Growing your business is all about finding ways to widen your reach but refine your touch. Social media and search engines are great for reach, but personalization is tough. Email is great for personalization, but inboxes are crowded.
SMS marketing is the perfect solution for this, giving you wide reach but also the ability to deliver customized messages to your target audience on a channel they use all the time. In fact, Americans check their phones 96 times per day.In this post, we’ll go over the basics of SMS marketing, why content marketers love to use it, and how to use SMS marketing to create a marketing campaign.
What is SMS marketing?
Short message service (SMS) marketing is a form of marketing that businesses use to send promotions to customers via text messages. In other words, SMS marketing is the same thing as text marketing. Like email marketing, SMS marketing is opt-in, which means customers need to sign up for it.
Though SMS marketing boasts of out-of-this-world engagement, it’s important that marketers still put effort into this marketing strategy to ensure that their customers actually convert. Here are our top five SMS marketing tips and best practices.
1. Don’t bombard – SMS messaging allows you to reach your customers wherever they are, whenever. But that doesn’t mean you should. If you text them too much, this may break trust and cause churn. The sweet spot for SMS marketing is 3 messages per week.
2. Keep it simple –
When prospects and customers opt-in to text message marketing, they are giving you their trust. Don’t break it with long messages and spammy clickbait language.
The best SMS marketing messages are short, provide relevant information, and cut the fluff.
3. Segment & personalize –
Don’t send the same text message to your entire customer base. You want your customers to feel like they’re part of something special, not just another number in the crowd. There are plenty of simple tactics to personalize your SMS content:
- Greet them with their names.
- Use conversational tone.
- Recommend products and services based on their purchase history.
- Cater the messages to their particular persona.
- Send exclusive updates.
An exclusive restock alert text to your loyal customers with the product in their purchase history is a great way to make your customers happy and feel like they’re getting VIP treatment before you alert the general public.
4. Try loyalty programs –
Using SMS marketing to promote your business’s loyalty program is an awesome way to engage and retain your customers.
Some of the best loyalty programs involve rewards for purchases, such as a free drink at a coffee shop or 25% off a future purchase if they spend a predetermined amount in a set amount of time. Offering these incentives is a temptation that many customers can’t refuse.
5. Leverage surveys and reviews –
Feedback is the cornerstone of any good business. Customers like to know that you are actively listening and trying to be better for them, plus you can even turn feedback into high-converting ad copy.
One way to use SMS marketing for feedback is to ask for a review on the platform of your choice with a link to that platform.
