What is SMS Marketing?

As time passes, customers feel more at ease using their mobile devices to communicate with brands and businesses.

The era of single-channel marketing is over. Marketing professionals today have access to several contact points via various platforms. Customers want businesses to use all of their resources to provide them with the greatest possible experience.

You may need to invest much of your time and money in marketing your small business. Due to social media search engine algorithms and the incredible number of emails that most people receive daily, it will be challenging for independent retailers to see results in their marketing campaigns.

SMS marketing, also known as text message marketing, is a simple approach to reaching out to your clients while generating a much higher ROI. 70% of consumers think it’s a wonderful method for businesses to catch their attention. So, start your SMS marketing campaigns today for your business.

SMS stands for “Short Message Services,” and SMS marketing is the form of marketing, promoting, and advertising SMS of your business and services. SMS marketing is the practice of providing text message campaigns, promotions, news, updates, and other information to customers who have tuned up with you.

These messages’ main objective is to notify clients who have agreed to receive text messages from your business about offers, updates, and alerts which are only valid for a limited time. If this explanation of SMS marketing seems too complex, don’t worry. You will get a better understanding of how SMS marketing can improve your digital marketing campaign, its benefits, how to opt one, and many others by reading further in this article, which covers everything mentioned above.

SMS is used in various ways. We’ll go through some of the most frequent use scenarios that help you understand what SMS can do for your business and how it may improve your brand.

 

 

Retail and eCommerce business short-term promotion.

Promotional offers and discount coupons are great methods to attract more customers to your business or website. You certainly want as many people to know about a deal or campaign which is only available for a few hours or days.

SMS marketing campaigns are an excellent channel for advertising these offers, particularly if you want to let your consumers know while they are traveling. This is because SMS marketing campaigns allow you to interact with clients regardless of where they are. This way, you can be certain that they will not be left out because they did not get the notification in time.

 

Urgent information about events or customer orders.

Are you planning or carrying out an event? It gets harder to deliver the relevant information to everybody the more individuals there are at the event. SMS allows you to transmit any changes, cancellations, general information, or modifications in your events in real-time, which is superior to email and other methods.

 

Appointment reminders.

If your business relies on scheduled appointments, you are probably familiar with how annoying it can be when customers skip their appointments or come in late. Even more aggravating when customers won’t appear at all. This not only disrupts your routine but also wastes your time. This indicates that you might have dropped other appointments because the timeframe for the appointment was already booked.

Text message reminders are an excellent approach to ensure that individuals remember their meetings/appointments. Configure an automatic SMS to follow up on every appointment booking using marketing automation.

 

Internal alerts.

It might be challenging to deliver crucial messages—like office closures or emergency updates—to a big workforce at once. You can contact them, but there’s a chance they won’t read it (we know that most of us don’t often check our work email outside of work). If you want to be sure that everybody gets the message on time, then SMS is a good option.

Understanding the various methods will help you choose which will be most successful in achieving the objectives of your business, even if not every business will be required to adopt them all. There are three primary types of SMS marketing that you may employ in your mobile marketing efforts.

 

 

1. Promotional SMS Marketing

The purpose of promotional SMS marketing methods is to boost sales, develop awareness among audiences, and promote new products and services of your business.

Businesses can also utilize promotional SMS marketing to provide brand-related information, give special discounts or limited-time offers, notify audiences about future events, and even connect to blogs or videos that describe how to use commodities.

Audiences must frequently “opt-in” to receive promotional text messages through a welcome message after providing their phone number to the company via an online form to get promotional SMS marketing.

 

2. Transactional SMS Marketing

In this type of marketing, customers are provided with useful data, such as tracking numbers and delivery confirmations, for the products which they have ordered.

This helps clients stay connected with your business as they wait for their orders to arrive and ensures that they are kept up to date with important information.

In order to engage with your consumers directly, transactional SMS marketing can also contain information about account balances, impending payments, notifications of bill due dates, as well as other transactional information.

 

3. Customer Service SMS Marketing

This kind of SMS marketing is meant to assist customers who have a better overall experience with the business by giving them a direct route through which they can express problems, ask questions, or otherwise engage with the customer service side of your organization.

