Sailthru, a CM Group brand and the leading personalized marketing automation technology provider for retailers and publishers, announced today the launch of its proprietary Short Message Service (SMS) product to give customers even richer cross-channel capabilities. This investment expands marketers’ ability to create and manage cross-channel customer journeys, which will help brands build stronger connections with their audiences. SMS is the first of multiple new capabilities Sailthru is developing to further marketers’ cross-channel execution capabilities.

“Sailthru customers can now build, personalize, send, automate and report on cross-channel messaging — including email, web, in-app and SMS — within one platform. Sailthru marries customer data and best-in-class channel execution to create authentic, personal connections,” said Allison Stone, VP of Product at Sailthru. “We’re delivering SMS to make our marketers’ communication paths bigger and more impactful by adding more capabilities to personalize the cross-channel messages they send.”

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As marketers strive to deliver more personalized experiences for their customers and drive increased engagement and conversions, SMS has become an important channel to reach all generations and geographies, behind only email and voice calls as the preferred way to interact with brands and companies. However, brands often face challenges implementing a coordinated strategy across channels. Moving between different technologies and issues with syncing data can limit the ability to deliver a seamless, coordinated experience.

With Sailthru SMS, customers move beyond these challenges, with shared data, personalization algorithms, and machine learning models to power SMS, cultivating authentic, revenue-generating connections with their customers across channels. With Sailthru’s native and integrated SMS capabilities, marketers have a single place to view interactions with their customers in owned channels, which allows them to make informed decisions based on the complete customer-data picture.

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“Since integrating with Sailthru, email has become a vital portion of our day-to-day online marketing strategy, especially for capitalizing on direct-to-consumer demand. SMS is the logical next step to establishing an even deeper and more meaningful level of communication with both our brand loyalists and potential customers. Email and SMS will work hand-in-hand to bring value to our fast-growing audience across multiple high-impact touchpoints,” said Adam Davis, Media & Marketing Manager at Magnolia Bakery.

“SMS has significant market velocity and in this year’s Retail Personalization Index, we found that while 31% of the 500 organizations we evaluated were using SMS, more than 50% of the top 100 are advancing in this channel,” said Jason Grunberg, GM of Sailthru. “Consumers want a value exchange, not to be bombarded, which makes Sailthru’s ability to marry cross-channel capabilities with personalized, dynamic content into this emerging messaging channel a true market differentiator for our customers.