SMS marketing is the strategic and deliberate use of the mobile phone SMS channel to deliver messages to a targeted population. SMS messages (AKA text messages) often come with a link to a purpose-built landing page on your website. Perhaps the most interesting fact about SMS as a platform is that it is more accessible than email…
...yes! It still commands more attention from the 92% of Americans who look at their phones daily, without fail.
Then there’s the impressive open and response rates – within 100 seconds from a recipient seeing a text.
Compare that to the 90-minute average with email and you have an iron-clad reason to create an SMS marketing strategy.
This post will expose 5 SMS marketing strategies.
1. Start with SMS API Integration
Even with just 100 customers, the idea of sending everyone regular SMS messages gets complicated.
You’d have to remember each customer to avoid the embarrassment of calling them by someone else’s name (which is really the least of things that could go wrong).
Starting with SMS API integration makes so much more sense. That’s assuming you already have a CRM acting as a home for all their information and interaction history.
How this helps will become more apparent as you keep reading this post. Suffice to say, it makes sending out messages in bulk as easy as pressing a button.
The next thing on your mind once integration is out of the way should be the messages you send and who gets to see what.
2. Personalize SMS messages
One reason SMS attracts attention is how you can personalize interactions. Create personalized campaigns for specific customer subsections for the best outcomes.
The first step is to group your customers using several factors:
- Customer purchase history – What they bought (or didn't buy) helps start a conversation about your products. Use data-mining to associate their purchase with other products they might like.
- Their product life-cycle journey – Sending customers messages toward the end of their subscription can help keep them on board. Customers early into their journey matter too. You can increase their confidence in your business through simple yet deliberate communication.
- Their interactions with your business – Customers who interact with your support and sales departments would appreciate SMS follow-ups to that activity.
3. Use SMS to increase loyalty
The more personal your SMS marketing messages, the more thought and emotion you ask from your customers and their responses. That’s always a good thing for your business as customers become more loyal to your brand.
Better still, you could create loyalty programs and campaigns to push out using SMS marketing. This could be anything from offering incentives to customers when they take up a particular product or service, to offering something back for more transactions.
You can also use responses to update any information you may not have about your customers. This further helps with targeting them with more personal campaigns in the future.
Each time a customer calls in, this information also makes them feel important. This makes them less likely to look elsewhere for the services you provide.
4. Use SMS for Customer Service
Great customer service is a stealthy yet effective marketing strategy.
Before they call you, you can apply the SMS platform to customer service. Since you already know what service and products they’re using, you can send specific FAQs about such.
This strategy solves their problems before they arise. Combining this with self-help portals lifts the burden on your contact center immensely.
5. Measure your SMS Marketing effectiveness with texts
After all this, you still need to measure how well SMS marketing is working. To that end, you can also apply text messages on different kinds of campaigns..
You can query your customers to measure the following metrics;
- Customer Effort Score – Ask how easy it is for customers to get their way when interacting with your business through text messages.
- Net Promoter Score – Ask your customers how likely they are to tell their friends about your business. You’ll learn a lot through this.
- Customer Satisfaction – On a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied are they with your customer service.
These are just a few of the many ways SMS Marketing can help businesses improve. Down playing the effectiveness of text messages when everyone has an active communication device is not a good move.
Are you using SMS marketing the way we’ve discussed above or there are strategies you feel give better results? Be sure to share with other readers using the social media buttons below.
About babelforce
babelforce is a global cloud communications platform focused on No-Code integration and automation. It allows non-technical people to build even the most complex integrated processes for customer-facing teams, particularly in the call center.