Cellular phone commercials have been around since their inception. In the modern era, you see ads promoting new flagship mobile devices year after year, with exciting features and designs. There has been a hidden gem in the marketing world whose potential has not yet been maximized, which involves these handy devices. Businesses have yet to experience the true power of SMS marketing.
When the world saw a dramatic surge in smartphone usage, SMS, or text messaging, has been utilized widely for traditional and online communication. Hence, with people using SMS almost daily, it's only practical and smart to do marketing through this medium. Getting your brand's name out there in today's mobile-focused industry could be done by SMS marketing. And this is only one of the many advantages you will get if you indulge in SMS marketing.
Are you interested to know more about what you can get from SMS marketing, how to start and get ahead of your competitors? This article provides a quick round-up on SMS marketing.
How to Get Started
If you are planning to employ SMS Marketing to increase conversion, here are three essential things you should know to get started:
- Ask for consent
No one wants to receive unsolicited text messages. Hence, it is crucial to collect the consent of the receivers of your text messages. Giving them a choice to opt-in or not is a great way to establish a good customer relationship based on trust. You can do this by collecting their phone numbers in an online pop-up form.
- Set up the type of messages you want to send
SMS marketing is not just for product and service promotions. They may also be automated messages tailored to each subscriber when they did a specific action, such as a pop-up message when they purchased or added to their respective carts.
- Content is everything
Even if your message set-up is perfect and all your messages are sent to your subscribers, all the effort would not mean anything if you don't get your desired action. You're considerably more limited in what you can include in an SMS message, so you'll need to think carefully about what type of content would best express the message you want to send across.
Benefits of SMS Marketing
Are you still rethinking employing SMS marketing to conduct the best business strategies? Here is a list of benefits to think about to help with your decision:
- High open rates
If you want to ensure that your message reaches your customers, SMS marketing leads the race when it comes to open rates. Of course, you would want the subscribers to receive the message and open and read the content.
With the massive usage of messaging platforms, texts are opened up to 98% of the time. As a result, SMS has a greater open rate than any other advertising medium like emails and phone calls.
Unlike text messages, emails, and physical leaflets as marketing are less efficient than text messages. Consumers may see emails as spam, and they may easily toss away your flier without reading their contents.
- Low-cost
You would not want to break your bank account just for marketing, especially if you are still starting a business with a non-flexible budget. So, if you are looking for a cost-effective yet efficient marketing strategy, then SMS marketing is the best plan for you.
It does not take a lot to send a message, even if you send a message to many people. You would be able to save more rather than paying a celebrity or social media influencer to advertise a product. Paying a space in social media platforms for your advertisements would cost you more.
- Greater audience reach
With the advent of technology, many individuals now own cell phones and other mobile devices. Hence, with this surge comes the benefits of SMS marketing.
Text messages would not require an internet connection to read. If the content has a link, recipients can choose to read it immediately or later when they get a connection. Hence, SMS marketing can broaden your client demography. SMS marketing can reach anyone and everyone instead of relying on a single marketing tactic that may only extend to a subset of your target audience. An increase in audience reach would lead to an increase in sales with more brand recognition.
Furthermore, frequent text messages would strengthen company-customer relationships. The firmer your customers' grip with them, the more likely they will purchase more of your products and services.
- Easy opt-in or opt-out feature
Customers would not want controlling and stubborn businesses. Text messages sent to uninterested customers would irritate them more, losing that customer altogether. They would appreciate the choice to subscribe or not.
Allow your consumers to choose whether or not to opt-in, and they will feel more at ease with your company as a whole. Moreover, since individuals have an escape path if they want to stop receiving communications, this feature promotes customer pleasure and establishes customer loyalty.
- Flexible and customizable
One of the most significant benefits of SMS marketing is flexibility and customization. You can add various things to your messages and mix and match marketing strategies through texts.
Businesses may utilize SMS services to advertise an ongoing promotion, provide discount coupons, offers, or alert customers about a nearby new store. You may also use SMS to send appointment reminders, the order and shipment status for online shoppers, and much more.
However, SMS provides a limited space to deliver your message. That’s why businesses must use the 160-character limit creatively to reach customers efficiently.
Wrapping It Up
From this article, you can see how SMS marketing can help market your business beyond email, online ads, and traditional marketing methods. With its easy start-up and list of benefits, texting as a marketing strategy can be beneficial to boost your business up the market ranks.
SMS marketing may be a hidden gem, as not many businesses are utilizing this powerful channel. Once you figure out what type of marketing campaigns are best delivered through SMS and how to maximize SMS marketing, you are in for its rewarding results.
