For retailers, the hardest part about marketing can be figuring out how — and where — to reach your customers. Enter SMS marketing, one of the best ways to make sure your carefully crafted and personalized marketing messages land directly in the hands of your customers.
Confused about where to start? Keep reading for the ultimate guide on what SMS marketing is, some of the best practices to keep in mind and how to fold SMS messaging into your overall marketing strategy.
SMS marketing is easy to explain: It’s promoting and advertising your business through SMS messages — promotion via text message.
But once you dive beneath the surface of that simple definition, you’ll find there’s actually a lot to SMS marketing and a lot of reasons to add it to your overall marketing strategy.
Let’s take a deep dive into SMS marketing, so you can learn how to make it work for your business.
Absolutely. Some studies have shown that up to 95% of SMS messages are not only opened but also read. This is no doubt quite a step up from your business’ average open rates for your emails, isn’t it?
SMS marketing is incredibly effective, largely because your messages are delivered directly into the hands of your consumers.
But it’s more than ease of access. Text message marketing is tailored to the text message age – messages are short, informative, personalized, and relevant.
That may sound like a lot to pack into messages that are often shorter than a Twitter post, but that’s the punch powering the effectiveness of SMS marketing.
How can SMS marketing help your retail business? Let’s look at some of the benefits of adding text message marketing to your overall marketing strategy.
Emails can languish in inboxes, bulk mailers can get pinned to the fridge and then forgotten, and social media campaigns are only useful if your followers actually catch them on their fyp.
But SMS messages land right in the phone that’s probably in your customers’ hands – and because text messages feel more personal than email, mailers or social media, most people open them quickly.
That immediacy is a gift to your marketing team, and one that bears capitalizing on.
Being able to actually reach your customers is invaluable to your business, especially when you’re focusing on increasing engagement.
While emails and text messages both come right to your customers’ phones, text messages carry a sense of immediacy an email just can’t beat. So when it comes to engagement rates, SMS messages beat emails hands down.
A personalized approach to marketing entails meeting your customers where they are – tailoring your marketing messages to their needs, rather than your hottest deals.
SMS messaging folds into wider personalization efforts by triggering specific messages based on specific actions shoppers take, not just larger blanket messages about sales or restocks.
In doing so, SMS marketing helps create an increasingly personalized experience for your brand, giving you an opportunity to deepen loyalty with your shoppers.
Tracking your SMS marketing campaigns provides you with additional analytics to track customer behavior and engagement, so you can modify your messaging accordingly.
These analytics provide further insight into your customers’ needs overall, revealing trends you may not have otherwise found. Knowledge is power, and the more you know about your customers the better you can serve them.
The immediacy of text messaging does more than put your marketing messages in the hands of your customers faster and more effectively than email or other forms of advertising. It also makes it easier to direct customer traffic to links embedded in those messages, receive feedback via surveys or quick yes/no questions, or spur other desired actions.
Because engagement with SMS marketing is so high, the likelihood of being able to leverage your interactive content is high as well.
SMS marketing is a key part of a broader mobile marketing strategy, delivering personalized marketing messages directly to customers’ most-consulted devices: their phones.
Here are a few tips for creating an SMS campaign strategy that gets the most out of all SMS marketing has to offer:
Knowing what you want to accomplish before you begin is key to creating any successful marketing campaign. When it comes to SMS marketing, you want well-crafted, targeted messages that communicate exactly what you want to say and generate specific customer actions. Three common campaign goals are:
You can, of course, have more than one goal, but make sure each one is clearly defined before you begin crafting your specific messages.
There’s nothing worse than receiving an irrelevant or unnecessary message. Avoid being a source of annoyance to your customers by creating a targeted contact list consisting of people who actually want to receive your messages.
You can even create polls for people to indicate what kinds of messages they do and don’t want to receive. And, of course, make sure your SMS marketing is as easy to opt out of as it is to sign up for.
SMS messages have a set limit of 160 characters, so you have to make each message count. And while at first this limit may feel a little daunting, in reality, it’s a blessing, forcing you to create strong, targeted, well-crafted messages directed at the right customers at the right time.
There are different types of messages, including:
Remember, no matter what kind of message you send, always create a specific message that provides immediate value in some way and includes a relevant, easy-to-follow call to action.
Not all SMS software services are the same, and not every business has the same SMS software needs. Finding the right-for-you fit is important, and to do so you need to focus on price point, ease of automation and creating built-in message triggers, and what analytics you can and can’t track.
Bluecore is an exceptional software platform partner for retail marketing that provides the analytics, automation, and ability to scale you need to capitalize on the power of SMS marketing.
SMS marketing is an extremely effective marketing strategy – but only when you use it right. Keep these 5 best practices in mind as you plan your first or next campaign.
The right message at the right time increases customer engagement. The wrong message at the wrong time does the opposite. And obviously, you don’t want to overload your customers with too many messages, sent too often. But how many is too many, and how often is too often?
