Today, people prefer messaging one another over voice calls. This trend has precipitated into the business world, with consumers now choosing messaging to interact with businesses. This has moved most businesses to find SMS texting solutions to help them reach their clients. Let’s look at text message marketing and how it works.
What Is Text Message Marketing?
As leads become harder to reach, text message marketing or SMS marketing is making a significant comeback. Customers enjoy the convenience, and companies love the SMS’ 98% open rates. While there are a lot more other marketing tools to use for free, SMS still never fail to make the rounds. There had been a dip in the use of this when Messenger, TikTok, Facebook, and many other platforms came around. For some reason, Text Message Marketing has bounced back lately and it has been used by subscribers to promote and disseminate product information or hiring gigs.
SMS marketing, or mass text messaging, is the technique of sending promotional short text messages (SMS) about a business’s products, services, alerts, or time-sensitive updates. It is a form of digital marketing and consumer mobile marketing. SMS marketing is ideal for any business that wants to simultaneously reach a large group of leads to scale operations and improve profits. The idea is to increase sales and productivity performance by reaching out to all prospects who has access to a device with SMS capability. And, so far, the attempt had been successful.
How Does SMS Marketing Work?
SMS testing is software-enabled using the numerous SMS tools in the market. You can integrate your existing phone number into the SMS software or set up a new SMS number. Some software also allows you to set up a dedicated short code to send mass texts. You’ll also need to set up a way to allow your target customers to opt in to receive your promotional SMS texts and also be able to opt out.
Once you get the customer’s express consent, you’ll store their data and phone number to which you’ll send messages. Depending on your SMS service provider, you may also set up automated away messages and drip campaigns. Other software can help you segment your customers into lists for targeted campaigns and track the results.
Other than SMS software, you can also use social media platforms like WhatsApp. A WhatsApp API designed for enterprises allows users to share their experiences through emojis, photos, videos, GIFs, and other interactive features.
What are the Benefits of SMS marketing?
Users have a higher likelihood of responding to text than email. The increased response rates can be attributed to better personalization of SMS texts. This means SMS texting provides fast delivery and a higher customer engagement rate. The ability for customers to opt in and out also allows better targeting of customers that have a higher chance of conversion rate.
For a minimal cost, SMS Marketing opened up gateways to a variety of distributing details specific to the brand being promoted. Companies have been utilizing this platform once more as it provides more benefits to the companies or individual entrepreneurs who have been using it. Sending a single message to a lot of users may pose a risk of being tagged as a scam text but it still reaches targeted audience. The best part, as long as a user has an active mobile number, it receives the message and the possibility of having it read is high.
Who Can Use SMS Texting?
While all companies can use mass texting, industries use it in different ways. For example,
- Restaurants use SMS marketing to send coupons, take reservations, or inform customers about daily or weekly specials
- Retailers and E-Commerce Stores rely on text messaging to engage customers, offer discounts, provide loyalty programs, and increase sales
- Real Estate Agents use SMS texting for lead generation
- Home Service Businesses such as lawn care and HVAC companies use SMS to get back to leads
Endnote
Mass text messaging is essential to any business. From increased conversion rates to higher customer satisfaction, SMS texting companies reap greater benefits. Any platform that can contribute to the production of the patronizing public gets entertained. Today’s entrepreneurs are doing multi-marketing by posting ads or engagement to any platforms available, online and offline, SMS being one of them. Knowing and understanding the dynamics of SMS Marketing, just as it has been tied up to other social media platforms is ideal and highly encouraged.
The number of users and the cost factors are normally considered by companies. If you can have users receiving your product details without paying much, who wouldn’t take advantage of it. Businesses of various kinds can present themselves in whatever form possible. Keeping the influx of information sent to every possible client is the goal, and this is easily settled with WhatsApp.