SMS Marketing Explained: How to Skyrocket Sales via Text
What is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is a direct and impactful communication strategy that utilizes text messages to engage customers, promote products, and drive sales. It stands out for its immediacy, high open rates, and personal touch.
Common Examples of SMS Marketing include:
- Promotional Texts: Sending special offers, discounts, or sales promotions to encourage purchases.
- Event Alerts: Informing customers about upcoming events, webinars, or in-store happenings.
- Loyalty Programs: Rewarding frequent customers with exclusive deals or points via text.
- Order Updates: Providing real-time updates on order status, shipping, and delivery.
- Appointment Reminders: Sending reminders for upcoming appointments or reservations.
- Feedback Requests and Surveys: Soliciting feedback or customer reviews after a purchase or service.
- Contests and Polls: Engaging customers with interactive content like contests or opinion polls.
Key Benefits of SMS Marketing
SMS marketing offers several compelling advantages that make it an invaluable tool for businesses looking to increase sales and maximize their marketing ROI.
High Open Rates
Text messages have over a 90% open rate, ensuring your message gets seen. The high open rates of text makes SMS marketing an attractive channel compared to email and other forms of advertising.If you’re sending targeted marketing messages, you can expect sky-high engagement rates as well.
Immediate Impact
SMS is instantaneous, delivering your messages directly to the hands of your customers. Not only is this great for marketing, it’s also why SMS is practical for emergency alerts and customer service.
Personalized Communication
SMS allows for personalized messaging based on customer data, making each message relevant and personal. This approach enhances customer experience and can lead to higher conversion rates than generic messages.
Cost-Effective
Compared to traditional advertising or digital marketing channels, SMS marketing is relatively low-cost. Its high engagement rates also contribute to an impressive return on investment.
Trackable Metrics
Delivery rates, open rates, and response rates can all be tracked in SMS campaigns. These metrics provide valuable insights for optimizing future campaigns and understanding customer behavior.
How to Get Started with SMS Marketing
Step 1: Choose an SMS Marketing Platform
Before you begin, you’ll need to sign up for a text message marketing service. If you don’t already have one, you can sign up for a free trial with Textedly - it comes with your very own 10DLC number and a keyword to start.
Textedly comes with all the advanced SMS marketing features you need to run a successful and scalable SMS marketing campaign.
Step 2: Create Your First Campaign
Once you’ve created an account, it’s time to start building your first campaign and writing your text messages. Standard SMS messages have a 160 character limit, so you’ll need to be concise.
Here are a few tips for writing SMS marketing messages:
- Be Concise: Keep your messages short and impactful.
- Have a Clear CTA: Include a clear call-to-action in every message. This could be a link to a new product or a text keyword to learn more information.
- Personalize When Possible: Personalized messages lead to better engagement and conversion rates. Include the contact’s name and other relevant information to make your message stand out.
If you get stuck, Textedly has a collection of optimized SMS templates for business.
Step 3: Choose a Keyword
Text keywords are words or phrases that customers text to trigger an automated response. Keep your keywords simple and easy to remember.
Step 4: Create Your Message
After selecting your keyword, you can start composing and scheduling your text messages. Standard SMS messages are limited to 160 characters.
Step 5: Launch Your Campaign
That’s it! You can send your message immediately or schedule it in the future. After it’s launched, you can check on progress with Textedly’s report dashboard.
SMS Marketing Best Practices
Obtain Consent
Texting customers without their permission can lead to hefty fines and liabilities. Always get permission from recipients before sending them SMS marketing messages. This can be done through opt-in forms, checkboxes, or clear consent language during the sign-up process.
Provide Clear Value
Ensure that your SMS messages offer value to recipients. Whether it's exclusive discounts, valuable information, or personalized offers, make sure your messages are worth receiving. Always have a clear goal with every SMS marketing campaign you send.
Identify Yourself
Clearly identify your brand or business in the SMS message, so recipients know who the message is from. Use a consistent sender ID or name that they can recognize. If customers can’t recognize your name or number, they might delete or not read your messages.
Personalization
Whenever possible, personalize your SMS messages with the recipient's name or other relevant information. Personalization can increase engagement and conversion rates.
Segment Your Audience
Divide your SMS subscribers into different segments based on their preferences, behaviors, or demographics. This allows you to send more targeted and relevant messages. Segmenting your contacts list is easy with Textedy.
Common SMS Marketing Examples
SMS Coupons
Text coupon codes straight to your customers (or potential customers) that they can use online or in-store. Remember to use codes that aren’t easy to guess. This prevents non-subscribers from stealing codes (which can muddy your campaign data or deter subscription).
And you need to make it as easy as possible for subscribers to use your SMS coupon codes. For example, you can give subscribers the option to add codes to their digital wallets.
Loyalty Programs
Want to keep your subscribers coming back week after week? Build out a loyalty program that’s exclusive to your subscribers with rewards and incentives. What large companies tend to do, is promote a shortcode you text “APP” and it will send you a link to download their app, containing in-app purchases and a rewards dashboard.
With small to medium size businesses, they text promo codes directly to the user. This rewards repeat customers with discounts and free products at established milestones.
Alerts & Notifications
SMS isn’t just for customers, it’s for group members and staff too. Cancel a soccer tournament or a meeting. For HR, you can notify office staff of a building closure, a fire drill, and other emergency updates with a couple of clicks.
Surveys
People want to share their opinions. And when you text a subscriber with a poll or survey, you'll likely get a 10% - 15% response rate - that's higher than the average 7% - 9% for email surveys. SMS survey is the ideal channel for subscriber feedback.. All you have to do is make it as easy as possible for someone to answer your questions.
SMS Marketing Templates
You’re probably already familiar with the many types of businesses that use SMS marketing. You can check templates for most of them here or to keep handy, get our master SMS templates download.
Final Thoughts
SMS marketing can be a powerful tool for any business when used correctly. Remember to follow best practices like getting consent, being concise and including clear value to your text messages. Adding SMS to your marketing channels is a surefire way to create better relationships with customers and increase sales.
Want to get started with SMS marketing? Textedly offers a free 14-day trial where you can get set up and start creating your campaigns. Learn more about how to get started.