What is SMS marketing and why you should try it

SMS Marketing is a mobile marketing strategy that uses Short Message Services (SMS) or text messages to convert leads and improve customer relationships, help you to attract new clients, create personal connections with them, and ensure their loyalty to your business.

For starters, what is SMS marketing?

For a long time, people believed that SMS was dead because it’s been overruled by more modern messaging systems, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and what not.

If we refer to commercial messaging, it appears that SMS marketing has been taking over for a long time since it’s creation: it’s free, it’s not personal, and it allows plenty of rich media (videos, photos) that can be linked within a single message.

On top of that, it allows a lot of very useful features for delivering tailored messages and measuring results to optimize campaigns. In a few words, they give a lot of valuable information that you can use to perfect your marketing and improve your conversion.

A lot has been going on through the years, and while messaging tools were evolving and giving birth to new and innovative ways to communicate, the marketing SMS has been also improving, silent and steady.

What Are The Benefits of SMS Marketing?

Here are some of the key benefits you can get through this marketing procedure:

1. Amazingly High Open Rates

Did you know that email notifications of business advertisements only have a 21.10% open rate? For any SMS marketing procedure, that rate is worryingly low and indicates that most clients are actively choosing not to engage with your business advertisement in any way.

On the other hand, marketing SMS notifications carrying the same general message have been shown to have an open rate of a staggering 98%. That is a huge difference in the response of the target audience and indicates that your clients are eager to listen to what you have to say.

By using a well-planned SMS marketing strategy, you can draw in much more new customers and encourage them to engage with your content.

2. Keeping Track of Your Clients

With the help of SMS marketing campaigns, your business will easily be able to keep track of the responses of all your clients. Keep tabs on which clients are choosing to view your messages and respond enthusiastically and which of your clients do not seem to be interested at all. 

A few metrics help you comprehend how good your ROI is and if your SMS marketing is actually working.

• Check how much it costs per subscriber.
• Keep track of how your subscriber list is growing.
• Keep an eye on how many people are responding to your CTA.
• Monitor the people that are unsubscribing.
• Calculate ROI to determine the effectiveness regularly.

Tracking of your audience in this way will allow you to think about what factors in your marketing strategy might be attracting your clients and what needs to be changed to entice those who were previously uninterested in what you had to say. 

3. Instant Gratification

One of the key advantages of using SMS marketing is that it grants instant gratification to both you and your clients. It is quick and easy, and clients can access all the necessary information you want to promote your business with just a few taps on their phone.

According to several studies, the best time to send an text message notification to your clients is between the standard business hours of 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., keeping office rush hours in mind, when your clients will not be disturbed.

Be sure to send your SMS notifications at a time when your clients are most likely to respond to your advertisements with genuine enthusiasm. Once you get the timing right, your clients will be interested in viewing your text message and responding immediately, thereby granting instant gratification to you and themselves.

4. Creating Personal Connections

In contrast to emails and pop-up notifications, which may often feel impersonal and bothersome, if not downright unwanted, text message notifications feel much more authentic and allow you to craft personalised messages to initiate a feeling of the close connection between you and your clients.

By using this technique of personalising your messages, you will be able to attract more potential customers, who will be drawn in by the integrity of your business and its authentic care for customers.

What Are Some Dormant Issues With It?

Apart from the good side, you can also find difficulties in the SMS marketing campaign. Below are two common situations that most businesses end up being in when they start adapting SMS marketing.

Limited Characters

This is something a lot of the business struggle to cope up with. But within 160 characters, it is possible to deliver the message unambiguously if you know the way.

Luckily Octopush service offers the possibility of delivering your message in a 764 characters, ask to our representative how to take advantage of this feature.

Permission from Customers

Before spamming or sending customers message offers, you should seek permission or offer them the option to subscribe. They will be more inclined if the instructions and content materials are explained to them beforehand.

What’s The Best Texting SMS Marketing platform?

Now that you are aware of the many benefits of SMS marketing, I’m sure you are eager to apply these techniques in your own business.

To initiate your SMS marketing strategy, your business will require SMS marketing platform. 

SMS marketing software is simply software that provides you with the opportunity to advertise your business to clients via text messages.

As a SaaS (Software as a Service) SMS marketing platform, Octopush is the best SMS marketing software for you to try out.

Through this SMS marketing software, Octopush provides text messaging services across the world in over 196 countries and is well-known for its excellent service.

10 Things you can do with text message marketing

As we said, text message marketing has been evolving. If you thought that text-messages were just that old fashioned telegram-like text with rudimentary functions… think twice.

