How to Use SMS Marketing Strategies to Elevate Your Business

Most people message each other using social media apps. While you might not be texting people on a regular basis, SMS marketing has a read rate of more than 90%. SMSing is not dead. More than half of consumers use their cell phones to make online purchases, so SMS marketing is a natural bridge for retailers who are trying to connect with customers who mainly use mobile devices. There are quite a few ways that you can make SMSs work for your business. Let’s take a look.

1. Automated Campaigns and Purchase Reminders

Automated marketing campaigns have proven time and time again that they are one of the absolute most important marketing toolkits for any business. In business, there are plenty of highly important things that need to get done. If a business owner were to have to complete everything individually, things would be chaos. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Let’s take a look at this scenario – Someone orders a package from your business. You will need to update them on the status of their parcel until they receive it. This is incredibly impractical. According to messente.com, when you seamlessly integrate your system with SMS automation, you can send your customers all sorts of information, including time-critical reminders and notifications. This can also be used to re-engage customers. You can target them all at once by offering coupon codes and other exciting campaign deals.

2. Use the Checkout to Expand Your Contact List

Before you can send any SMS campaigns, you need your customers’ contact details. But what is the best way to go about this? Collect them when they check out from your online store. You will of course need to get your customers’ consent to contact them about promotional deals, but this is as simple as a little square box that they need to tick at checkout. Capturing their information this way is less invasive than other methods, plus it gives them the ability to choose whether they want to be contacted by you or not. You could also capture it when they create an account to make purchasing simple. Having their personal details in your system helps you to see repeat customers and helps you with your market research.

3. Keep It Concise

People don’t like reading things they don’t have to. You have 150 characters to play with including your opt-out option, so you are already quite limited with what you can include in your SMS. In order to keep people interested, follow these tips:

• Get to the point by telling customers why you are contacting them in the first sentence
• Personalize your messages by using a provider that auto-fills individual names.  
• Capitalize important words
• Use call-to-action words like “Buy Now”, “Act Fast”, “Don’t Miss Out”, “Last Chance”, and ‘Sign Up Now”
• Avoid text language abbreviations
• Always include the option to opt-out
• Let your customers know exactly who their messages are from each time

4. Coupon Codes

Discounts, promo codes, and coupons are different ways of saying the same thing. Whatever you wish to call it for marketing purposes is up to you. In 2020 we saw a massive rise in the number of purchases made with mobile devices, coming up to an estimated $1 trillion. Coupon codes are a great incentive to invite more people to sign up for your mailing lists. When customers sign up for your mailing list, you offer them a percentage off their first purchase. Customers are increasingly using multiple devices to view one online store and share their wish lists with their friends. For this reason, it is important that your site be optimized for multiple devices (mobile and desktop) showing how professional your business is. To incentivize sharing with friends, you can run a campaign that will offer them an additional percentage off a purchase every time one of their friends signs up and shares with another. This is a great way to get contact details of like-minded customers, quickly.

5. Collect Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is an important part of any successful business. You can use SMS strategies to prompt responses from customers regarding their experiences with your business. You can either prompt your customers to click on a secure link to an online survey where they can answer things in detail, or you can opt for a quick text response on the quality of their experience on a scale from 1 - 10. To further incentivize this, you can attach a coupon code to the end of the survey. Meaning that you both get something out of it.

 As you can see, there are quite a few ways that SMS marketing can still be used to benefit your business. It might seem a bit antiquated for some, but this is not the case at all. Everyone has access to SMS.