As you might have known now, SMS marketing and the field of mass text marketing are becoming quite popular for businesses, for the sake of reaching their customers. But, just like most of the trends these ways, most of the business owners believe that it might not work for them as well. Mainly when it comes to small business owners, they often don’t have the resource or time, otherwise needed to make difference in marketing.
SMS marketing is probably not just the big business tool, as it will work pretty well for smaller businesses as well. The issue with this section is that smaller businesses don’t have same capabilities or knowledge of that of a large organization, where they can base off the decision. That’s what you desperately need to change. In this article, you will come to know about what walks through SMS marketing exactly and why this method is a valuable addition in small business marketing sector. You will further get to learn the pros and cons of SMS marketing, just to help you prepare for the successful path forward.
Value of SMS marketing:
Even though email marketing has dominated this industry for such a long time, SMS has been accepted recently as valuable marketing means. The first thing that you might want to know is that SMS can never replace email and vice versa. These sectors have their own purposes, and that’s what they are better equipped to fill up with. Another thing for you to know is that SMS is always used for immediate action. While sending an email, you might have to wait for few hours or even days to get a response. Well, that isn’t the case with SMS actually as it will be send directly to phones, without which people can’t even operate nowadays.
You will be amazed to know that SMS has a click-through rate of 19% and the messages are read on 5 seconds average. So, for running effective and efficient SMS marketing campaign, you have to plan for this current immediacy. Apart from that, you have to start the venture quite strong. As around 90% of participants associated with the SMS loyalty programs feel that they might have gained value from being just members, it is always your job to wow them as soon as you can.
Ways to perform SMS marketing in an effective manner:
One major aspect and quite difficult part of SMS marketing is ensuring that you are doing it right. While emails might be quite notorious for spam messages, around 1% of them are spam. The main reason for that is strict rule, which is exactly what’s surrounding the working venture of SMS. To obey all the procedures associated with SMS and following best practices, there are some major rules to consider while focusing on SMS marketing for smaller businesses.
- Understanding rules:
Before you hit it off, it is always worth reviewing regulations on what you can and cannot do with SMS marketing. The primary thing to notify in this regard is to know that you can only send text messages to customers who have opted explicitly for you. This is not going to be something optional for you.
As mentioned already, spam is a major problem in terms of email, but even emails have looser restrictions. The easiest way to avoid such issue is to ask prospects to click an option manually to sign up for later text messaging. While this step makes lead acquisition rather difficult but every lead that you might generate from now on will be way stronger and with higher converting chance.
- Timing is the key:
As SMS marketing seems so immediate, timing to send the messages right on time can prove to be quite critical. Always remember that mobile user will open your messages and within a span of 5 seconds. It means that your objective gets to reach user just before you can make any buying decision. Always remember to check about the time when your users are most likely to make any decision and try your ultimate best to get message to them on time.
- Restricting messages to 160 characters:
Even though, there are specified reasons on why you might be limiting SMS messages to less than the allotted 160 characters, the main area over here is that these messages need to be to the point and short. Chances are high that your customers might use email if they are planning to read something anything longer than the allotted 160 characters. On the other hand, most of the carriers will split up messages into varies parts if that exceeds the 160 character limitation. As you are not aware of the device your user might be working with, it is always better to restrict messages below that number.
- Adding CTAs (Call To Action) in every text:
Call to Action or CTA are foundations of SMS marketing strategies. Why even try to send any text unless you get to have immediate action and response? This is the main beauty of SMS marketing, but it is also quite difficult to do well over here. While the field of email marketing helps you to manipulate message in the way you want it, SMS is stricter when it is associated with design. That’s why multiple SMS marketing firms opt for making CTA simple to understand like only a phrase or word. Other smart small business marketers will include URL at end of the messages, which will prompt users to click through for more information.
No matter whatever decision you have made so far, the important thing is always to add CTA in every text you are sending to potential clients’ numbers. Without CTA, your user will have no next step and might end up in dead end. You may get ideas from these 8 highly-effective CTAs curated by Messente.
Avoid all mistakes in SMS marketing:
Spamming customers and not properly integrating are some of the major mistakes people might make in SMS marketing. You should not do that if you want to see your business grow.
Author Bio:
Jack Dsouja is an experienced blogger who has written articles for several renowned blogs and websites about various uses of marketing to engineer more business traffic on business websites.