Use predictive models to better understand customer behavior and preferences, to make sure you don’t miss the mark with too much – or too little – when it comes to the timing and frequency of SMS messaging.
Again, the right message needs to get to the right people. This is where personalization and segmentation come into play – or rather, having the right analytics to create relevant personalization and accurate segmentation.
Working with the right data management software, you can manage data from every touchpoint and channel at which your customers interact with your business. From there you can create tailored messages to customers, building trust and loyalty in your brand by never missing the mark or spamming their text message inbox with irrelevant messages and offers. Instead, they should get 1:1 messages sent with product recommendations, price drops for products they’ve browsed, and more — the same triggers and 1:1 outreach they expect from email to phone.
A/B testing is an effective way to compare the relevance of your SMS marketing messages with actual customers, analyzing the data in real-time and adapting your messaging accordingly.
But split testing isn’t just for the starting stages of a campaign. It can be useful to test the efficacy of your messaging often, at various stages. Monitor the relevance and usefulness of your SMS messaging by continuously evaluating how they’re being received by your customers.
Sending out messages via SMS individually is, at the least, tiresome and at the most, completely unmanageable. Instead, use automation to tie the right messages to the right behavioral triggers. That way your messages get to the right customers, without you having to manually send each and every one. And automation helps you create more fully realized SMS campaigns by letting you program in an entire campaign’s worth of messages at once.
Before you add a bunch of customer names and phone numbers to your campaign list, you must ensure your campaign is fully compliant with all legal regulations.
The first major regulation is getting customer consent before your message, spelling out exactly what they’ll be receiving, and, again, making the opt-out option easy to find and take.
Be sure to familiarize yourself with all SMS-related legal regulations before launching your campaign. Being out of compliance can tank a campaign before it even really gets off the ground.
A basic SMS marketing campaign consists of regular texts about upcoming sales, discounts, offers, and other simple messages. If you’re ready to try something a little more advanced, consider the following techniques:
As noted, automation is every marketer’s and business owner’s friend. But automation can do more than just take the “send a mass SMS message” off your to-do list. You can add triggers to have specific messages sent after specific behaviors. This can include welcome messages after someone first signs up to receive your messages, appointment confirmations, and even refill reminders.
Just like the chatbots you find on websites, SMS chatbots take the place of a customer service agent in answering simple queries or holding brief conversations with your customers via text messaging. You can program your chatbots to be able to answer your most frequently asked questions, as well as connect customers with the right contact or department for further information.
The most effective marketing strategies work together, across media and channels, to build your brand, engage with your customers and increase sales. Not only does this create a more cohesive experience of your brand for customers, but the analytics pooled from various marketing efforts will also create an ever richer understanding of customer behaviors.
By siloing your marketing efforts, you run the risk of creating campaigns that just don’t align with what your customers actually expect from your brand. Creating a coordinated experience helps you understand where your shoppers are most likely to engaged in a cross-channel journey.
Including “click here” links in your SMS messages is an effective way to encourage your customers to further interact with your website, and brand. But it’s important to make sure the links you provide are live and will successfully link your customers to the right website page, product page, or other location.
And again, make sure you link to pages with relevant products or service information to maintain the overall relevancy and personalization of your messaging.
In two words, the future of SMS marketing is; personalization and automation. Ever-increasing personalization is the biggest trend of marketing in general, especially online, and with that need for increased relevance comes a need for more and more efficient automation for marketers wanting to keep up.
With the right software and analytics, automation is relatively easy to incorporate. When it comes to SMS marketing, creating triggers linking the right messages with the right behaviors means your customers get highly personalized and relevant messages right when they need them most.
No. SMS messages are fairly cheap to send, and with the level of engagement they can create with your customers your ROI is potentially quite high.
Yes, as long as you do it right. Over- or under-utilizing SMS messaging can make or break your success with this marketing technique. Too many or irrelevant messages annoy customers, and not enough messages to stay relevant render it useless. It’s about finding the right balance for you and your customers and making each message personal to them
SMS marketing allows you to send short, direct, personalized, and relevant messages directly to your customers’ phones. The messages can offer access to limited-time sales or discounts, ask for participation in surveys or encourage customers to visit embedded links to your website or product pages.
An SMS marketing platform is a service that allows you to send large amounts of SMS messages to their customers. This could be an app, software, or a service that a company provides to marketers and business owners.
To sum it all up, SMS marketing is an incredibly effective marketing technique, one that’s useful to most kinds of businesses. SMS messages have higher open and engagement rates than email, and because they’re by necessity shorter you end up delivering more relevant information in a shorter amount of time.
Incorporating CTAs and SMS landing pages engages customers further, and utilizing chatbot technology to handle basic queries makes SMS marketing even more effective. With the right software and automation, SMS marketing can be integrated into your other marketing channels seamlessly.
For more information Marketing SMS, Cloud Call Center, Voice SMS Service, please get in touch with us!