SMS marketing could also be used to send questionnaires to consumers after they engage with your business or to ask for reviews to determine if people are willing to favorably advertise your business on Google, Facebook, YouTube, or any other platforms.

If you have used SMS marketing previously, you are probably well aware of how efficient the service is for interacting with clients. However, you may need assistance influencing other employees and departments in your company to support your adoption of SMS messaging. The main things that made SMS marketing so successful are outlined below.

 

 

Pervasiveness of smartphones

Even though we have never met, but we share a trait. We each have a smartphone. Including a clickable link in SMS will also increase their interest in the company’s online offerings.

 

Completes the email marketing cycle

Although the execution of the strategies for email and SMS marketing are quite similar, they are most effective when used together. As was already stated, SMS could be used to provide immediate notifications, but email is better suited for longer-form information like a newsletter with helpful links.

 

High engagement rates

SMS engagement rates are tremendous compared to emails, with 90% of messages being read within 3 minutes of delivery. Because of this, SMS is particularly effective at transmitting important information or crucial details/modifications in the plan.

 

No one ignores Text.

Every day, consumers are bombarded with commercial messages from different businesses that we haven’t heard.

People’s attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter as they are constantly bombarded with social media posts and internet advertisements, making it harder than ever to get your point clear.

Therefore, SMS marketing is the solution. The New York Times describes it as “the closest marketing approach to a guaranteed readership in this information-overloaded digital marketing world.”

Need proof? Look at these statistics:

• There is typically a 45% return on investment (ROI) for SMS marketing campaigns.
• 98% of SMS are opened
• Approximately 19% of SMS promotions receive click-throughs.
• Because of this, almost 60% of company owners want to raise their expenditure for SMS marketing.

 

 

1: Create a subscriber list for SMS.

The essential component of the SMS marketing strategy is your subscriber list.

Start collecting contact details from those interested in receiving your promotional items if you haven’t already. You will want to be sure that what you are doing is legal, so the first step is to educate yourself on the legal requirements that apply in your nation.

Ensure that you are signing up for high-caliber SMS customers who are really interested in your business. If you want a large number of signups, you should try using gamified notifications and one-line effective content. Text to Join is another possible engagement option, particularly when combined with an exclusive promotion or voucher.

 

2: Install an SMS marketing application/software.

SMS marketing software helps to enhance your text marketing tactics. By keeping track of compliance data and TCPA regulations, there are many apps/software that make it possible to handle communications on a large scale. Additionally, you can automate your messaging to send numerous texts at once, giving you more time free in your day.

Additionally, most SMS marketing tools include a range of reporting data that gives you a greater understanding of your customers. When used in conjunction with native dashboards, businesses can simply change their text campaigns over time to get the best ROI.

 

3: Build your SMS marketing campaigns.

The most important stage now at hand is creating the actual message. It’s harder than it seems to do this. Since SMS messages may only be 160 characters long, there isn’t much space for rambling.

Here are some pointers for structuring your message:

Consider value. Before launching any SMS campaign for your business, ask yourself one simple question: How will this SMS bring value to my customer’s life?

Use proper terminology. Avoid using text vocabulary and acronyms because not everyone will understand them. Abbreviations, text speak, and incorrect capitalization gives your brand an unprofessional appearance.

Creating an SMS campaign from scratch may seem impossible at first, but like many other aspects of marketing, it all comes down to practice. So, try it.

 

4: Set the time and Automate as necessary.

Decide when (or how often) your clients/customers should get SMS notifications. When you reach out to people at the proper time, they will be more attentive to what you’ve to say and will be in a good mood to consider your offer.

Research reveals that if you choose times manually, you should deliver communications during busy periods (8 AM to 5 PM). Or you can automate your SMS marketing campaigns to a specific time and date with software.

Remember that SMS texts are much more rapid than emails and other marketing communications. To ensure that your consumers are always glad to hear from you and not always bored, save this text for just your most fascinating or engaging messages. One of our preferred best practices is integrating text messages into operations and automation tools.

 

 

1. Customers’ preferred mode of communication.

Your clients “WANT YOU TO SEND THEM TEXTS!” 75% of users are OK with companies sending them SMS messages.

Additionally, 89% of customers say they would rather communicate with companies through text messages than on the phone.

