The first text/SMS message was sent exactly 30 years ago – in December 1992. Today, around 270,000 text messages are sent worldwide daily. This tool has quickly gained traction due to obvious advantages – especially convenience and speed. Millions of companies use SMS marketing to communicate with both current and potential customers. Let’s see what you should know about this strategy.
Estimations are over 5.3 billion people (over 67% of the global population) own a mobile device. This number is steadily growing, although the growth rate rarely exceeds 3% per year. What IS dynamically growing, though, is cellular data usage. As of January 2022, monthly data consumed by an average mobile device exceeds 11GB (compared to slightly over 7GB in 2016):
Cell phones are no longer for texting and making phone calls. They are true entertainment and business operations centers. Plus, consumers have their smartphones with them almost always, making them a perfect communication tool. It is likely 100% of your customers use a smartphone or at least a mobile phone. Therefore, adopting SMS marketing to your strategy can significantly boost your brand’s exposure and help build long-term customer relationships.
The specificity of SMS marketing
In theory, everything is cut and dried – you have a message to send, so you send an SMS (or, as it’s usually called, a text message). In practice, though, you have to take more questions into consideration.
THE CONTENT OF YOUR MESSAGE
Today, you don’t have to limit yourself just to written content. Thanks to MMS, you can also add pictures, emojis, and even animations to your messages, making them more appealing to receivers. But you cannot go overboard; your message cannot be too long or overloaded with visual content. As our experience shows, it’s best to stick to one main communique and keep your message short (three or four sentences max).
WHEN SHOULD YOU SEND YOUR MESSAGES?
Again, in theory, you can send them all day long. However, you are on thin ice here. First of all, no one wants to receive marketing messages in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. You should test different options and see what time and day of the week works best for your customers. Take a look at this chart of Instagram engagement (the majority of users enter this social media platform through their mobile devices). It shows you can expect the highest attention in the middle of the day and week:
It can be a good reference point, but you still need to conduct some tests, as the results will differ between companies. After several SMS marketing campaigns, you will be able to tell when is the best time to send text messages.
DON’T SEND TOO MANY MESSAGES
SMS marketing is a very fragile tool. Although we use our phones almost 24/7, we don’t want to feel like companies make the most of this fact. Sending too many messages with result in just one thing – annoying your customers. They will quickly consider you an aggressive seller and spammer. And you surely don’t want either of these labels.
What’s the perfect amount of text messages? You can safely assume that one/two messages per week are enough. Of course, provided you have something vital to say.
MAKE YOUR TEXTS USEFUL
Just like with any other communication tool, you ought to think about what’s important to your customers, not to you. Ensure every SMS you send has something beneficial/valuable to convey. Giving something for free, e.g., free delivery or a small discount is a good practice. You can also think about giving knowledge (inspirations, practical advice, personalized suggestions) for free; that’s also always welcome!
OBTAIN NECESSARY CONSENTS
You can’t just decide to start SMS marketing and send mass campaigns to hundreds of your customers. Under GDPR (as well as other personal data protection regulations), you need their consent to do that. Usually, companies ask for such consent at the beginning of cooperation, when signing the agreement with the new customer or when finishing the first order. If you don’t have such permissions in your database, start by obtaining them. You can use our GDPR manager to help you with that.
What can you use SMS marketing for?
This technique comes in handy every time you want to convey something short. In practice, this refers to the following possible applications:
- Rescuing abandoned carts
- Informing about new promotions/products
- Distributing promo codes/vouchers
- Informing about the order status
- Informing about new stores
- Reminding about the ending contract, etc.
Make the most of your SMS marketing
To truly benefit from SMS marketing, you need tools to streamline work. Thanks to iPresso, you can benefit from two useful solutions: automation and personalization. Both are paramount in the text communication world.
AUTOMATION
Sending text messages to hundreds of customers manually is ineffective, to say the least. iPresso enables you to automate your text messaging campaigns. With our SMS tool, you can:
- Set up automatic scripts as reminders about upcoming events, e.g., a webinar, trade show, or conference
- Send discount coupons (e.g., on a given customer’s birthday) or information about current promotions (e.g., related to Black Friday or Christmas)
- Create automatic SMS campaigns with information about the planned delivery date and more.
In fact, you can use automation scenarios to create a whole list of rule-based campaigns where messages are sent in response to your customers’/users’ actions. Take a look at our campaign creator:
PERSONALIZATION
For text messaging to be effective, it has to be tailored to each of your customer’s profiles and interests. That’s what personalization is all about. With this technique, you don’t send the same irrelevant message to hundreds of customers. On the contrary, you use available data to craft relevant and interesting messages, making them more appealing and, as a result, effective.
Again, that’s something we can help you with. Take a look at our SMS creator, enabling you to personalize your texts:
Start SMS marketing with iPresso
With our platform, you have access to everything you need to start and benefit from SMS marketing. What is more, iPresso has been cooperating with key SMS providers from the Polish and foreign markets for years, meaning we can offer seamless service and high deliverability wherever your customers are. Our platform will also help you gather and manage permissions from your customers (our solution is 100% GDPR-compliant).
Do you want to know more? Take a look at our SMS marketing offer and start a free trial today!
Leave a Reply