Marketing is integral to the success of any business organization. It refers to the various activities a business undertakes to advertise and promote its products or services. The primary objective of marketing is to build awareness and visibility. Without marketing, it’d be impossible for any business today to connect with its target customers.  

Fortunately, there are various strategies you can adopt to spread the word about your business enterprise. One is to leverage short message services (SMS) marketing. This comprehensive article has all the information you may want to know about SMS marketing. You’ll learn what SMS marketing is, how it can benefit your business, how to build a robust strategy, and more.  

An Overview Of SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is the process of sending and delivering promotional messages to target customers by text messages. It mostly utilizes mobile devices such as phones, tablets, and iPads to deliver advertorial messages to the target audience.

SMS marketing is a form of opt-in advertising—it requires target customers to subscribe to your SMS list. In other words, you should request your clients to provide their consent to receive your text messages before including them in your SMS marketing list. 

Here are examples of types of SMS marketing:

• Customer surveys
• Event reminders
• Order updates
• Personalized promotional campaigns
• Offers 

You might think SMS marketing is a recent invention, but that isn’t the case. It has been there for more than two decades. The first SMS marketing message was sent in 2000 when companies began to take advantage of the increased use of mobile phones. The majority of today’s world population owns mobile phones. Therefore, leveraging SMS marketing allows you to reach a massive audience.  

Benefits Of SMS Marketing For Your Business 

SMS marketing can offer tons of benefits to companies. Here are the major benefits of SMS marketing for your business organization.  

1. SMS Have A High Response Rate 

The obvious benefit of SMS marketing is its high response rate compared to other promotional strategies—such as email advertising. That’s because of its nature as a direct form of communication. With SMS, you’ll deliver promotional messages directly to customers’ phone inboxes. And because people always carry their phones, customers are likely to read and respond to your text messages.  

But you need to know that many customers don’t like to be disturbed by adverts and promotional messages. Therefore, you’ll likely affect your customers’ experiences if their phones keep ringing because of your messages. So, transitioning into a more considerate approach, you can leverage ringless voice marketing.

Leveraging ringless voice marketing is an excellent way to deliver promotional messages to customers without disturbing them. It allows you to use technology or software to pre-record promotional messages and directly deliver them to customers’ voicemail inboxes without their phone ringing. Therefore, customers will read your messages when they’re comfortable doing so.

This not only improves customers’ experience but also enhances responses. You can count on solutions such as Drop Cowboy Ringless Voicemail and similar others to assist you in establishing effective SMS marketing for your business.  

2. SMS Enhances Your Reach

The long-term success of your business will rely on the number of audiences you reach. The larger the target audience, the higher the chances of generating more leads, which helps increase your conversions and generate more sales. This is why every business seeks ways to connect with more target audiences.  

SMS marketing can also be an effective way to boost your reach. As noted earlier, many people today own phones. Therefore, promoting your business through text messages allows you to reach an enormous target audience.  

While that’s the case, sending messages one by one can be overwhelming and time-consuming, especially when delivering texts to many customers. Fortunately, you can leverage a Power Dialer solution to streamline the process. This involves the use of specific software to automate the process of sending messages, which enables you to reach several customers quickly. When implemented properly, power dialer technology improves marketers’ productivity and enhances your overall SMS marketing strategy.  

3. SMS Improves Customer Engagement 

SMS is a great channel to enhance customer engagement since it provides a direct communication channel. It also offers two-way communication, allowing business owners to engage with customers and provide an immediate response to their concerns. This engagement improves clients’ experience allowing you to build a loyal customer base.  

While SMS can improve customer engagement, you should provide value in your content. The primary reason why customers will open or read your text messages is to find solutions to their problems. Therefore, you first need to understand customers’ needs before you draft your messages. Only by sending valuable messages will you improve customer engagement.  

4. SMS Marketing Is Cheap

If you’re like most other small business owners, you’re probably looking for ways to reduce company expenses. And for a good reason, minimizing costs helps maximize profits. SMS marketing is cheap and can help you to achieve that.  

SMS marketing is more affordable, especially when compared with most other marketing methods. For one, you don’t have to invest in complex equipment or tools for SMS marketing. You can even use the personal phone you already have to deliver messages to target customers. In addition, sending text messages involves very minimal cost per SMS, making it a cost-effective marketing strategy for small businesses. So, going in this direction allows you to save money, maximize returns on your marketing efforts and increase profits.  

5. SMS Marketing Increases Sales 

The main goal of any business enterprise is to increase revenue. By generating more sales, your business can improve revenue, make more profits, improve cash flow strategy, and thrive. Without enough sales, it’d be difficult for any business organization to take off the ground, let alone grow.  

SMS marketing is an effective way to increase your sales. To succeed in generating sales, it is vital to invest in a marketing strategy that allows you to connect with more target customers. By automating your message creation and sending process, you can reach a wider audience, increasing your chances of making more sales.

Besides, SMS marketing allows you to send personalized texts and inform customers of limited-time discounts, thus creating a sense of urgency. All these can help attract more customers to your shop and increase your sales.  

How To Build An Effective SMS Marketing Strategy

As detailed in the previous section, SMS marketing can benefit your small business in many ways. However, you must build an effective promotional campaign. 

