While I don’t necessarily have a favorite marketing tool SMS marketing is definitely up there as my top picks mostly because its major strength is engagement and with more and more people advertising and building content and pushing out notifications and sending emails it has become incredibly difficult to actually engage the average person.
In fact advertisers are spending more and more every year to reach the exact same customer further eating a massive hole into their margins further increasing their acquisition costs.
Even if you do manage to acquire a customer most businesses will use email marketing as a way to engage them but only 20% of people will open your email messages! That is insane, that means of the people who put their hand up to receive your marketing message only 2 in 10 will see it.
This is why I like SMS marketing so much.
SMS marketing allows businesses to capture the attention of customers almost 100% of the time – well 97% would be more accurate.
That’s right if you send out and SMS marketing promotion to 1,000 people 970 of them will open and read your message compare that to 200 if sending an email.
What is SMS marketing?
SMS marketing is a promotion that you send out via an online SMS platform . It is 1005 online but uses the same mobile phone carriers to deliver your message.
This means that as long as your device has an internet connection you can send an SMS even if you are out of mobile coverage – it’s pretty cool.
Why use SMS marketing?
There are plenty of reasons to use SMS marketing but I’ll list only the main ones.
It’s simple
If you have ever sent a group text message then you can use this – it really is just a matter of uploading your contacts, selecting them, writing your message and clicking send and like magic virtually all of them will receive, open and read your message.
Great delivery rates
One of the main issues with email is delivery rates. People think that just because you send an email the recipient will receive it – this is not the case.
ESP’s (email service providers) give your email account a quality score and that quality score will determine whether or not your emails reach the recipient.
SMS marketing will deliver 100% of your messages unless the recipient has changed their mobile phone number or they are out of mobile coverage or have their mobile phone switched off – in the case of the last two SMS services will typically keep trying to send that message up to 72 hours before calling it a day.
No SPAM filters
Even if you email gets delivered chances are (if it is a promotional email) it will get delivered to the junk, spam or “promotions” folder never to be seen by the recipient.
The reason for this is that there are spam algorithms that scan your emails and if they see certain trigger words they may get triggered as a promotion. There are 400 spam trigger words a lot of them fairly common like “click here”.
While you can download apps that block mobile numbers and SMS messages currently there are no built-in spam filters that prevent SMS messages from coming through. This again means that all of the messages you send will be placed in front of the recipient.
It’s cheap
For only a few cents per SMS you can get amazing engagement. While ad costs continue to climb SMS actually moves in the other direction and is becoming cheaper. The reason for this is that there are no inventory problems that plague online platforms, there are no impression limitations and on top of that you see more SMS companies popping up which naturally brings the pricing down.
Tips to skyrocket your SMS marketing campaigns
Get your timing right
Treat SMS similar to a phone call, typically you wouldn’t make a call after business hours so (in most cases) it is a good idea to keep your SMS campaigns inside those same hours unless people are expecting an SMS or the SMS is an auto-reply.
Personalize your offers
The fastest way to get people to unsubscribe from your list is to feed them spam. Spam is essentially unwanted messaging and this goes for offers as well, if you’re looking to lose weight but you keep getting offers to gain muscle it’s going to get irritating and soon, you’re going to wonder why you are on that list.
SMS is a very personal medium which means you need to make sure that when you contact someone you make it a good experience, one where' they actually look forward to hearing from you.
Use an opt-out
Should it should go without saying that you should include a way for people to unsubscribe from your SMS list but some businesses often leave this out and it’s a mistake the reason being is that you can face some pretty heavy penalties for not having an unsubscribe in your SMS message so make sure that you always have a way for people to remove themselves from your list to remove any legal headaches.
Personalize your messaging
People think personalization is just adding the first name to the message but it’s really about the entire message including the offer. Different market segments will use different words and phraseology to talk about their problems their goals and so when it comes to personalization you really want to use those same phrases and words, you want to talk about the same problems and the same goals and so when you’re putting together promotions you can hit on those key hot points and this increases your overall chance of converting more sales and increasing your return on investment for your SMS marketing campaigns.
Group people together
This is something I don’t see very often or not done correctly and that it is grouping people together based on certain characteristics by grouping people together you’re able to put together a tighter message better offer and you’re able to resonate your message. you can group people by past purchases gender location whether they are an active customer or a past customer, etc.
