What is SMS marketing?
SMS (short message service) marketing is one of the practices in text messaging marketing that involves the opting-in of subscribers to receive messaging marketing from your brand. This marketing tool is one of the proven tools that are efficient in delivering your marketing content with having 98% of open rates in 3 minutes upon receiving (MobileSquared).
Examples of several SMS marketing types include:
Personalised promotions
Surveys
Appointment reminders
Remarketing
Promotional deals and discounts.
SMS coupons.
Text-to-win competitions.
Flash sales.
Loyalty programs.
Alerts & notifications
How does it beneficial
High open rates
SMS marketing is a great way to increase brand awareness, generate leads and engage existing customers. SMS marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach your customers on the go. SMS marketing gives you the ability to send personalised messages to your audience on their mobile phones, which are more likely to be opened and read on a mobile phone than any other channel. Emails are also used to send out promotions and notifications have a high rate of being dumped inside a spam/ promotion folder. These folders are rarely opened and easily ignored by the customers. So, if you are thinking of connecting with customers more effectively, do consider using SMS marketing tools.
Text is personal
SMS marketing is one of the most direct and cost-effective ways to communicate with your customers. Send targeted messages directly to your potential customers' mobile phones. Using short codes allow your customer to be familiar with your brand and make them more likely to respond to the message. Just include a keyword in your message and it will trigger a response to the call-to-action.
Learn about your customer
SMS will also help you to learn your customer’s preferences and thoughts through responsive messaging. You can send surveys and which will help you to collect data easily. Net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) can be done to evaluate customer loyalty and happiness. With NPS, you can get to know how likely your customer would be to recommend your brand to friends and family while CSAT will help you determine your business’s customer service performance.
Costly affordable and cheap
Who does not like a cheap yet effective marketing activity? Opting to connect with your customer via SMS will not put pressure on your budget as compared to social media advertising. The cost could be as low as RM0.10 per message and usually, it could be lower when buying in bulk.
Tips to do SMS marketing
To excel in running SMS marketing, here are some tips that we found useful in getting more customer engagement and better brand values.
Define your SMS marketing goals
For each marketing channel, you should have a specific primary goal that can be achieved with that particular channel. Whatever you intend to achieve with texting—lead list development, improved customer service, loyalty integration or anything else, being crystal clear about your objectives can help guide your whole strategy. SMS marketing is very flexible and not specific to a marketing goal as long as you understand your brand position and relationship with your contact list.
Building subscribers list
In doing SMS marketing, always do an opt-in process to gain permission to send out SMS to your contact list. In doing so, your contact list will be expecting to receive promotions/ information from you and will not abandon your message or report you to spam. You can consider these 2 ways in building your SMS subscribers list:
Offer sign-up form
If you already have a subscriber list from the current marketing channel, you can try to notify them of your new marketing channel that they can opt into that might be convenient to them. In this way, you are offering options to your contact list and letting them choose their preferred channel. Educate your subscriber on the importance of this SMS marketing platform to make them feel the need to be your SMS subscriber. One key feature, SMS is fast and the notification is hard to ignore. Subscribers will not miss the message and are always in the loop, even when they have no Internet connection.
However, if you didn’t have a subscriber list you can start collecting one easily. One of the ways is to announce freely on your social media platform or your website and you can try using the traditional ways in doing so such as giving away a gift or promo code when they subscribe. This will spark some interest to give their phone number to you and get the gift/ voucher through SMS. Then start building a relationship with them and offer a great value in your service to make them stay.
In life, when there is a way to go in, there should always be a way to go out. The same goes for the SMS subscriber list. If a person does not want to receive your message after opting in, they can always opt-out by replying for example - STOP to any of your messages. Give the freedom to your subscriber and let them choose their preferred notification method. To know other methods that might be helpful to you, read this article. Although the article is written on an email subscriber list, the method is still the same. Instead of collecting their emails, you should collect their phone numbers or make it better, maybe both! Now you can combine your marketing effort and boooom! establish a better customer relationship.
Credit to: MobileSquared, Entrepreneur, Business News Daily