SMS Marketing: What Is It And Why Should You Be Doing It

Most people think of SMS as an old-school way of communicating and they are not totally wrong. However, SMS has remained relevant over the years blending well with newer methods of communicating. So, as a business owner or marketer, you will be losing out if you fail to see the many benefits of SMS, particularly, SMS marketing.
SMS, which stands for Short Messaging Service, is a text messaging communication system with which people send information to people. Just like many other communication avenues, SMS is used by marketers for creating awareness for businesses and products. This is where the term SMS marketing comes from. In this article, we will highlight a few reasons why you should be doing SMS marketing.

Benefits of SMS Marketing

Immediate and Direct

SMS marketing is pretty straightforward and it aims directly at the target audience. You don’t need any special preparation to send your text messages, just decide what will be the content of your message, then type and send. The delivery is fast and thankfully, telco companies offer a feature that lets you know when your message is delivered. You can even go further to get a third party software that will track and let you know if the target audience read your message, engaged it and did whatever you suggested to them. The fact that most people are always with their phones also makes it more impressive. This means that the chance of them seeing your SMS immediately is high compared to most new-age marketing strategies such as social media marketing, influencer marketing and email marketing even. Let’s take influencer marketing for example. The target audience has to be following the influencer on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any other platform the influencer uses before they will be able to see their marketing campaigns. Email marketing doesn’t require a lot from the target audience yet the target audience can choose to ignore your email just as they do all the hundreds of emails they get regularly.
The takeaway from this is that your SMS marketing campaign will reach your target audience immediately and they will see it immediately too. About 90% of SMS messages get read within three minutes of being received.

Impressive Open Rate

Email marketing is often favored by marketers because of its personalization opportunities, open rate and ROI. What most business owners fail to see is that SMS marketing offers the same benefits and is even better than email marketing when you compare their results. Unlike email marketing open rate sitting at 20%, SMS messages have an open rate of 98%. The reasons are not far fetched, your target audience doesn’t have to be connected to the internet or have a smartphone or PC to receive your SMS messages. Ideal text messages are short and precise, so, that removes the burden of reading a lot of words, which means that your target audience won’t be discouraged from opening your SMS messages. The most important of all still remains the fact that most people are always with their mobile phone.

High Response Rate

Not only are people more eager to open and read text messages, but they are also willing to engage your SMS messages and do what you suggested to them. This is most likely because text messages are often straight to the point and useful to the targeted audience. Keep in mind that your audience will determine what is useful to them, so don’t assume, rather ask them first if they will like to get SMS messages from you before you start sending them. You should also find out what kind of messages they want and when. Doing these will increase your chances of getting a positive response from your target audience. In case you’re interested in the numbers, text messages have a response rate of 45%.

Cost-Effective

Unlike most of the marketing strategies available, SMS marketing is very cheap. It is the best option for business owners and marketers who have a low budget. All you have to do is get the phone numbers of your customers and potential customers and send them messages using the bulk SMS feature of SMS marketing. Remember to seek their permission before sending your SMS messages, as it is illegal to send text messages to people who didn’t give you permission. Sending bulk SMS is way cheaper than email marketing which is probably the next cheapest marketing strategy.

Easy to Set Up

SMS marketing is not only cheap but also easy to set up. As mentioned above, you only need to have the phone numbers of your customers and potential customers to set up your SMS marketing. To make it more effective, and like other marketing strategies, group your contact list into categories based on their unique personalities. With that, you will send the right message that will be read by the recipients instead of having your number blocked. Since SMS marketing is cheap and easy to set up, you have more room to do trial and error. You get to see how people react to your message based on how you coin the message. You keep tweaking until it is perfect and yields the best results.

Third-Party Integration

In this age, a marketing strategy that doesn’t allow integration will definitely be outshined by others. This is one of the reasons why TV, radio, billboards/banners, flyers and other non-digital advertising methods are not marketers’ favorites. While SMS marketing may be non-digital, it allows for integration with other new-age marketing strategies. You can include links to your landing page, email newsletters, social media posts and lots more in your SMS messages. This makes SMS marketing not only a good marketing avenue in itself but also a good complementary strategy for other marketing strategies. You can increase awareness for your social media post by sending the link directly to your target audience with a text message.

Over To You

Making your business mobile-friendly doesn’t have to be complex, it can be as simple as using SMS marketing. Text messaging falls under mobile-friendly strategies and it doesn’t require any special skill or knowledge. When you look at all the benefits as well as its impressive results, it is only right that you too start using SMS marketing to create awareness for your brand.