Last updated - July 3, 2023
The days of single-channel marketing are over. Now, marketers can access a host of contact points across different channels. Customers also expect businesses to utilize all of them to deliver the best user experience. SMS marketing is the way to go for those looking for tools to complement their existing social marketing efforts.
SMS marketing lets you engage with your existing customers while expanding your connections to reach potential leads. You can do this on your cellular telephone in real time with effective and targeted messaging.
The essential question is: How can you leverage SMS marketing and include it in your current marketing strategies? Before we discuss this matter, it’s best to understand what SMS marketing is.
SMS Marketing: What is it?
This term refers to the strategy of sending marketing messages through text. It’s an opt-in marketing scheme that encourages contacts to subscribe to a specific product, service, promotion, or content.
Unlike social media marketing, SMS marketing doesn’t involve posting public content people can like or follow. Instead, it centers on the following activities:
- Surveys
- Remarketing
- Discounts or offers
- Personalized promotions
This marketing trend made consumers more comfortable interacting with brands through mobile devices. As such, they expect to reach these businesses by texting or messaging.
When the pandemic upended how businesses engage their customers, over 50 percent of US retailers decided to increase their investments in SMS marketing. In 2020, this number ballooned to 56 percent, easily outranking other potential investment areas.
Getting to Know SMS Customer Service
This process is how brands deliver services to their customers through SMS messages. Through this, businesses can talk to their target markets via text messaging. People can’t be online 24/7, but they could still be on their phones without connecting to the internet. It’s easier to contact them through SMS.
Statista revealed that global mobile business messaging started to show a sharp increase in usage in 2020. The year before that, there were only 2.56 billion users. However, by 2020, it had risen to 2.91 billion.
Since then, the number has kept growing, with 3.32 billion active users this year. Experts expect the trend to continue and project that it will reach 3.51 billion by 2025.
Retailers use messaging for the following activities:
- Delivery updates
- Tracking information
- Dispatch notifications
- Order confirmations
All these activities fall under the SMS customer service umbrella. According to Gartner, by 2025, around 80 percent of CS organizations will use messaging and SMS instead of native applications.
Customers see these SMS messages as the essential messages businesses send. Booking confirmations, delivery updates, and appointment reminders are all messages that rank higher than service or product discounts in the perceived value category.
This means that if you intend to incorporate text messaging into your marketing strategy, it’s best to integrate SMS customer service. Customers will readily subscribe to SMS marketing when they find your messages valuable.
Note, however, that SMS customer service is not limited to automated reminders or confirmations. This service also includes direct chats with customer service reps through one-on-one text messaging.
Benefits of an Established SMS Marketing Campaign
It’s common to hear business owners be skeptical about investing in SMS marketing. For some, it sounds like an outdated technique. Others think that it’s too intrusive. The truth paints a different story, though. SMS marketing is a highly effective, efficient, and powerful way of engaging with your customers. It’s time businesses looked into it.
If you still need to try this campaign, consider the following benefits.
High potential open rate
Almost 90 percent of text messages get opened and read. These messages are also opened and read within three seconds after receiving them. On the other hand, emails only get opened by 20 percent of recipients. If you compare both strategies, you know where to invest your resources.
When someone hears a ping or feels a vibration in their pocket, they most likely check it out. Text messages are lightning-fast forms of communication that are guaranteed to get seen.
Flexibility and speed
Businesses must adapt to the fluidity of the modern world. You must learn to adapt to these constants. With SMS marketing, you can communicate faster with zero lead time. You can create and deliver your messages to your target audience within minutes.
Low cost and high returns
Traditional forms of advertising, like TV commercials, newspaper ads, and outdoor advertising, are costly. If you’re a small or mid-sized business, the cost can be a stumbling block, stopping you from utilizing other channels.
A well-planned SMS marketing plan executed through a platform will only cost a fraction of traditional marketing schemes. The money you’ll spend will be worth it, considering the significant impact of communication.
Highly targeted communication
Traditional marketing methods are disadvantageous because you’re uncertain who gets to see them. However, with SMS marketing, you know the people you’re messaging care about your product.
Since this is a permission-based strategy, you have already established a relationship with your recipients. When you have plowed, prepared the fields, and seeded your target market, your returns will most likely be more significant. This scenario happens when you invest in SMS marketing.
Best Practices in SMS Marketing
If you intend to shift to SMS marketing or plan to incorporate it into your existing marketing strategies, go through these best practices. These are proven and tested techniques that turn businesses’ output around.
Send a message with an explicit opt-in
If you’ve been considering this tactic, you may have already collected enough customer phone numbers. However, this doesn’t mean you should already launch a text brigade. Like email marketing, you should also include an explicit opt-in for SMS marketing campaigns.
Ask your customers to opt-in via your website and other communication channels. Then send a text message expressing gratitude for choosing your brand and requesting that they confirm their subscription with a yes or no. Only message them again if they respond with a yes or you get a response.
