordable. Support is decent, providing lots of information on their website and the ability to contact them otherwise. This service is a decent option to look in to.