Text messages used to be a convenient way to keep up with friends, but today, they have become so much more as they’re powerful mobile marketing tools for businesses.
With 31.9 million mobile phone connections, the vast majority of Australians own mobile phones as most, if not all, use them to send or receive text messages on various platforms. More importantly, mobile phone users are more engaged with messaging than emails.
With mobile phones having the ability to alert users immediately when a new text message arrives, it’s no surprise that text messages have an open rate of 98% while 38.95% of people open their messages within 3 minutes.
Even with these encouraging figures, business owners still hesitate to adopt SMS marketing as a promotional tool while believing that the method is ineffective. In reality, however, SMS marketing can help businesses obtain a lot of value at an affordable price.
Here are some of the top ways that SMS marketing can help businesses amp up their operations.
Enables customers to opt-in
Many traditional advertising methods heavily relied on the law of large numbers for their campaigns to succeed. They believed that the only way to get their message across was to blast their marketing messages to a wide audience so that they can stand a better chance of getting the attention of prospective customers.
Generally, this type of marketing strategy meant that businesses had to spend a large amount of money and resources on marketing messages that customers would forget within minutes or simply choose to ignore if the messages didn’t capture their immediate attention.
SMS marketing—on the contrary—relies on consumers to take the first step and opt to receive messages. This means that your target audience needs to sign up to receive any messages regarding offers, updates, and promotions.
This type of marketing has many benefits as consumers that receive your marketing messages are already invested in your product or service—hence why they sign up— and you won’t be wasting any money marketing your brand to a market with customers who aren’t interested.
Gives customers the ability to opt out
When it comes to small businesses, the competition faced is fierce and sometimes your customers inadvertently have to bear the burden. Think about it from your customers’ perspective. You’re not the only brand that’s regularly contacting them with promotions, ads, and other content.
There’s not much that they can do to escape this perpetual cycle. They do, however, have the option of opting out of your SMS marketing campaigns. Similar to email marketing, SMS marketing can make it easy for customers to opt out of campaigns.
When your customers know that they have the freedom to choose whether they want to continue receiving your texts, they are much more likely to voluntarily sign up, allowing you to entice them with your products and services.
But this isn’t the only way that SMS marketing can help businesses. A customer who’s tired of getting an onslaught of texts may get annoyed and unsubscribe or opt out from receiving your messages. So it’s better to accept their decision and try again after some time to appeal to them using other routes.
Deliver messages quickly
A large part of the appeal of SMS marketing is its brevity—both for the business and the consumer. Unlike lengthy email promotions, text messages are typically a single sentence or two along with a link that directs the consumer to a website with more information.
One of the best features of a text message is that consumers are very likely to read your entire message for the simple fact that they’re very short.
Text messages can also be read at their convenience so it’s not as annoying or intrusive as telephone calls or pop-up messages.
The brevity of text messages also benefits small business owners who are pressed for time. So it’s much easier to plan and dispatch promotions via SMS without requiring much planning, in comparison to traditional advertising campaigns.
Reaches a wider audience
As mentioned previously, 31.9 million mobile phone connections in Australia mean that your SMS marketing campaigns can cast a wide net. You could argue that emails have the same reach, but text messages often feel more urgent than an email in an already crowded inbox.
Plus, an email address could be known by many people, so getting an email isn’t enough to get someone intrigued.
Text messages, in contrast, feel a lot more urgent since you don’t readily give out your mobile phone number to anyone, meaning that only a select few have access to it. This gives consumers a sense of text-based urgency that keeps your brand in your customers’ minds.
It also helps you stand out in a crowded SMS inbox as promotional content is far less common to make an appearance in your texts as opposed to your email inbox.
SMS marketing can help businesses—so why not take the help?
Today, email inboxes are automatically divided into tabs—primary, social, and promotions—which means that your marketing emails get lost in the shuffle and your customers don’t even know that they’ve received an email from your business.
Mobile phones don’t have these divisions, so if you send—for example—an SMS about loyalty rewards, they’re almost guaranteed to see it. If the offer is something valuable, you’re well on your way to gaining their trust because they understand your messages carry value for them.
Businesses that want to amp up their operations should opt for expert assistance in automation and create an SMS marketing strategy that can help them generate compelling SMS marketing campaigns that convert customers.