All You Need to Know About SMS Marketing
SMS Marketing is about sending instant promotional messages directly to your customers and new leads that they simply can’t ignore to read & couldn’t resist to act-on. Brands that aren’t yet using texting must consider adding this direct & most personal channel into their marketing mix.
After all, there are 6 billion smartphone users worldwide today. Consumers prefer SMS subscriptions, in fact in the same year 48.7 million people opted-in to receive SMSes from businesses.
Now, let's discover every important detail about SMS Marketing.
Table of Contents
Definition SMS Marketing
The overall strategy that allows businesses to send promotional campaigns or transactional short messages to their audience in form of text messages (SMS) is called SMS Marketing.
Businesses use SMS Marketing mostly to distribute time-sensitive promotions, festive offers, reminders, alerts, notifications, or confirmations to their subscribed customers and leads.
If you want to know more about how businesses are using SMS marketing for mass-targeting their massive customer-base, go through with our another article named SMS Blasting.
The Top 9 Benefits of SMS Marketing
Messaging platform makes communication sharing so easy that businesses can send their text messages to their customers instantly within in few seconds.
With SMS marketing, businesses can send promotional messages or transactional messages delivered right into the mobiles of the audience.
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Cost Effective
SMS marketing is the most cost-effective and budget-friendly marketing channel when compared to other advertising like email, social media, press, or TV. SMS campaigns can be sent to your audience affordably without hurting your pocket while giving you a healthy return on investment.
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Straight to The Point
One message consists of only 160 characters, characters above that will be split into two messages, as the characters are less be direct about your subject.
Write your content with the tone of conviction and include all crucial points that will make your text optimized. People open their messages quickly, non-engaging messages go unnoticed and are lost inside the folder forever.
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SMS Structure
- SMS content includes text and link
- Individual SMS can only be 160 characters
- Sender ID, Customer name, Offer Expiration, Call to Action, Link, Opt-out
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Fast Delivery No Wait Time
A great benefit of SMS marketing is that you can deliver your message to multiple users at the same time and instantly without delay.
Messages are sent automatically through the messaging platforms as per the schedule. Create an overall better experience by notifying your customers about your offers, last-minute updates, and other messages right on time without the wait.
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Greater Audiences Reach
The easiest way to engage and reach the targeted mass population without hassle, SMS is a great way to do so. SMS marketing reaches everyone, with an advantage to reach the broadest audience it’s possible for businesses to meet a wider audience and convert leads into customers.
The number of mobile devices operating worldwide is expected to reach 18.22 billion by 2025, an increase of 4.2 billion devices compared to 2020 levels.
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Higher Response Rate
SMS marketing is one of the most reliable ways to reach your customers or prospects. Text message marketing sees higher open and response rates when compared to phone calls or emails, as people keep their phones always handy, near to them, and check or read content immediately as some notification comes.
98% of the messages that are sent to customers are opened within a few seconds or minutes of arrival customers.
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Easy Scheduling
With the complete automation of SMS marketing, SMS scheduling has become effortless and uncomplicated, with the pre-scheduling features now businesses will never forget to send important SMS to their audience.
Schedule your important SMS reminders, alerts & notifications by simply specifying or inputting the triggers that are dependent upon date, time, event-based and action-based.
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Easy to Track
Important metrics that most of the service providers will provide are delivery reports to let you know that your messages are successfully sent to how many people from your database and sometimes more advanced reporting too like click-through rates, opt-out rates, and even cost per conversion.
But this is almost dependent upon the choice of service provider you have made, always choose the SMS marketing service with a good track record and also that provides advanced analytics too so that you can evaluate the success of your campaigns and decide for future marketing practices.
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Boost Conversions
How many times a day do you look at your phone?
The study found that in total users check their smartphones on an average of 150 times during a waking day of 16 hours.
While doing SMS marketing, businesses send text messages to get connected, boost engagement, and increase brand awareness of their product or service with their prospects or customers having one primary goal in mind to generate more conversions.
SMS marketing is a proven and very cost-effective way when compared to other marketing channels to improve customer interaction.
