Although it has been around since the 90s, SMS marketing has recently seen a resurgence amongst marketers and advertisers hoping to reach customers in the digital age. Coupled with the rise in popularity of customer retention marketing, business owners have discovered how powerful and effective SMS marketing can be.
Despite this resurgence, there are still those who have doubts about SMS and mass text messaging campaigns. Hoping to quell those doubts and show how powerful an SMS marketing campaign can be for your business, we have put together this article on how SMS has changed the game.
Not only that, but how you, as a business owner, can take advantage of this latest trend and make a difference for your company. Let’s take a look.
SMS marketing’s impact
Even though it may seem like stating that SMS marketing has “changed the game” is a bold claim, there is hard data to back it up. For instance, while with even the best email marketing campaign you are lucky to get a 30% open rate, with SMS 90% of messages are opened within 3 minutes of being sent.
Mass text marketing is far and away the most powerful tool that marketers now have in their pocket, but using it can be difficult without the right practices. In order to help with this, we are going to review a few ways in which SMS marketing is superior to alternate methods while providing guidance on how exactly to get the most out of your campaign.
Mobile engagement
As the world continues to shift toward a preference for mobile, marketers need new ways to increase mobile user engagement. Thankfully, SMS marketing solves that problem. By being fully mobile and always in the pockets of your customers, you are never more than a few seconds away from delivering a branded message right to them.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. Companies who jump right into their SMS marketing campaign are likely to alienate their customers by sending unimportant messages. While SMS is great because of its immediacy, when done incorrectly it can have heavy repercussions.
Stick to normal business hours for sending your messages, follow SMS guidelines, and provide value with your message. By simply doing these things, you will avoid a lot of headache.
Reliability
Another benefit to SMS marketing is how reliable it is. With email marketing campaigns, despite your best efforts to avoid them, spam filters might prevent your message from ever reaching the inbox of your customer. On the other hand, with SMS marketing, you should have no doubts that 100% of your customers are getting your message.
Again, this is a huge benefit, but can also be a big problem if mishandled. For anyone running a business SMS campaign, there are certain rules you need to follow. One example is that your customers must opt-in to receive SMS messages. If you do this without their consent, not only will you have an unhappy customer, but you might find yourself in legal trouble.
Before you begin your campaign and take advantage of how reliable SMS is, make sure you have gone through all of the rules and regulations to avoid a false start.
Next-level tracking
Business owners are no doubt tired of hearing how “Big Data” is going to change their lives. Thankfully, when it comes to SMS marketing, that data isn’t as big as you might think. Instead of thinking of big data, think instead of SMS marketing as using “Smart Data.”
What we mean by this is that while SMS marketing is not as detailed as say Google Analytics, it provides you with only the user engagement metrics that you really need. You can see things like how many messages have been delivered, how many have been read, and what your conversion rate looks like, all in real time!
Additionally, you can segment your audience to track even more targeted campaigns. SMS marketing won’t get you bogged down in too many stats and can provide you with only the info you need to be successful.
Increased conversions
The last way in which SMS marketing has changed the game when it comes to customer retention is through increased conversions and engagement. According to a recent study by the Mobile Marketing Association, customers are 5 times more likely to respond to an SMS message than an email. This is due to not only being easier to respond, but the immediacy of a text compared to an email.
The best way to take advantage of this SMS marketing feature is to consistently provide value to your customers through your campaign. While you could argue that all marketing should do this, SMS is a special case. Since conversion rates are so high with SMS, you should only send messages when you have a specific action you want your customers to complete.
This means that you might only be sending 1-4 messages a month, but trust us when we say that your customers will thank you for it. If you can provide added value to your customer with every single message, your customers will start to get excited when they see your SMS (whereas they might otherwise be groaning at the sight of another email).
SMS marketing and customer retention
As you can see, SMS marketing is an incredibly powerful tool for retaining customers and reducing your churn rate, but only when it is done correctly. Like anything, SMS marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum, and a good campaign will be coupled with other customer retention techniques to provide the best possible service for your customers.
But, that being said, SMS can be the difference between a good company and a great company. If you are searching for a way to keep more of your customers at a fraction of the price of other channels, SMS marketing might be what you are looking for.
So, what are you waiting for? Start your campaign today.
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