SMS Marketing

There are a lot of different marketing strategies you need to consider to be successful in your industry. Think about your business’s mission and vision, products and services, ads, prices, and discounts. But first, think about your potential customers. ‘Who are they?’ ‘How can you reach them?’ and ‘How can you attract their attention?’ At this point, you have more than a few options, from social media marketing and email marketing to content marketing and integrated marketing. In this article, we are going to talk about one of these marketing strategies: SMS marketing. Let’s start by defining it and mentioning its pros and cons.

What Is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing, also known as text marketing, is described as using text messages in order to promote your products and services. It is also an excellent way to create customer loyalty. That’s why a significant amount of business owners want to combine this marketing strategy with others like email marketing to achieve the best marketing results.

What Are The Pros and Cons of SMS Marketing?

Now, we are going to examine the pros and cons of SMS marketing and try to answer two essential questions: “Why should business owners use this marketing strategy? ” and “Why should business owners avoid using this marketing strategy?”

The Pros of SMS Marketing

1. Open rate is higher than email marketing: One of the most significant advantages of SMS marketing is that the average SMS open rate is more than the average email open rate. The majority of people open approximately 98% of text messages they receive from brands.
2. You can keep the cost low: As you may guess, SMS marketing, compared to other marketing strategies like advertising marketing, is one of the most budget-friendly options. In other sayings, your potential customers can be aware of your products and services with less cost.
3. More potential customers are available: You can touch and contact more potential customers in one go. Why? They do not need an internet connection to read your text messages, unlike emails. A mobile phone is enough to reach them.
4. You can easily track and measure your performance: There are hundreds of SMS marketing services that provide detailed graphical analytics. To give an example, using these online services, you can understand whether your text messages are read or not. In the end, you will know what steps should be taken to reach more customers.
5. It is a flexible method: Text marketing provides great flexibility. You can inform your customers about the rate of discounts, coupons, new products, services, or new stores.

The Cons of SMS Marketing

1. You will have a limited audience: As everyone knows, not all people have a mobile phone, or elderly customers may not know how to use a mobile phone, right? For this reason, you cannot reach people of all ages.
2. If your message is too long, the target audience may not read: You have a limited space to attract your potential customers’ attention. You can’t send them any images, videos, or sounds; you can only use words up to 160 characters. Because of this, every word in your message should be used as effectively as possible. There is one more thing. Keep your messages informative.
3. You may not find a large audience to start with: In this case, the most important question is: “How can you find your target customers’ phone numbers to send them a message?” Also, you should encourage your potential customers to sign up for receiving your messages.
4. You may not catch target customers’ attention: Each message needs to be original and well thought, and you need to find something different; otherwise, people delete messages without reading them.
5. You always need fresh and up-to-date content: You need to keep your text fresh and up-to-date. If you send the same or similar messages repeatedly, your target customers will no longer want to receive a message from you.

Tips For an Effective SMS Marketing Strategy

Well, you have more information about SMS marketing than when you began. Now, let’s look at some useful tips to be more successful in this marketing strategy. If you get permission from people to text them, you will make a good impression on them.

You shouldn’t bombard your potential customers with messages within their working hours. Don’t send your messages too late or too early in the day. You shouldn’t send the same message via both text message and email. One channel is more effective and efficient.

Your success depends on the words you use and how you use them. Each word should be clear and understandable. Remember, you only have 160 characters in order to send a standard SMS message. Ask yourself, “If you were a potential customer, would you like to read the message?”

You should be serious and professional. Avoid making punctuation mistakes and grammatical mistakes. You shouldn’t also use any emojis.
You should provide an opt-out option; otherwise, you will lose your potential customers forever.

SMS Marketing In Short

It is easy to understand why SMS marketing is essential for both small and large businesses. However, like everything else, this marketing campaign also has some pros and cons. High open rate, more available customers, flexible and easy tracking of your marketing campaign success are some of its advantages. On the other side, if your message is too long, customers will not want to read the message and delete it without reading it. Besides, you have to collect your potential customers’ phone numbers in a legal way; otherwise, you may get in trouble. Think very carefully about whether to use this marketing strategy or not. The choice is yours! By the way, if you decide to go with a more relevant marketing method, you should check out Facebook marketing.