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SMS Facts to Consider
- SMS has a 98% open rate
- SMS has a 45% response rate
- People respond to SMS in less than 90 seconds
- SMS-delivered coupons are redeemed 10 times more than any other types of coupons
SMS Best Practices
SMS marketing is a powerful medium to engage your audience and build strong relationships with them. But there are so many factors that can make or break your SMS campaign success, consider the below-mentioned points while creating, scheduling, and sending your SMS campaigns to enjoy better results and higher conversions every time.
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Permission-Based Messaging Only
Before sending business messages to any customer in the world, the best practice is to take consent from him to do so. Let customers opt-in to receive a message from you that will be the legal way to promote your business, your message will be not spammed and it will reach the right customer.
Permission-based messaging will save your money, boost business credibility, and will not put you in legal trouble too.
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Create a Valid Number List
The easy path is to It may be tempting to purchase or borrow contact lists from the internet, send mass SMS to them and your business is boom Right?
It may sound tempting but bought list can contain a fake and invalid number, Sending messages to invalid numbers is the most common reason for SMS delivery problems.
The best option is to create your authentic phone list by collecting the mobile phone numbers through various platforms like website opt-ins, social media, in-store promotions or though seminars, and more.
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Create an Opt-In Campaign
Get customer permission to send promotional offers on his number by using an opt-in form.
For example:
Connect with your existing customers through email and convince them to opt-in by sending a particular keyword like YES to 567766 (6 Digit Sender-id) and get an extra 20% off on your next purchase.Likewise use opt-in forms or pop-ups on your website and give irresistible offers for joining. Valuable discounts and other promotions encourage site visitors, existing customers, and other business prospects to opt-in for your campaigns.
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Give Instructions for Opting Out
In legal and ethical practice, it is always recommended to indicate how a user can unsubscribe in the text by replying via a certain opt-out keyword, like “STOP” or “NO”. Customers are termed as asking and businesses shall let them control which marketing messages they wish to receive and which they do not.
It is quite clear that if customers will opt-out of your campaigns then you may lose business and you will be without customers, but it’s not like that if your number list is genuine and is created through authentic means then this problem of an opt-out will not arise with you.
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Use an SMS Marketing Tool
Now you can reach your leads and customers using an advanced SMS tool that will help you reach your goals through automation. Either send a single or multiple SMS messages, with the least hindrance or human intervention these tools will make do all that automatically.
You can automate your SMS marketing linked with action triggers like shipping confirmation, policy renewal, seasonal offers, and many more. You can also enjoy advanced features like SMS and MMS templates, contact spreadsheet uploading, two-way messaging, message personalization, auto-responders, etc.
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Give Value to Your Customer
Valuable and enticing marketing offers sent regularly by the businesses push customers to open messages. Customer interaction and response rate towards the offers and communications sent through text is very high.
25% of consumers redeem SMS-delivered coupons within 3 days and 60% will redeem them within a week.
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Keep it Short and to The Point
The list of characters you can use to deliver individual SMS is 160-character/message. If extended the limit and sent higher than that it will be considered as a new lead to doubling your costs.
Write your message intelligently so that you cover all the major and important points that will make your message or SMS campaign successful that’s too on the character limit.
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Personalize Your SMS Marketing Campaigns
Personalization is a key to building trustful relationships with the customers, delivering your message to the right person at the right time, less formally, and more friendly. Message personalization increments engagement and human connection, businesses can enjoy a higher level of the recipient’s focus by simply addressing him by his name.
75% of people wouldn’t mind receiving an SMS text message from a brand (after opt-in).
Conclusion
SMS Marketing is the must-have, cost-effective, and consumer-preferred direct marketing channel. Businesses that use permission-based and user-oriented personalized SMS campaign targeting are making exceptional sales & business growth.
If you want to cut the marketing clutter, defy the advertising & content feeds noise, stand apart and reach your target audience using the most reliable direct communication channel you have to go for SMS Marketing.
Choose the best and reliable SMS Marketing solution, consider automation possibilities and follow a mutually beneficial approach delivering a better consumer experience to your customers and bringing higher conversions for you.
