ClickSend the go-to SMS solution
Updated October 20, 2020

ClickSend the go-to SMS solution

Ramón Carmona Medina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with ClickSend

Bussi is a ride-hailing app in Mexico City with more than 60 routes, 32,000 active users a month, and more than 138,000 registered users. To communicate with our users, we use a variety of services including ClickSend. We believe nothing is more direct than SMS so if you have something important to communicate and is urgent SMS is your choice. We usually send 2 kinds of campaigns with ClickSend: general/promotion campaigns to different lists of segmented users (segmented per route, area, kind of engagement) or for sending automated SMS, for example, a welcome SMS or a discount. This kind of action lets us be closer to our users and it has shown to be effective as the retention increase and the churn decreases.

Pros

  • You can add list of users just by uploading numbers CSV or by uploading detailed CSV.
  • You can generate quick campaigns just like in email, save templates with URLs, send immediately, or schedule for a certain date and hour. They have analytics, shared, and private numbers. I like that it is super straightforward.
  • You can make automated campaings that will be sent every time a new user joins a list. This you can do with 3rd-party integrations such as your own app or Zapier since ClickSend already has this integration.
  • Super cheap and it's what I like most. You pay for SMS in bulk with really competitive prices. Most SMS companies want to charge by the number of users, and when you have 32,000 active users or +130,000 users it just becomes expensive so ClickSend is the SMS solution.
  • In general, using ClickSend is quick and the learning curve for new users is flat since it's almost the same as an email marketing tool just for SMS and compressed.

Cons

  • Definitely the UI--I mean you can do practically everything and so fast but still the general design feels a little bit old and they haven't renovated in the last 2-3 years that I have been using it.
  • Add Paypal. Currently, ClickSend uses only Stripe, and Stripe trend to block credit cards if you have a lot of transactions processed by Stripe (in different services). It may be a bank issue with Stripe in my country, but still, your users are affected and it's a pain not to be able to have more payment methods. Paypal is just fine and it usually doesn't have the kinds of problems that Stripe has.
  • In general, it has a positive impact when you use ID correctly for general announcements. Segmented offers work fine and you obtain expected results if you have a good marketing strategy.
  • For automated engagement, SMS is just great. Our campaigns using SMS have let us increase retention and decrease churn.
  • The only negative impact is that SMS can be expensive if you don't wisely manage it. As I said general tips are to always segment your list by kinds of users that you want to reach and make a particular strategy so you can be sure there is going to be ROI.
Twilio is pretty similar to ClickSend, in general. It is the same concept. The only thing is that it is a couple of years behind ClickSend, perhaps because they are still starting. A positive is that they have more payment methods and in general it feels super familiar. Negative things or features of Twilio are that yes you can upload your users through CSV but usually it takes between 2-12 hours to be reflected in the platform and it's the same for campaigns. You send a campaign now with Twilio and it will be sent sometime between 2-24 hours so for reliable schedule times I go with ClickSend.
In general, support is good. Actually they usually write to you about things like when you upload your first contacts, send your first campaign, or when you forget to put the opt-out option. Of course, they are automated emails but it happens that if you reply to one of them a real support agent will attend to your case. If you have any doubt you can write directly to support by email. I'm not sure if they are using Zendesk or any other kind of program but they usually answer in less than 2 hours. Still, the option of an actual real-time chat is missing.

Do you think ClickSend delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with ClickSend's feature set?

Yes

Did ClickSend live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of ClickSend go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy ClickSend again?

Yes

ClickSend is not for activation account SMS. For that, you can use services like TWILIO. Neither is it for having continuous communication with your users, like a kind of chat over SMS (becomes expensive). Better to try to route your users to a common customer communication tool like Facebook Messenger or something.

It is definitely suitable for outbound marketing campaigns to already registered users. Some exmples would be to send a communication annoucement, send a general offer to all your database of users, to send offers to a particular segment of users by filtering them, automated marketing campaigns based on users who join lists (users that just register and you send 1-5 welcome SMS with tips and tricks on how to better use your product, SMS to users who have an issue with payment method so they can check quickly with its bank, automated SMS with offers each time the user makes a trip, a buy, or gets more engaged with the product).

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