Avochato Review, Pricing & Features

What is Avochato?

Avochato is a SMS marketing platform that helps over 1,000 businesses execute successful SMS marketing campaigns. Avochato is ideal for small businesses looking for an affordable tool for customer list building and two-way text messaging. The platform’s SMS campaign and segmentation tools are basic, and therefore not recommended for advanced marketers.

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Table of Contents

• What is Avochato?
• Avochato Review Summary
• Avochato Pricing & Cost
• Avochato Features
  • Subscriber List Building
  • Segmentation
  • Message Creation
  • Campaign Building
  • Two-Way Conversations
  • Automations
  • Analytics
• Avochato Integrations
• Avochato Customer Service
• Avochato Alternatives & Competitors
• Is Avochato Right For You?

Avochato Review Summary

Avochato was founded by Alex De Simone and Christopher Neale in 2017. Today, the company serves over 1,000 businesses from its headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Avochato’s features are similar to most SMS marketing tools. Standout features include its subscriber list builders and two-way messaging. Campaign creation and segmentation, however, are limited in comparison to alternatives.

Avochato’s pricing starts at $92 per month and $0.03 per message sent. Each plan comes with 2,000 messages per month.

Overall, Avochato is an affordable SMS marketing tool ideal for businesses looking to leverage text marketing for subscriber growth and one-on-one messaging with customers.

Avochato Pricing & Cost

Avochato pricing starts at $92 per month and $0.03 per message. Each plan comes with 2,000 messages per month.

Here are some prices you might spend based on messages sent per month:

Avochato Features

Let’s discuss the major features that Avochato offers and how they can help your SMS marketing and business goals. Product screenshots are included to add context and demonstrate the user interface.

Subscriber List Building

Avochato offers multiple effective options for building your subscriber list. Manual imports, keywords, text surveys, and website widgets are the primary ways to build your list using Avochato. Text surveys and website widgets are the standout features due to their customer engagement and data collection capabilities. Your business can leverage these later for highly personalized messages.

Manual Imports

Subscribers can be manually imported through .csv files only. Avochato offers users a sample .csv file as a template. You also have access to your entire upload history to see past imports.

Keywords

Keywords are phrases that customers text to become subscribers. They are one of the primary ways to build your SMS contact list. Avochato’s keyword creation is easy to set up, but rather simple when compared to alternative tools. This biggest limitation is that your keyword autoresponders cannot contain attachments for MMS messages.

As you can see above, Avochato’s keyword editor is simple. You can, however, create unlimited keywords.

Additionally, you can schedule your keyword autoresponder to send out during your office hours. You can also attach “tags” to contacts who opt-in. Tags are essentially an additional label you apply to subscribers to later segment them for targeted marketing. We will see how tags work in context later in the Segmentation section.

Text Surveys

Text Surveys are an excellent way to build your list in Avochato. This is due to the fact that they simultaneously build your subscriber list and collect subscriber information. This enables you to build detailed segments and create highly targeted messages.

Surveys in Avochato can have an unlimited number of questions. Each question can be linked to a custom field either you’ve created yourself or provided by Avochato. Unfortunately, there are no question types to choose from. All questions have open, text-based answers. This makes setting up multiple choice or numerical scale questions far more difficult.

Similar to keywords, you can apply a unique tag to anyone who begins the survey for further segmentation opportunities later on.

Website Widgets

Website widgets in Avochato are forms you can embed on your website to engage two-way conversations with subscribers and simultaneously add them to your list. This means your business has an additional line of communication with subscribers to answer any questions and opt them in for future campaigns.

Form design options include custom icons, icon scale, and colors. This means your website widget can be customized to align with your branding and style guide. You can also set auto responses for customers based on what time of the day they fill the form out.

Segmentation

Segmentation in Avochato is not as robust as alternatives. This is primarily because segments cannot be stored in Avochato’s system, and must be exported as .csv files instead. Although tags are helpful for segmenting customers, segmentation will ultimately feel limiting for advanced marketers.

There is no dedicated interface to segment users. Instead, you must sort through your contact list with either the search bar or the select categories on top. You can, however, leverage tags that you’ve attributed to your contacts to target your list. Ultimately, this does not compensate for the lack of segment conditions.

