Marketo-Twilio integration. Zapier or other integration tools?

[ChienHuaWang]

We already established Marketo-SFDC integration for email campaigns and will be kicking off one-way SMS campaign using Marketo as well. Our SMS volume is relatively low <3000 SMS/ trigger/month. We just learned about that we need to find a 3rd party gateway for SMS campaign or using Marketo-Vibes. We decided not to use Marketo-Vibes for its limitation functionalities. 

We are considering Twilio however, Twilio is no longer a Marketo Launchpoint Partner so it adds difficulties for my team as none of us are tech/coding savy. I read that some people use Zapier to integrate Marketo-Twilio. I don't know if this fits to our use case when we already have Marketo-SFDC integrated. With our non-coder capacity, can we integration Twilio-Marketo without using Zapier? or are there other gateway tools you recommend that we can easily integrate ourselves without any technical capacity? 

We are open to purchase consulting hours from either party or any experienced individuals but not sure where to find one. 

Any advices are highly appreciated! Thank you.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

For a one-way campaign you certainly do not need any software beyond Marketo + Twilio.

Twilio’s simple API is stateless, making it directly webhook-compatible (as I explained in this post). So you only need to define the HTTP POST webhook in Marketo.

(Note that this is for truly one-way, that is one-way without any status callback.)

[ChienHuaWang]

Thank you Sanford. We will need to receive opt in/opt out responses from the receiviers. This will be the only reply we need to get. Does this consider One-way SMS? 

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

This is still considered one-way SMS. Twilio itself will handle opt-out (i.e. STOP keyword) and will never send to someone who opted out.

But if you need to know this information in Marketo for housekeeping purposes (updating an SMS Opt-Opt field), that’s when you would need an inbound service to receive callbacks from Twilio, which are then repackaged to update Marketo. It‘s possible to build this service using Twilio “Functions” I believe, but that’s a needlessly complex setup. I would sooner build it in an standalone AWS Lambda function where you have total control.