SMS Marketing, Its Benefits, Where to use it? How to use it?
SMS marketing has been a tried and tested method of communicating with customers. This communication might be one to one conversation between a staff member and customer, it could be an automated text that is triggered by a customer action, or it could even be part of a mass text sent to a group of customers who have opted in to receive texts from your business.
DOES SMS MARKETING WORK?
The benefits of SMS Marketing are listed as under:
Preferred method of communication
Your customers want you to text them. 75% of customers are ok with receiving SMS messages from brands. Additionally, 89% of consumers would prefer to interact with businesses via Text Messaging rather than a phone call. Because text messages are non-intrusive. Customers can glance at it now (or later), ignore it, delete it, respond to it, opt out of it, or refer to it later. It is the ideal way for a business to communicate with customers.
High read rate
SMS messages have a 98% read rate. If you hit “send” they are going to see it. This doesn’t mean you can send anything you want, whenever you want. As with any marketing communication method, too much messaging too often will turn off the customer and they will likely opt out of your SMS communication.
However, when done with texting etiquette, your customer will want to continue receiving your communication.
Cost-effective
You need to drive more sales. For many small businesses, this means dumping valuable marketing dollars into thousands of mailers that may or may not be seen by the recipients. However, it is seen that 99% of all text messages are opened and less than 20% of emails are opened. Text messaging has proven to cut through the noise and reach consumers instantly. You can use text messaging to boost in-store and online revenue, increase average order size, and grow loyalty to inspire repeat purchases. Bulk SMS marketing even makes it quite easy and affordable. Our company provides a quality service of Bulk SMS that includes Promotional SMS, Transactional SMS, OTP SMS services
Personalize Your Customer Journey
Text is how your customers build personal relationships, so should you. Activate your audience by creating automated personalized messages for offers, service, and loyalty based on customer behaviors, location, and attributes.
Ubiquity of Smartphones
With 79% of adults in the world owning a smartphone in 2019, SMS is an excellent way to reach customers directly. By including a link in this text, you can drive engagement with your business online.
Great for Emerging Markets
If your business is trying to operate in countries where data is expensive and wi-fi is less common, SMS is a much better channel to communicate information.
Closes the Email Marketing Loop
Although email and SMS marketing have many similarities in their strategy implementation, they work best in tandem. As mentioned earlier, you can use SMS to send instant notifications, while email contains more long-form content.
What is SMS marketing used for?
SMS can be used in several different ways. It can be used for:
Short-term promotions for retail or e-commerce businesses
Coupons and promotions are an excellent way to drive more people to your store or website. If you are conducting a limited-time sale or promotion, you want as many people to hear about it as possible.
SMS is a great channel to communicate these offers, especially if you want to let customers know while they are on the move. That way you can be sure that they don’t miss out because they didn’t get the message in time.
Urgent updates about events or customer orders
There are a lot of moving parts that go into planning and executing an event. The more people you have attending the event, the more challenging it becomes to communicate the necessary information to everyone.
With SMS, you can easily communicate any changes, cancellations, general information, or updates with better real-time engagement than email or other channels.
Appointment reminders
If your business runs on scheduled appointment times, then you know the frustration of having clients forget appointment times and show up late. Even more frustrating, is when clients fail to show up at all.
Not only does this throw off your schedule, but it also wastes your time. It means that you may have turned down other appointments because that appointment slot was taken. Sending reminder text messages is a fantastic way of making sure that people don’t forget their appointments and show up at the right time.
Internal alerts
If you have a large number of employees, it can be hard to communicate urgent messages (office closures, emergency updates, etc.) to everyone all at once. You can send them an email, but they may not see it. SMS is a great way to guarantee that everyone receives your message on time.
What are the rules and best practices for SMS marketing?
Make sure your contacts have opted in to SMS
Text messaging is a very effective and direct line of communication to the customer. But, there are many rules that you should consider when planning your SMS marketing strategy. The first, and most important of these are receiving permission from your contacts to send them SMS messages. SMS has an extremely high open rate, but this won’t help you if you’re sending messages to people who don’t want them.
Be mindful of the timing of your messages
Unlike email, which is only checked a few times daily (at most), people open text messages almost immediately. This is great for urgent messages, but you don’t want to abuse this power by disturbing contacts at odd hours in the day.
Include your company’s name in your messages
When sending bulk SMS messages, most providers send them through a shortcode, which means your contacts won’t know it is coming from you. That is why you have to let your contacts know who is sending the message in the first place.
You don’t want to send a promotional coupon to customers and not have them know where to go, right?
Use SMS to complement the rest of your digital marketing strategy
The beauty of digital marketing is that there are so many channels that you can use to interact with your customers. All of these channels tie together to create a marketing communication system that enables businesses to build relationships with customers and leads at a great scale.
SMS and email marketing are two very complementary channels. You can create campaigns through both channels, using email for including more detailed information and SMS to communicate more time-sensitive or urgent information.
Conclusion
SMS Marketing is effective, efficient, and performs better than most of the available marketing techniques, making it an unmatched channel your business should be using to reach customers.