Here are key strategies for establishing a robust SMS marketing strategy:

Define Your Target Customers

The first and most important step when establishing an SMS marketing strategy for your business is to know your customers. Leveraging SMS marketing can be a great way to grow your business, but only if you deliver text messages to people interested in your products or services. Targeting the wrong audience can lead to a waste of time, money, and other resources.  

Utilizing customer relationship management (CRM) technology is an excellent way to determine your target customers. It allows you to collect data on people who visit your website and other online platforms. Gathering information about visitors’ demographic location, age bracket, purchase history, and behavior will allow you to send the right text messages to the right target customers. It also lets you personalize your messages to address specific customers’ needs.  

Once you define your target customers, segment them according to their interests. From there, send bulk but target messages to each group. This way, you can reach more target clients, generate quality leads and increase your conversions.  

Build An SMS Marketing Team

You can do everything in your business, particularly when it’s at its initial stages of growth. However, this might not be practically possible when your company starts to grow. For that reason, you may want to hire some professionals. One of the areas to seek assistance for is SMS marketing. You’ll need qualified and skilled individuals to maximize returns on your SMS marketing. 

Here are examples of professionals you may want to employ for your SMS promotional campaigns

• Marketing Strategist: A marketing strategist is a professional who can help you to establish an SMS marketing plan and strategy. They can help define your target customers, identify key messaging opportunities and develop a promotional campaign that aligns with your broad company goals.  
• Copywriter: A qualified copywriter can help create compelling messages for your SMS marketing strategy. These are trained professionals in content creation and can deliver text messages that grab the attention of target audiences.  
• SMS Platform Expert: You also need to employ an SMS platform specialist. This person will help you identify the right SMS marketing channel and ensure the smooth implementation of marketing on these platforms. They’ll also be responsible for managing promotional campaigns on all your SMS marketing platforms.  

All these team members need to work closely together and communicate about your SMS marketing campaigns. The more qualified and skilled your SMS team is, the higher the chance of building a more effective promotional campaign.  

Build Clear Brief And Clear Messages

When creating your messages, make sure you’re brief and clear. Many customers have a small concentration span, so a long message may significantly affect their experiences. Plus, an effective marketing SMS requires you to use only 160 characters in your messages. Therefore, you must be brief and clear when sending promotional messages.  

Apart from that, avoid creating open-ended messages. For example, many business owners send sales offer messages to customers, but they don’t indicate when the sales are starting or ending. Clients may not understand how long the sale offer will last. If you intend to run a sales offer in a day or a week, ensure you specify that in your messages. Giving all the information about your sales offer and date lines allows customers to make informed decisions.  

Deliver Messages At The Right Time

Sending adverts at the right time is crucial for any promotional campaign, but it is much more critical in SMS marketing. Customers have their preferred time for reading and responding to text messages. So, make sure you aren’t delivering advertorial messages to customers at times when they’re busy or don’t want to be disturbed. Otherwise, you’ll hurt customers’ experience, leading to a loss of sales.  

Before you message customers, take a moment to study them. Know where they come from and their working hours. If a customer lives in a different time zone from yours, research to ensure you’re not delivering messages in the middle of the night. The best time to send messages could be in the morning before clients get busy in their offices or the evening after they leave their workplace. The idea here is to send messages at the most appropriate times to enhance customers’ experience, increase open rates, and enhance responses.  

Choose The Right SMS Marketing Software

SMS marketing can be complex, especially if you use a simple messaging app on your phone or computer. Invest in SMS marketing software to simplify the process. It can offer tons of benefits that can elevate your SMS marketing efforts. 

For instance, SMS marketing software provides a centralized location where you can manage your text messages, which makes collaboration among your marketing teams easier. Besides, it enables you to collect data and measure the performance of your SMS marketing efforts. As such, you can make data-driven decisions for optimizing your SMS marketing strategy. 

Below are effective strategies for choosing the right SMS marketing software for your business:  

• Find A Scalable Solution: Before you install any SMS marketing software you see on the market, evaluate its scalability. Make sure that the system can accommodate your business’s current and future SMS marketing demands.  
• Select User-Friendly Software: Another key feature of good SMS marketing software is user-friendliness. Invest in a platform that streamlines your SMS marketing strategy management. A complex system may lead to a loss of productivity and sales. It may also attract extra costs as you may be forced to hire experts to educate you and your employees on how to work with the software. So, look for a tool with a simple user interface.  
• Consider The Pricing: Compare the pricing of different vendors to determine which solution offers the best value for your money. The quality and features of a certain SMS marketing software will likely affect its pricing. For example, a high-quality solution with more features will be more expensive than the basic ones. Select a solution with reasonable pricing based on your budget and expected return on your SMS marketing efforts.  

Takeaway 

SMS marketing provides a great way for you to engage with target customers effectively. By establishing an effective strategy, your business can enhance its market reach and generate more revenue. Key elements of a robust SMS marketing strategy include defining target audiences, building a marketing team, drafting precise messages, delivering messages at the right time, and using text automation software. Once you launch your SMS marketing campaign, monitor its performance regularly and improve or make changes when necessary.  

 

Author Bio: Amanda Nelson is a marketing specialist for SMEs. She loves sharing her insights by posting articles online to assist business organizations in growing their revenues. During her free time, Nelson plays guitar.