SMS Marketing is the process of sending promotional text campaigns through SMS to prospective customers. Nowadays, the subscribers have the option to opt in or out for marketing messages from certain providers, so the primary goal for any business is to get a maximum number of their loyal customers opt-in for their SMS campaigns. Through SMS marketing campaigns, you can share the seasonal offers, business updates, promotion, and alert to your premium customers for better responses.
When it comes to preparing SMS marketing campaigns, it is not an easy task as developing a successful relationship with customers requires proper planning and execution. If the goal is to reach to more prospective customers in this highly competitive market, you cannot expect them to reach to your, but the marketers should be proactive and intelligent to reach to where the prospects are.
As people are more attached to their mobile phones, text messaging is a very straight-forward line of communication. It is also an effective mode of communicating with customers if done correctly. Further, we will discuss some SMS marketing best practices.
Ensure that all your contacts are opted in
As discussed above, SMS marketing is effective as it is a direct line of communication with the prospective customers. However, there are many basic rules you should stick to while planning for a successful strategy. At the first point, most importantly, it is receiving the permission of your prospective customers to receive your SMS marketing messages.
SMS messages come with a high open rate, but it will not let you send messages to anyone you like. Opt-in is a mandatory need in many countries for the telecom users to receive promotional SMS from their desired brands and business. So, marketers need to ensure the availability of this opt-in before pitching in with an SMS marketing text to someone.
Be careful about the timings
Unlike mail or social media feeds, which the users tend to open only a few times a day, text messages are opened almost immediately when the users get an alert tone. This makes the text an ideal option to share urgent messages, but it is not advisable to make use of this advantage to send messages at any odd hours.
Do you think someone will be interested in your coupon code at 2 a.m. on a working day night? Not obviously. There are specific laws also at some countries as to when marketing text messages can be sent to users. For example, the telecom regulations of France doesn’t allow the marketing SMS on holidays, Sundays, and after 10 PM. Based on the offer you have to give, it is important to choose the best time of the day to hit the target group. Say for example, if you have a one-day offer for a discounting on dining out, the best time to hit the prospects with the offer is afternoon or evening when someone gets out of work.
Include the company/brand name in the SMS
While sending SMS messages to the prospective customers, Simpletexting.com points out a mistake many tend to make as sending shortcode, with which the recipients will not know where it comes from. This is the reason why you have to let them know who is sending this message in the first place. There is no point in sending a blank coupon code to the customers who don’t know where to go to redeem it right?
So, craft the message informatively as to from where it is, what is offered to the consumers, and what the next action expected from the users. Messages with easy to infer information are found to reap more results in SMS marketing.
Complement other digital marketing campaigns with SMS
Digital marketing offers various channels to interact with prospective customers. All these channels are mutually satisfying and also mutually contributing to achieving the business objectives. All digital marketing channels go hand in hand to make the marketing communication most effective and let the businesses to set up effectively relationships with loyal customers and earn leads at a large scale.
Considering all these avenues, we can find that SMS marketing and email marketing go hand in hand as highly mutually satisfying channels. You can create identical campaigns for both of these channels. Say for example, and SMS can be sent to grab the customer attention to a particular topic of their interest and then link it to the e-mail through which you can share more information or brochures, etc. In this combination, SMS allows time-sensitive communication whereas e-mail allows comprehensive communication.
Why do marketers find SMS marketing highly effective?
The major reasons pointed out by the marketing experts for the popularity and effectiveness of SMS marketing include, but not limited to:
- Increasing smartphone use: With about three-quarter population of US using smartphones now, SMS is an apt way to reach to the users directly. SMS covers both the smartphone and basic phone users alike.
- Go along well within the marketing loop: As we have seen above, email marketing and SMS marketing have many things in common in terms of strategy and implementation so that they can work well in tandem.
- Better engagement rates: The engagement rates of SMS are huge when compared to mail marketing and other modes of digital marketing. Majority of the users tend to read their SMS within 3 minutes itself.
- Ideal for emerging markets: If a business is focusing on the target audience in the emerging markets, where internet connectivity is costlier or less common, still SMS reaches to everyone. So, irrespective of the users owning a smartphone or not or have access to the net, SMS acts as an instant channel for quick communication.
In fact, if you are new to SMS marketing, then many service providers in this sector are offering cost-effective and return-oriented SMS marketing services to all sort of clients. SMS marketing is not only ideal for business houses and leading brands but from a non-profit organization to government services everyone now makes use of SMS marketing as one of the quickest and effective modes of communication with the prospects.