Once you’ve selected your segments, you have several options. You can either send a text blast to the selected subscribers, export them as a .csv file, apply a new tag to them, or remove them from your list.

Message Creation

Avochato does not have a universal message interface. Totally different features are available depending on whether you’re building campaigns, automations, keyword responders, or two-way messages. This means you cannot use MMS messages in personalized campaigns or automations.

Seen above is message creation for two-way messaging. You have the following options:

Avochato does not come with prebuilt templates. Additionally, you cannot shorten URLs for further analytics.

Campaign Building

Campaign building is decent in Avochato. You can create drip campaigns and broadcasts. Custom campaigns are similar to traditional drip campaigns. Broadcasts are specifically designed for text blasts. This means your business has multiple options to engage with subscribers. Note, however, that MMS messages are not available for custom campaigns.

International Coverage

Avochato supports international messaging in over 150+ countries. Messages are sent via textable virtual numbers or text-enabled landlines.

Drip Campaigns

Building drip campaigns in Avochato is similar to other SMS marketing tools.

You can use custom fields that you’ve created or any that are provided by Avochato in your custom campaigns. Unfortunately, there are no opportunities to send MMS messages.

You can set up an unlimited number of messages. Each message is sent after a specific amount of time has passed since the moment your campaign launched. You have three main conditions that you can edit for your drip messages to be sent out.

Broadcasts

Broadcasts in Avochato are built specifically for sending text blasts. They are easy to set up and function similarly to text blasts in other SMS marketing tools.

Building your broadcast is very simple. You can use custom fields and attach any files for MMS messaging capabilities. Scheduling options are also simple. Additionally, you can send a complimentary test message to your own number to preview each message.

Two-Way Conversations

Avochato’s inbox for two-way conversations is robust and user-friendly. Relevant customer data is available such as opt-in source and tags. This enables your business to easily facilitate one-on-one engagement with customers.

The inbox allows you to see your entire chat history with any given subscriber. This offers your company additional context for further personalized messages. You can also directly call users with your digital number which broadens your customer service capabilities. Finally, you can assign individual conversations to different team members.

Team Members

Avochato allows you to add team members to your account and delegate specific inboxes to them.

Team members can have manager privileges that come with extra administrative options. You can also auto assign various chats to team members to ease your workflow.

Automations

Automations are actions triggered by specific events that streamline your SMS marketing workflow. The most common use cases of automations in SMS marketing include automated messages, customers being categorized into different lists, and more. In Avochato, automations are primarily found in keyword autoresponders.

Keyword Autoresponders

Keyword autoresponders in Avochato are messages sent to customers immediately after they opt-in through a keyword. Editing keyword autoresponders in Avochato is very limited.

This is primarily because there are no additional messaging options available, such as URL shorteners or MMS messages. Avochato can, however, send a double opt-in confirmation message if a subscriber who has already subscribed texts your keyword again.

Analytics

Analytics in Avochato are rather simple. This is because drill down opportunities are limited and statistics about individual campaigns are not available. This means you can’t measure the ROI of specific campaigns.

Dashboard

The analytics dashboard is simple. You have access to three different reports, each of which come with respective metrics.

Note that you can export your reports as .csv files.

Avochato Integrations

A majority of Avochato’s integrations are handled through Zapier. There are, however, a number of native integrations available:

Avochato Customer Service

Avochato’s customer support team is excellent. Their support team is helpful and response times are quick. They are reachable through live chat, email, and text. Hours are Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm PST.

Avochato’s secondary material mainly consists of guides geared towards SMS best practices and blog posts. Their blog primarily features case studies, industry news, and sms best practices..

Avochato Alternatives & Competitors

Avochato competes with a number of SMS marketing tools that either support all businesses or specialize in specific industries like ecommerce. It competes most directly with ZipWhip and EZ Texting.

Is Avochato Right For You?

Avochato is an affordable SMS marketing solution currently used by over 1,000 businesses. Avochato offers common SMS marketing software features such as customer list building, segmentation, and campaigns.

Avochato provides strong value at its price point. It’s best suited for businesses looking for an affordable solution that has diverse subscriber list building options and above-average two-way messaging capabilities. Its segmentation and campaigns, however, are limiting for marketers looking to target their subscriber base to its full potential.

Learn more about how Avochato stacks up against its top individual competitors:

If you're interested, you can try Avochato today.