SMS, short for short message service, was developed in the 80s and officially implemented in the early 90s. SMS was the most popular method of text communication for many years after its release, and it inspired the launch of mobile phones that used QWERTY keyboards since texting using SMS was very convenient at the time. The SMS technology kept on improving over the years, but it did take a bit of time to venture into the marketing realm, wasn’t until the 2000s. A lot of people think that SMS is a marketing language of the past, but they haven’t really seen what it can do in this day and age. We’ll be providing you with the best benefits you can gain from business SMS texting and how to utilize them properly.
Incredibly Cost-Effective Marketing Campaigns
Back in the day, sending too many SMS messages could put you back a pretty penny. Nowadays, the price of bulk SMS messages is much lower than its digital or physical advertising counterpart. SMS campaigns are very affordable, which makes them a versatile tool even for marketers on very tight budgets. What makes it more interesting is its ROI, return on investment. No matter how hard you look at it, SMS costs significantly less to reach any type of audience, and when you take into account that you’re sending these texts to people who are already interested in what you offer or opted-in, you’ve got yourself a serious ROI rate.
Superb Open Rate
Open rate is a percentage of the number of people who open an electronic message, whether it’s an email, notification, or a message. The open rate of SMS is between 80% and 98%, which is a pretty amazing average that trumps the open rate of emails and other advertising options. An email or a phone call can go unnoticed for a pretty good while, but an SMS is read almost immediately the majority of times. SMS marketing used to be quite underrated when it came to marketing, but with the prevalence of mobile phones, it’s making great strides in every great multi-channel marketing strategy.
You can rest assured that the majority of the targeted audience will open up the SMS you’ve sent and read it. Getting a message to the target audience is actually much easier and more straightforward when you compare it to social messages, organic SEO, PPC ads, and emails. And as mentioned on https://messente.com/resources/guides/sms-marketing, getting a reply from your audience can be quite fast if you make it easy for them. Quick engagement and response can merit a higher conversion ratio. It’s worth mentioning that there are some restrictions that are put into place to avoid the abuse of such communicative power. It’s not legal to send unsolicited text messages for marketing without offering the recipient an option to opt-out, so keep that in mind when planning for your campaign.
Personalization of Messages
Thanks to the abundance of SMS management platforms, it’s become quite easy to take control of a lot of features in a single text message. Messages are known to be personal, and removing that personal tone can also reduce the wanted effect. This is why personalizing SMS messages is a great advantage when you’re using it to market or advertise for something; it can reduce the gap between the brand and the target audience. Thanks to new CRM systems, it’s possible to personalize the message further by adding individual-unique information in the text message, such as their name and other relevant information. Use marketing metrics like age, geolocation, product usage, and other parameters to create even more personal messages that can show the audience your interest.
Wide Audience Reach
The bigger part of online traffic is generated through mobile phones, which means that SMS marketing is a great way to capitalize on that. What makes SMS marketing far-reaching is that it doesn’t need an internet connection to operate. This gives it a critical advantage that a lot of the current messaging mediums don’t have. No matter how old or rusty a phone is, it can always receive an SMS with absolute ease. It doesn’t require an application, internet connection, a big screen, or many other technicalities to reach its intended audience. You can always implement ways for the recipient to engage with your brand through any other medium by referring to it in the SMS, hitting two birds with one stone.
Pursuing Instant Delivery
SMS marketing is a very high-tempo method of delivering a brand’s message to the target audience. It makes sense to make the most out of it by delivering information that is time-bound or restricted through timeframes. Using other mediums to deliver things like OTPs or flash sales won’t work out well if there is any technical difficulty in the way. Cloud telephony service providers can make this process quicker and more stable, ensuring that no message is late or lost. The instantaneous nature of SMSs should be pursued to its full potential if you want it to make a positive addition to your marketing strategy.
Gaining Insight
Sending SMSs to thousands of customers blindly is a huge waste of an opportunity that you can use to gain deeper insight into your target audience’s preferences. The performance of an SMS campaign needs to be properly gauged if you want to improve it in the future. A lot of platforms offer real-time data collection and analysis, in addition to features that allow you to know whether a message was read or not, a number of messages, whether a link was pressed, and other important information. Once you collect data after an SMS campaign, use it to prepare for a more coordinated one that has a higher potential to entice your audience into converting. Knowing whether the SMS marketing campaign is successful or not can be a major strategy-changer, so keep a close eye on those metrics.
SMS marketing is making a serious comeback in popularity because it’s still very relevant to this day. A lot of successful brands implement SMS in their multi-channel marketing strategies, ensuring a broad reach to their audience. It’s always possible to boost the benefits of SMS marketing by combining them with digital marketing strategies, so try to lean on the creative side of your campaigns.