Almost every single American (95% to be exact) has a cellphone.
It’s rare to see an adult or child in public without a cellphone in their hands. However, it’s more surprising that business owners often overlook the most effective and inexpensive marketing strategy: text messaging or SMS marketing.
SMS marketing is an effective way to communicate with your community. Text messaging is necessary to promote customer loyalty, increase sales, and outpace your competition.
What is SMS Marketing?
SMS (short message service) messaging is a marketing method that needs a business ‘ approval to connect with a customer by text message in order to promote, sell, change or validate such messages. The system allows the user to opt-in, much like a subscription to email newsletters, so that businesses and companies can send alerts, promotions, and announcements directly to their customers’ cell phones.
When properly implemented, SMS messaging attracts the interest of people unlike other methods such as emails and PPC. SMS open rates are as high as 98% and a response rate of 46% compared to emails with a 20% open rate and a 6% response rate. In fact, 75% of users prefer to receive incentives via text message according to Digital Marketing Magazine. The GSM Association’s data shows that users respond to text messages in 90 seconds on average.
You can assess your SMS campaigns ‘ success and boost your results with the right messaging platform. Many SMS marketing tools provide analytics to track open rates, response rates, and offer redemption.
Text Messaging: The Next Evolution of Marketing
Text messaging has already gained a lot of traction and businesses have noticed its power. Data from the 2018 Salesforce Marketing State Report shows that 53% already use text messaging to clients or prospects Sellers would likely use more (including text) cell messaging. And while this serves to affirm the importance of SMS marketing, more companies are going to be using it, increasing competition.
How to Use Text Messaging for Your Business
Offer Value
Many people just chat with close family and friends, so you must make your offer useful to be part of that inner circle. Segment the audience to send only the most important messages so that when your clients see the text come in, they are happy to open it.
Make your offers, coupons, product launches, alerts, and announcements only via SMS. If your blog, online ads, or websites can get your clients the same offers, text messaging will lose its appeal. Make sure all your customers benefit from opting in and you provide a worthwhile experience for them. Are there customers who have not visited your store or website in a while? To get back onto their radar, send them a quick text. In doing so, your customers trust your brand more and continue to open and read your texts.
Ask for Feedback
As it is the same to offer your products and services to customers, SMS is a valuable tool for getting feedback from customers. Because people are more responsive to text messages, there is a greater chance of collecting responses. SMS also lets brands and companies boost customer satisfaction by receiving adequate feedback about a customer’s experience in store or on a website. When businesses engage actively with their customers, 74% of users reported an improved overall customer experience.
Time your messages
Figure out the best time for you to send and receive text messages from your customers. This could be until 9:00 p.m. or 9:00 a.m., particularly when your business is not even open. If your company is closed on weekends, the same will apply on Saturdays and Sundays. Watch the times on your mobile site when users are most involved to find the ideal times to send promotions and other news. Put down holidays and send out SMS messaging campaigns on those dates. Make sure that your system is ready to submit an instant confirmation when the users opt into your text messaging service. If your customer opts in for weeks or months, and does not hear from you, they might lose interest.
Monitor Results and Act Accordingly
When you want to have any impact on your SMS mobile marketing plan, you need to keep track of its efficiency. Look at the number of opt-outs you get from each message and then use that data to decide the kind of content that receives the highest response rates.
Should SMS Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy?
SMS offers another way to increase engagement to drive sales, gather reviews, deliver services and connect with your audience.
The promise of this method is to outperform traditional channels in open, click-through and reaction speeds. See how SMS might fit into your strategy for customer engagement and start looking for the right messaging platform.
Use those observations to get to know your audience better, and then optimize your marketing efforts, once you have gathered enough data.
