10 Reasons Brands Should Use Text Message Marketing
Why should businesses use text message marketing?
Text messaging has become one of the best ways for businesses to communicate with customers. If you are on the fence about implementing SMS marketing into your digital marketing strategy, here are 10 ways it can benefit you.
1. Direct and immediate message delivery
SMS is the most immediate marketing channel available. SMS Comparison found that 98% of text messages are opened and read, and that most are read within three minutes of delivery. Direct communication with consumers can prompt an immediate purchase. This direct communication can also cultivate lasting relationships between your brand and your customers.
2. Instant deliverability
Another great thing about SMS marketing is that even people who don’t own a smartphone can send and receive text messages. This makes SMS marketing one of the most accessible and effective tools for instantly delivering promotional messages to consumers.
Additionally, text messages usually deliver within seconds. The average SMS delivery time for most mobile carriers is less than 10 seconds. Brands can deliver time-sensitive messages instantly. With brands struggling to increase email deliverability, the high level of SMS deliverability makes SMS marketing a worthwhile investment.
3. High open rate
A higher open rate makes a marketing campaign more effective. At 98%, the average SMS open rate is more than five times that of the average email open rate (17%). Brands don’t have to worry about crafting a great subject line that will encourage recipients to open and read a text message. The buzz going off in a mobile user’s pocket is all the motivation they need to open a text message.
4. High conversion rate
SMS has a very high conversion rate. Mobile users respond to calls to action in text messages more than any other marketing channel. SMS messages have an average response rate of 45%, compared with an average email response rate of just 8%. The reason conversion rates are higher with SMS is the simplicity of the marketing message. Text messages are short, they don’t include a lot of links and they are not bogged down with a lot of images. The call to action is clear and concise.
5. Personalization and customization
Text messages are more personal than other forms of communication. Since your marketing messages are being delivered directly to your consumers’ personal messaging inboxes, you can use casual, friendly language. Instead of traditional marketing and sales language, approach this form of communication as though you are talking with a friend. This allows you to build a personal relationship with the consumer. You can also create a personal feel by customizing your messages.
Tip: Amplify your text messaging communication by using MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) features such as images, GIFs, video and audio clips, and emojis.
6. Brand awareness
SMS marketing is great for increasing brand awareness. Implementing effective SMS messaging between brands and mobile device users is a great way to attract and engage customers throughout the buying process. Since users check their text messages multiple times a day, you can stay top of mind with consistent messages.
Personal, consistent and reliable messages can also foster trust and loyalty among your consumers. When customers are loyal and engaged with your business, they are more likely to recommend your product or service to a friend, thus expanding brand awareness.
7. Quick feedback from customers
You can initiate surveys and polls via SMS and receive results quickly. Customer feedback is valuable for helping companies improve their products. It could also help you learn more about market trends and better understand customer preferences.
8. Cost-effectiveness
SMS marketing efforts are inexpensive compared to other marketing solutions. Since it has a high open rate and response rate, text message marketing can garner a high return on investment. This makes it a cost-effective tool to add to your overall marketing strategy.
9. Easy implementation
This type of marketing is permission-based, so you already know your customers are opting in to receive your messages. Once you’ve created an SMS campaign, you can easily track, manage and optimize performance. With the help of SMS marketing automation, brands can create, schedule and automate smart targeting campaigns.
10. No spam filters
Marketers don’t have to worry about their promotional text messages ending up in the spam folder. The filters that email marketers have to battle with do not exist in the world of SMS. When someone opts in to receive SMS marketing messages, marketers don’t have to remind them to whitelist their short code so that their messages don’t accidentally land in a spam folder.
Integrate SMS with your email campaigns and your ecommerce
Including URLs in an outbound text campaign to important emails or relevant web content can encourages subscriptions and conversions. Furthermore, your total customer reach, and engagement with email and web channels, will improve through and by incorporating SMS into your email and ecommerce sale as it allows you to track the customer’s activity back to the SMS through multi-touch attribution.
Maybe your conversion rate for DM is as high as 28%, as it is for some businesses, but usually DM response rates can be much lower. Want to boost it? Send a text message within 24 hours of your DM landing to offer an extra incentive. It’ll get more people opening your envelope, and help you to achieve better conversion rates.
Ultra-customize communications, by learning the best time to contact
07.00? 09.30? Late at night? Everyone has their preference for when they want to talk. With SMS messages, which tend to be read within minutes, you can learn over time when a customer is most receptive to your contact – not just for their “audience demographic” as a whole, but for him or her as an individual.
One quick warning however! SMS marketing requires careful planning when automating it as part of an omnichannel marketing solution. If an SMS is triggered from a purchase then you want to ensure that text doesn’t land at 3am when your customer is not going to appreciate being woken up by a message ping. Equally, if you’re running an SMS campaign across time zones, you’ll also want to make sure you stagger the send to land at the right time for each individual customer.
Best SMS app for getting started quickly
Within moments of signing up for TextMagic, I’d already sent my first SMS. Sure, it was just a test message to my own cell phone as part of testing every function, but the process was super easy. The setup wizard and intuitive interface meant all I had to do was enter the phone number, type my message, and click Send. And bam!, my phone beeped and distracted me from writing this.
But just because TextMagic makes sending simple messages easy, doesn’t mean it’s not functional or powerful. You can send messages from TextMagic’s number so replies go to the API, web app, or your email; or from your own mobile number so replies go directly to your phone. You can build contact lists by importing an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file, manually entering them in the Contacts tab of the app, saving the number of anyone who texts you, or using a click-to-text form on your website.
In the Scheduled tab, you can schedule messages, for example, to send out a Friday Specials text every week. You can also set up templates in the Templates tab to make it faster to send recurring messages—like appointment confirmations—and automate responses to customer texts. And of course, you can quickly and easily send customers a text from the web or the iOS and Android apps.
Really, Text Magic hits that sweet spot of being both a joy to use and powerful enough for almost anything a small business needs. And even better, it’s entirely pay-as-you-go, so you’re not locked into any kind of ongoing contract. You prepay for credit and then just send texts—which start at .04—as much or as little as you need.
You can also connect Text Magic to thousands of organizational tools, scheduling calendars, and other apps through Zapier, so you can do things like follow up on Typeform feedback surveys or automatically post text messages to Slack.
Sources:
https://www.business.com/articles/6-reasons-brands-should-start-using-sms-marketing/
https://uplandsoftware.com/adestra/resources/blog/10-innovative-ways-use-sms-marketing/
https://zapier.com/blog/best-sms-app/
