Should You Add Business SMS to Your Marketing Strategy?

Marketing strategies are constantly evolving. First, it was cold-calling. Then, it was mass emailing. Now, SMS marketing is making waves as one of the preferred ways to advertise to your leads and customers. But is it effective? Absolutely.

What Is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing involves sending text messages to your leads and customers. You can use them for just about any kind of marketing campaign, including product releases, restocks, sales, and promotions. Broader uses of business texting include customer service, business notifications, order updates, and lead nurturing from successful CTAs.

Why You Should Add SMS to Your Marketing Strategy

In an age where getting the attention of customers is more challenging than ever, business SMS offers a unique opportunity to engage contacts in an intimate form of communication. Texting is often used between friends, close acquaintances, and colleagues, making the average text message more important than an email. Plus, they’re less likely to get marked as spam than emails and are less invasive than calling – something younger people want to avoid whenever possible.

Unlike emails, texts are delivered directly to a phone’s messaging app, often with a notification sound to help get your leads or customers to read the message. As a result, texts have up to a 98% read rate, which means you’re more likely to have your marketing campaigns read through SMS marketing than any other channel. This increased engagement helps contribute to the 500% average return on your investment – 5x your money.

Tips for Using Business Texting Effectively

Business texting is an effective form of marketing, but it’s a bit different than other strategies. There are some rules you must follow and some crucial elements to implement if you want the best results.

TCPA Compliance Requirements

Texting as a business requires you to comply with TCPA requirements, which say that if you want to text a contact, you must collect an opt-in and allow them to opt out of your texting list at any time. Opt-ins must be explicitly collected to send them texts, and the purpose of the texts must be provided, such as receiving marketing texts or using them for updates, notifications, or customer support.

Use Targeting and Personalization

72% of consumers will only engage with tailored marketing texts. If you send generic texts that could apply to anyone, they’re less likely to make an impact and achieve the results you want.

Effective SMS marketing requires segmenting your texting lists into different categories so that you can write texts that relate to them more closely. For example, separating customers and leads ensures you’re not thanking a new lead for their purchase or offering a new customer discount to a loyal customer.

Personalization, like adding someone’s name, loyalty status, order history, or location, can also help improve engagement. You can achieve this by using custom fields that automatically insert the contact’s personal information, allowing you to send mass texts.

Fortunately, most business texting applications include these essential features.

Send Your Texts at the Right Time

Did you know 95% of texts are read within three minutes of receipt? Texting gives you more control over the deliverability of your marketing content, allowing you to send them at almost the same time that they’ll be read. You can use this to offer time-sensitive deals like lunch specials around noon, short-term promotions that trigger FOMO, and texts based on popular events like the Super Bowl. It also makes it easy to avoid texting outside of regular hours for contacts in different time zones.

In many cases, your business texting app also lets you schedule texts to be sent at any time, even when you’re not around, to give you even more control.

Let Watt Media Help You Build A Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

There’s no one-size-fits-all marketing type that will work for every business. Each channel, including SMS marketing, will work differently for your business than someone else’s. The best thing you can do is create a diverse, robust, and versatile marketing strategy that covers as many channels as possible.

At Watt Media, we can help you evaluate and refine your existing marketing strategy or build a brand new one that maximizes your marketing budget using the most effective channels for your business.

Contact us today to learn more.