Lehi — Podium, the leading customer messaging platform for local businesses, announced the addition of Podium Campaigns to its existing suite of interaction management tools, allowing local businesses to launch robust SMS text message marketing campaigns directly from the Podium platform.

With a 98 percent open rate, SMS text messaging is one of the most powerful tools for marketing campaign conversations, averaging upwards of 4.5 times the rate of email. Purpose-built for the needs of local businesses, Podium Campaigns enables easy creation, management and reporting of campaigns in-line with a business’ existing messaging strategy.

“As we have seen a dramatic shift in the way that society communicates, there has been a rift opened up in the way that local businesses were able to effectively connect with their customers using conventional methods,” says Eric Rea, co-founder and CEO at Podium. “Creating a tailor-made solution for local businesses to market to their customers via text has been one of the biggest requests we have had from our customers for years and was the next logical step in the expansion of Podium’s platform. We’re excited to roll out this feature to further enable local businesses to better serve their customers via channels they already use and trust.”

Podium Campaigns was built to help local businesses easily grow and engage an SMS opt-in customer base. It centralizes customer conversations and allows users to manage SMS opt-in from multiple points in the customer’s journey on a single platform, including from Podium’s other tools like Reviews, Webchat, and Payments. This creates an easy and convenient way to incorporate text-message-based marketing into current or planned workflows while also using those touchpoints to more effectively target campaigns. It also makes measurement and reporting of SMS campaigns simple with pre-built dashboards to provide digestible insights of unsubscribes, reply rates, and more.

To learn more about Podium Campaigns, please visit podium.com/campaigns.

About Podium
Podium is a customer messaging platform that enables companies with a local presence to conveniently connect with their customers at critical touchpoints to help them strengthen their business. By conveniently facilitating millions of customer interactions, such as driving customer-generated online reviews and providing improved customer messaging tools, Podium serves more than 90,000 local businesses in the United States, Canada and Australia. Headquartered in Lehi, Utah, and founded in 2014, Podium is currently backed by YC Continuity, Sapphire Ventures, Alkeon Capital, Recruit Co. Ltd., IVP, Accel, Summit Partners and GV. To learn more, visit www.podium.com or contact us at [email protected].