I've been trying to optimize our messaging stack and ran into something weird with SMS

Curious if anyone else has run into this.

Over the last few months I've been doing a pretty heavy “optimization” push across my marketing stack; cleaning up automations, consolidating tools, trying to remove stuff that technically works but isn’t actually performing.

One thing that stood out to me was SMS.

I've typically thought of text marketing like just an automation channel:
trigger → send message → track CTR → move on.

But when looking closer, the engagement plateaued really quickly. Open rates were obviously high (because it’s SMS), but the actual interaction with messages was kind of shallow. People would click once in a while, but it still felt like we were just blasting another notification channel.

The bigger issue was everything felt transactional, not conversational.

Example:
Someone replies to a campaign text and it just goes into a support inbox or sits in a dashboard no one checks regularly. Which kind of defeats the point of texting in the first place.

So I started looking into platforms that treat SMS more like ongoing conversation threads with an audience, not just automation triggers.

I finally landed on Community. It was interesting because it basically turns text into a managed messaging community for campaigns and then you can keep the conversation going from there; it's not just another channel. Replies actually matter, you can see audience sentiment in real time, and campaigns end up feeling more like back-and-forth engagement instead of one-way sends.

What surprised me most was that once replies actually became part of the workflow, the optimization strategy changed completely. Instead of optimizing for click-through, we started optimizing for responses and conversation volume, which weirdly ended up driving more downstream actions anyway.

Still early for us, but it made me realize that a lot of SMS “optimization” advice is basically just email marketing logic applied to a different channel. Community changed that.

How other teams are approaching this? Are you treating SMS as just another automation channel, or actually trying to build conversation around it?