This is logical. Text messages don’t bother anybody. We can take a quick look at it now (or later), overlook it, delete it, reply to it, opt out of it, or return to it in the future. Therefore, it is the best approach for a company to interact with their clients.

 

2: Lightning-quick delivery.

Mobile marketing is quite quick. Your text message is sent instantly once it is delivered from the business campaigns.

This enables you to deliver time-sensitive communications like promotions for upcoming events and flash deals. For instance, to increase Christmas sales, you can send customers a message.

As a result, hundreds of individuals will immediately see your message as you push the “send” button. People also carry their phones around all the time, which increases the likelihood that your message will be read as soon as it is sent. In fact, within the first three minutes, 90% of SMS messages get read.

 

3. Much Higher Open Rates

When customers get a notification on their emails through email marketing, they must “check” their mailbox, which may take several hours or days to open and read. This involves being alerted, activating a smartphone app, and quickly perusing a list of messages in their inbox. With the constant flow of messages people receive via email and social media, individuals are more likely to block these alerts.

However, SMS marketing will immediately notify customers through text message whenever a new message is received. Considering that people are most likely to receive SMS from their loved ones and friends, it’s less likely that people would overlook the notifications.

Furthermore, most phones show a fragment of text messages immediately on the screen. Compared to other marketing channels, SMS marketing has a higher open rate because it is more personalized and stands out from other alerts.

What are the open rates for SMS?

In 2018, they reached as high as 98%. Can you imagine that it means for every 100 messages delivered, 98 messages are opened?

SMS marketing is superior to email marketing, which only has a 20% open rate.

Your SMS marketing campaign’s success depends on a high open rate. If customers aren’t even opening your emails, your time and marketing efforts are completely wasted.

 

4: It can work with and assist other channels.

When developing a marketing strategy, it’s crucial that all media, including SMS, balance each other. Although SMS is a great independent channel, it can also be used to improve and support other marketing channels like social media and email.

For instance, they can be used to remind clients to read an email that a company sent them hours or even days before. Thus, email open rates could be increased by 20% to 30% using a simple follow-up SMS that asks, “Have you seen our email?”

 

5: SMS Marketing is cheap.

Cloud messaging services greatly enhance SMS’s value by reducing its price, making it a viable alternative to more expensive methods of communication like email. Cloud telecommunication companies provide Bulk SMS alternatives through SMS API or their platform, allowing businesses to reach out to thousands of clients in a few simple clicks. SMS is more cost-effective compared to other marketing strategies like billboards, television, mobile, or magazine ads.

 

6. Response data allows you to monitor, track and improve

SMS can measure significant ROI, identify texting clients, and monitor delivery rates, breaking the myth that SMS is an untrackable medium and putting it on the level as email.

Businesses can develop more precisely targeted advertisements and gain a better knowledge of their smartphone database by using these insights. Not only does this imply that businesses save money and increase ROI, but SMS also enables a business to target those clients through email or another channel by analyzing and segregating out the contact details which are less likely to respond.

Sign up for phone contacts: Never send an SMS message to recipients without their permission. Use an SMS opt-in strategy instead because customers don’t expect to receive notifications from you; therefore, doing so will hurt your company more than benefit it.

Send out offers with a deadline: Include a sense of urgency with something special. Engaging clients with your offer has tremendous financial incentives.

Make personalization a goal: Make the SMS marketing experience more enjoyable for your target audience by adding a personal touch. Building trusting relationships with clients requires personalization.

Create a unique text: The SMS has 160 symbols in total. You must be adaptable to sell your products/services and entice customers. Try to keep your sentences brief and to the point.

Audience segmentation: By using segmentation, businesses can deliver slightly different messages to different groups of individuals depending on factors like gender, location, and other factors like where a sales funnel is located, etc.

Sending SMS at the user’s convenience: Find the optimum time to send an SMS campaign to reach a larger number of people. Never disturb someone who is most likely busy or sleeping.

Several companies are beginning to realize the significant benefits of SMS marketing in today’s world. Top-selling real estate agents, growing organizations, prosperous e-commerce businesses, and everyone else utilize it.

SMS is one of the most neglected marketing platforms despite its widespread usage. For businesses that are prepared to give it a go, there are significant benefits for their business. There has never been a better moment than now to begin.