Mobile phones era has been around for several years now and continues to dominate. A growing number of people have started to ditch their computers and laptops to fully rely on their mobile phones. Though it has seen several advances from analog phones to smartphones, one of its main features remain relevant up to this day – short message service (SMS) or text messaging.
Considered as the easiest form of communication, it is still widely used despite the influx of internet-based messaging platforms emerging in the market. More than its purpose to connect people instantly, it has become an avenue for business owners and marketers as well to reach customers and grow their businesses.
Technology has dramatically improved how you will run your business. This has been possible through the different software that can help your business’ operations run smoothly and successfully. As time goes, the marketing industry has also been influenced by technology thus giving way to what we call now as digital or online marketing. Many companies have seen better days because of this method and oftentimes overshadowed traditional offline marketing activities like billboards, fliers and tv commercials.
Given the effectivity of both SMS and digital marketing, how can you leverage these two to effectively promote and grow your business?
Reasons to Use SMS Marketing in your Digital Marketing Activities
1. Short link Messages
When using SMS marketing and sending messages to your existing and potential clients, it is an excellent way to engage them further by incorporating links to your webpage. The link can be anything that you want your audience to access. It can be any section from your website, special offer, promo of the month or a landing page where they can download an app.
Use URL shortener when adopting this kind of strategy since links tend to be quite long and tagging it along with your message without being shortened is not a good idea and can consume more characters than your message itself.
2. Open Rates
As promotional email messages have been thrown in spam folders more each day, messages sent through mobiles are usually opened. SMS Marketing is amongst the strategies that have the highest open rates compared with any other marketing methods.
Impressively, 98% of messages are opened and read by recipients. People are constantly with their phones and checks it from time to time. Receiving a text message usually grabs their attention which prompts the user to open it and read its content.
3. Response Time
People now spend time on their mobile phones more than they are on their laptops and computers making it faster for them to respond to text messages. An average person checks his phone more than 63 times a day and spends an average of 171 minutes per day.
When text messages are opened, it takes an average of 3 minutes to respond. Not everyone checks on their emails every often and they usually do not respond right away but with SMS, people tend to respond and react straight away.
4. Targeted Audience and Content
Text marketing can allow you to reach a wide demographic reach yet still be able to target your desired audience. You can leverage mass text campaigns to reach your audience with your specific marketing message thus increasing your brand’s visibility and reputation.
SMS Marketing does not only allow you to send a promotional message to your target audience but it also allows you to deliver targeted content that can boost your business even further.
5. Lead Generation
This type of marketing campaign is not only effective in sending and delivering your message across your target audience but also has the ability to grow your lead generation.
A way to increase your text list subscriber is the use of keyword and short codes. Many businesses have been using these to entice customers to know more about their products or services or join their latest promotions.
You may have encountered or come across a message that says, “Text SUNDAY to 2306061 to enjoy a 10% off on your next visit”. This is an example of a message that uses keyword and short codes. In the message, SUNDAY is the keyword and 2306061 is the short code.
These codes and keywords are used to grow your leads and generate subscribers to your texting list.
6. Cost-effective
Despite its effectivity in targeting your audience and sending your message across that have high rates of being opened, SMS marketing is surprisingly cost-effective that provides with large potential of conversion.
Compared to other forms of marketing strategies either online or offline methods like, TV advertisements, paid social ads, or billboards, SMS marketing is relatively cheap. Messages cost only a few cents however it offers a high ROI.
7. Fast and Measurable
When you utilize SMS marketing, it is incredibility fast. After hitting the send button, it will be in your target audience’s mobile phone after a few seconds.
Unlike other marketing methods, SMS marketing can be measured as well. You can easily track how your efforts were doing and even know who opened your messages. You can track web pages you have incorporated in your message by using UTM tagging tools to ease your ROI analysis.
8. Customer Engagement
After doing all your digital marketing efforts, SMS is a great way to reinforce connections and have a deeper engagement with your clients. With competition everywhere trying to grab the interests of your customers and the growing distraction all around that resulted in short attention spans, SMS marketing stands out to help you deliver your message in front of your target consumers.
It can cut through the noise and enrich your relationship with your clients. Aside from promotional messages, you can send to your customers, you can also remind them to join your contest, read the latest content, check out your latest post or send a survey for your brand.
9. Wider reach
Not everyone is connected to the internet every single time. Some people may go to places without an internet connection or some maybe just to be disconnected at time. SMS marketing still allows you to reach these clients even they are not connected to the web.
You can use this opportunity to remind them to check your site or log on to your website or join your online promo.
10. Future Growth
SMS Marketing has been in the market for too long yet it does not show chances of slowing down but rather a great potential for growth. Many entrepreneurs and marketers have already been leveraging on this method and many are leaning to use this method in the coming months.
As more people are seeing the value of this strategy, SMS marketing is expected to be saturated and to be more crowded which means that competition will become tougher. Thus, if you are planning to jump into SMS as your marketing tool to expand your business and reinforce your digital marketing activities, it is better to do it now.
Final Thoughts
It may be an old way of communication but SMS marketing has still a lot of potentials to offer. When done right and when poised to work together with your digital marketing strategies and efforts, it can give you astonishing and big results.