Here you have 10 things you can do with text messages that you probably didn’t know you could:

1. Send bulk SMS to a large amount of contacts: reach your entire database with a single click.
2. Trigger SMS notifications automatically when a given event happens: keep your customers updated and informed.
3. Receive SMS and chat with your audience: have conversations with your audience and learn from their needs.
4. Include multimedia content like photos and video: expand to more than just text and send more compelling messages.
5. Include URL to redirect your reader to dedicated landing pages: guide your audience to a specific page of your website for more information.
6. Transform a text message into voice message: explore beyond text into automated virtual calls.
7. Create segments with your audience: to send your message to the right people.
8. Include merge-tags for personalization: nurture the bond with your audience.
9. Measure open rate, click-through rate, churn rate, and more analytics: learn from your campaigns’ results to improve.
10. Create automatic workflows according to reader’s response: let your customers self-help themselves and lower the need for human intervention from your side.

Some statistics about SMS Marketing

Now that you know how SMS has been evolving in the last decades, let’s explore how the tendencies and practices of both, businesses and consumers, have been changing.

23 billion text messages are sent each day worldwide. (Source: SMSeagle)

There are 7,5 billion people in the world, so the amount of text-messaging that is happening nowadays would be like if every person of the planet would send 3 SMS daily. Far from being dead, we can say that text-messaging is very much alive and present in the life of most of the people on this planet, which leads us to the next statistic.

Researchers predict 6 billion people will send and receive SMS text messages by 2025.

As the number goes up, we can rely on the fact that SMS Marketing will continue to be relevant in the future, and what’s more, it will actually increase.

SMS messages have a whopping 98% open rate and 90% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes.

These are probably the main competitive differences between text-messages and email: SMS open rates are nearly 5 times that of email. The open rate for an SMS is 70% higher than the one of emails, which is on average of about 20%.

The average person takes 90 seconds to reply to an SMS message — but 90 minutes to respond to an email. Moreover, SMS messages have a 209% higher response rate than phone, email, or Facebook.

Another competitive advantage that text-messaging has over email and other regular channels, and we could add that, of that percentage of people that do reply to SMS, 95% do it within the first 3 minutes of receiving.

48.7 million people will choose to receive business SMS messages in 2020.

From a consumer perspective, SMS appears to be a desired channel of communication with brands that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

More than half of consumers prefer contacting customer support through text. Those who get SMS marketing messages are 40% more likely to convert than those who don’t.

This is something very easy to prove: just integrate SMS to your customer channels and compare the results. Even if it’s for a while, it’s worth trying to give your customers what they’re asking for.

20% of market leaders plan to use SMS marketing more.

With all that we’ve explored about SMS, it seems like a good choice to make. More and more, we’re seeing top-quality services and products offering integrations with SMS gateways and providers, so we can say with confidence that those plans are pretty much being executed at the present moment.

(Source: https://techjury.net/stats-about/sms-marketing-statistics/#gref)

How it works: making of Your First SMS Marketing Plan

After all we’ve seen and learned so far about SMS Marketing and its advantages, the next logical step would be: how to put all of this into practice?

And though sending text messages might feel very simple, we shouldn’t forget that this is not some friend we’re texting to: this is a marketing strategy with a defined goal. Therefore, we should take it as such and drive smart campaigns that will bring us results.

Here you have a list of 10 basic steps to come up with a powerful SMS Marketing campaign for your business. If you’re a complete beginner, we recommend you take some basics marketing course.

And before you start, just a little advice: take this structure and adapt it to your own business. Like us, businesses vary a lot from one another, so take these steps as the grounds of your campaign and change it to your needs. Experiment, take risks, document your processes and learn from your results to know what works best for you.

How to make an SMS Campaign

1. Define a sales funnel for your business: your sales process from beginning to end.
2. Create buyer persona profiles.
3. Distribute your opt-in message for your SMS campaigns in all your marketing channels.
4. Grow your list of subscribers.
5. Segment your audience according to your sales funnel and your buyer personas
6. Define a marketing goal and create a plan accordingly.
7. Write the messages for your campaigns, set your campaigns and launch. You can sign up with Octopush and receive free SMS for you first campaigns.
8. Analyze the results.
9. Optimize, iterate or suspend your campaigns according to what you’ve learned from your results.
10. Run some experiments on the side to try new approaches. Read some use cases for inspiration.

Octopush’s Contributions In Making SMS Marketing Work

Octopush has been striving to make SMS marketing flourish for a long, long time now. It is one of the most reliable providers that will make you believe in the concept of achieving success through SMS Marketing again.  

With integrity, we live on our sole purpose to make your business meet marketing objectives and to help you engage and communicate with your valuable subscribers at every step of their journey with your business.

Octopush offers beneficial texts to attract new and old customers and to keep them loyal to your business concept in the long-run. We generally offer various discounts, complimentary gifts, and coupons to go with your marketing campaigns.

Sometimes, the platform includes exciting contests in promo offers to keep customers engaged and on the edge of their seats. 

Lastly, our low price rate entices international clients from over 196+ countries to use SMS marketing to promote their businesses. On top of that, our premium packages are both affordable yet attractive, as they allow businesses to send around 300 bulk texts at once for a super affordable price within the U.K.

The price rate for our services vary outside of the U.K, but you can expect it to be just as affordable and effective.