You can offer discount coupons for every text message subscription. Add a clickable link in your message that redirects them to an automatic pop-up leading to a messaging app on their phone. This message should have a boilerplate statement in case they want to subscribe.
Add opt-out instructions
These instructions are often one of the legal requirements for marketing communications. However, it’s essential for more intrusive marketing methods like SMS marketing. If you continuously text people who wish to avoid hearing from you, you will likely lose them rather than close a deal.
This is why adding information on unsubscribing is crucial, even if it’s just for transactional messages such as appointment reminders and shipping dates. Note that some people are uncomfortable receiving these details by SMS.
Another essential factor to consider is SMS message open rates. These rates are higher than emails, so your unsubscribe rates will also be higher. Remain calm when you see a surge in unsubscribers after sending your messages.
Analyze how your unsubscribe rates are changing over time. After fully implementing your SMS marketing campaign, establish a baseline for your unsubscriptions. Go through all messages against your baseline and figure out outlying results. If you find your unsubscribes unusually low or high, check your messages and study what factors affected the results.
Incorporate your brand
Your target recipients must know who is messaging them. You can’t assume that they have your number on their contact list. Without branding, your messages will appear under a number your recipients might not recognize. With no identifying information, it would be challenging to get a positive response.
If your recipient wants to read your messages, you must identify yourself immediately. You can seamlessly do this by putting your brand name at the start of your SMS. Follow it with a colon and start your message.
No matter how valuable the message is, if your recipient can’t identify who it’s from, they’ll always doubt its legitimacy. You will get the needed engagement when you complete this simple step. Keep your audience from guessing and introduce yourself early on.
Choose the perfect time for sending the message
Timing is always crucial when it comes to marketing messages. It’s even more critical for SMS. The reason is people are likely to turn on their text alerts. If these people set their phones to focus or “do not disturb” mode, trust that they want you to leave them alone.
You don’t want to wake them up in the morning or the middle of the night for a marketing offer. They also wouldn’t want to be disturbed at breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Take note of the dos and don’ts so you don’t get on your customers’ wrong side.
Take advantage of area codes to help you identify your recipient’s time zone. Instead of sending out a blast message, pick an appropriate time according to their time zones. With this, you’re assured that you’re not disturbing or annoying anyone.
If you’re running an in-person store, you can send an SMS immediately after every customer appointment. You are on your customer’s minds right then, and you’re also aware of their concerns. Suppose you’re a dentist who just had a tooth extraction appointment. Soon after they leave, you can send a thank you message with a link to a review site.
Before sending messages at a given time, test to identify the times with the lowest unsubscribe rate and best responses.
Limit the message length
No one wants to read a lengthy sales message. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes to determine their feelings about your message.
As a general rule, keep your SMS to 160 characters. There are more than enough characters to introduce yourself and provide opt-in and opt-out options. Draft your message to maximize the word count. Be direct and precise. Only say what’s necessary and avoid being too pushy.
SMS Marketing Tools to Use
You don’t have to do all the heavy lifting when launching your SMS marketing campaign. You need more than just a cellphone app to do this. Some tools can make your life easier and your campaigns more effective. Here are a few of them.
Hootsuite’s Sparkcentral
This tool is for you if you want your apps, WhatsApp, social media, and SMS in one inbox. Your customers may get in touch with you across different platforms. Sparkscentral is the key to ensuring that your SMS customer service is part of a holistic customer care strategy.
This tool allows you to integrate chatbots into your system. Sparkscentral can handle and automate routine customer care requests. With the app already running this task, your team won’t be overwhelmed by the volume of other processes they’ll have to deal with.
When your agent steps in on a particular SMS, they can access CRM data and existing chat exchanges. By then, they’re already equipped to handle customers and delight them with helpful responses. On top of these, you can also link the software to CRM systems like Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zendesk.
EZ Texting
If you want to launch a broadcast text campaign to your organized opt-in customer list, EZ Texting is for you. You can include activities like promo codes, coupons, and contests in your planned SMS marketing campaigns.
Apart from that, you can also send transactional messages such as review links and appointment reminders. EZ Texting also has a built-in form to convert your website visitors and email subscribers into SMS subscribers.
Omnisend
Omnisend has pre-built SMS workflows and templates for birthday offers, cart abandonment, and shipping and order confirmations. This software also offers tools for SMS opt-ins like landing pages and pop-ups. Omnisend supports MMS, allowing you to send images and GIFs via SMS.
Invest in SMS Marketing and Broaden Your Reach and Engagement
To reach a more targeted audience and get a higher ROI, consider SMS marketing. You don’t have to do it all by yourself because there are tools that can simplify the process for you. Pick the right tools, learn their mechanisms, and apply them to your business.
If you’re diligent enough to follow through, you can quickly improve your brand’s reach and increase your ROI.
