3 Reasons Why SMS Can Help Your Marketing Campaigns Perform Better

With email becoming more cluttered and the performance of email marketing flattening out, SMS marketing is making a comeback. Digishop Girl’s CEO told in an interview that 70% of her clients are already using SMS to reach customers. There is just too much noise in email and a low level of engagement. SMS as a marketing channel isn’t too busy and direct-to-consumer brands can leverage SMS marketing to deliver their messages without getting lost in the clutter. 

In this blog post, you will learn why and how to use SMS marketing to make your marketing campaigns perform better than usual.

Changing online shopping experience

The pandemic has also played its role in the online shopping experience. According to a report made by Forbes, 49% of consumers shop online more often than they did before the  Covid-19 crisis. From retail to healthcare companies, SMS marketing is growing steadily. SMS marketing and email marketing are two important marketing channels that keep on bringing quality leads for businesses across the world.

On the flip side, marketers could easily get lost and confused when it comes to choosing between so many different marketing platforms. SMS marketing has made its way more like a wild-card entry and direct-to-consumer marketers are prioritizing grabbing customers’ phone numbers to send out marketing messages.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty, let’s refresh some of the related facts and figures of SMS marketing and email marketing.

3 reasons to use SMS in your marketing campaigns

In the presence of so many marketing channels along with email and SMS, it could get quite overwhelming when marketers have to choose without knowing which one will perform best. If you’re one of them, your brain is probably continuously bombarded with questions like:

“which channel is appropriate for my marketing campaign?”

Or

“what would bring me better results?”

However, after going through the following 3 reasons, you will get an idea of what matters for your marketing campaigns to perform better. These 3 reasons are reachability, urgency, and personalization. Before we deep dive into each one of those to have a better understanding of what it means, consider the following figure to get an overview of how they are related to each other.

Reachability

SMS enjoys a whopping 98% open rate which makes email’s open rate of 20% look inferior. The high open rate of SMS automatically entails the high reachability of your marketing campaign in a given volume, which means that businesses can leverage SMS for delivering their marketing messages.

With over 306 billion emails sent each day, more than 50% of those end up in the spam folder. This is problematic for any type of business since it is critical for companies to communicate with their customers without much noise. Moreover, according to Statista, there are currently 4.78 billion people using mobile phones. This makes SMS marketing distinct by making it possible to reach such a large audience.

The key point here is to emphasize that if there is too much noise between your company and your customers, they can easily start ignoring you.

Urgency

Marketers are always on the lookout to create a sense of urgency in their marketing campaigns because urgency sells products. We all know that SMS triggers some kind of urgency in our mind which is well supported by data.

In contrast to email response time which is 90 minutes, it takes an average person only 90 seconds to respond to a text message. This is mind-blowing because it triggers the bias of fear of missing out (FOMO) which can get you more traffic and hence more sales on short notice.

This sense of urgency can also trigger the bias of loss aversion. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that is associated with prospect theory. First identified by Daniel Kahneman in 1979, it is thought that the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. People are ready to take risks to avoid a loss than to make a gain.

Urgency plays a crucial role in triggering loss aversion because it sets the time frame for customers’ actions. Customers will lose the benefits of an offer by the end of the time frame. Hence, they are more likely to buy if you can frame your offers in a way to capitalize on the sense of urgency created by SMS marketing. So to make it easier to understand, consider the following figure.

The whole point of discussing these biases is to show how SMS marketing can bring better results if used the right way. Moreover, this urgency is not only limited to driving more traffic and sales but also for spreading quick information. Many health care companies use automated SMS message services for keeping their customers informed about general health-related issues.

Personalization

We all know how important personalization is regardless of which marketing channel is used. Now consider the previous points of reachability and urgency, if your marketing campaign is reachable to a large audience and has that element of urgency; then personalizing the campaign is like icing on the cake.

By personalizing your marketing campaign, you’re trying to connect with your customer a bit more closely that could help to increase brand loyalty and trust. Moreover, you would want to personalize your marketing campaign due to the following statistics by Instapage:

• 75% of customers are more likely to buy if a retailer recognizes them by name or by their past purchases.
• 41% of people say that it's acceptable if a business delivers them a personalized offer through mobile if it is related to their past purchases.

We use text messages every day to stay in contact with family and friends, and this automatically adds an element of intimacy.

Why personalizing your marketing campaigns is specific to SMS marketing?

This is because you want the best results from your SMS marketing campaigns and there’s no reason not to use personalization in your SMS marketing. First, when people receive personalized text messages, it gives a feeling of human-like conversation. This is a good foundation to build brand loyalty and trust.

Secondly, since text messages are character bounded, people get short, relevant information with an appropriate call to action. Relevance is very important for the success of any marketing campaign.

How to use reachability, urgency, and personalization in your campaigns

Before you could start articulating your SMS marketing campaigns, there is some work that needs to be done. It is indispensable to consider different SMS marketing tools when you’re getting started with SMS marketing.

A well thought out plan and an SMS marketing app are of paramount importance for the best results. There are countless advantages when it comes to using an SMS marketing app such as;

• SMS automation
• Ease of opt-in and opt-out
• Personalization options for campaigns

While these benefits could drive more engagement and better ROI, a well thought out plan is as important as using an SMS marketing app. A plan typically includes what you want from your SMS campaigns (goals), how you’re going to achieve it, and what you can offer to your customers.

The figure below is just one example of how reachability, urgency, and personalization could be used in an SMS marketing campaign.

Conclusion

While companies such as Microsoft and Apple are trying to solve spamming issues of email, SMS marketing is a great way to reach your customers without losing brand loyalty and trust.

Whether you’re a small online retailer or a large company, you need to find the right balance between different marketing channels. The key takeaway is, you must make the most out of whatever opportunity is available. What is more important is your customers’ convenience and what they value.