April 23, 2018 Posted by Pocketstop in Text Message Marketing - M360 Social Share
In the U.S alone, over 6 billion SMS messages are sent and received every day. SMS communication continues to be one of the most popular methods to get in touch with people on the planet.
Many businesses are utilizing text marketing to develop and execute high performing SMS marketing campaigns that inform, educate, and entertain their key audiences over a platform that is trusted and easy to access all over the world.
The ability to reach customers on a device that is always with them is invaluable. However, text message marketing needs to be clever and well researched in order to be both effective and efficient for businesses.
Because people trust text messaging, they don’t want to be spammed and there is a fine line between communicating and becoming a pest. A line which all businesses need to be aware of when planning their SMS marketing strategy.
Below are some examples of SMS marketing ideas that work and have been a successful part of many businesses marketing and communications strategies. The purpose of this blog post is to give businesses the information needed to know the options available to execute a successful SMS marketing campaign.
Flash Discounts
The flash discount is a fantastic way for a business to offer rewards and opportunities to their loyal customer database. The flash discount works by deciding on an offer related to your product or service and sending this out by way of a discount code to a database of customers.
One particular company that utilized this type of SMS marketing brilliantly is Redbox, a U.S.-based movie and video games rental kiosk. Redbox decided to create SMS marketing campaigns that offered a rent one get one free or a free rental voucher to all their mobile subscribers. The fact that Redbox offers these exclusive deals to their mobile subscribers gives their customers and incentive to opt in for their SMS notifications.
This kind of random incentive can be utilized by many different businesses across a number of different industries. The advantage of this type of offer is that it makes customers feel rewarded and keeps your business fresh in the minds of your customers.
This also gives customers a reason not to unsubscribe from your SMS marketing list.
Appointment Reminders
Appointment reminders are another really useful way to keep customers engaged and informed via SMS. There are many text marketing software providers that offer SMS appointment reminders as part of their software package.
Many businesses can use this kind of SMS notification to their advantage. This includes hair salons, spa’s, gyms, doctors, dentists, solicitors and basically any business where an appointment is often booked in advance for a service.
Many people can forget to list an appointment in their diary or on their calendar. Therefore, by offering them the chance to be reminded of their appointment, you will be doing them a favour and also ensuring that business is not lost should they forget that they have an appointment.
They are truly beneficial to both the client and the business.
Weekly Tips and Hints
A weekly hint or tip is a powerful way to both educate your customers and to keep your business or service in the forefront of their minds.
Almost all businesses can utilize this type of SMS marketing and send a weekly piece of information to their customers and keep them informed and entertained.
It could be a fact, a news update, a link to an exclusive offer, or a useful snippet of information.
It’s important to keep it light, relevant, informative, and following the voice and tone of your overall brand personality. The benefit of this type of SMS marketing is that it offers your customers something useful every single week for free.
This is a valuable marketing asset and should not be overlooked by any business struggling to communicate with their key target audience.
Text messages have a 98% open rate, this is a staggering statistic and trumps email open rates which can be as low as 25%.
Sweepstakes and Competitions
Sweepstakes and competitions are another powerful way for businesses to harness the power of SMS marketing. They can be part of larger marketing campaigns and are a great way to actually keep customers engaged and interacting with your brand.
Sending out a sweepstake or competition to your customer database will make them feel valued and exclusive. You may include a question with multiple choice answers, or a keyword that needs to be sent back in order to successfully entered into a competition.
Two large brands that recently collaborated on a SMS marketing campaign by using sweepstakes are Chipotle and Tough Mudder.
However, you don’t need to be a huge brand to gain traction from this super-efficient way of engaging your existing customer database.
In Store Special Offers
This is a great way to improve foot traffic within physical stores and also to increase customer loyalty for businesses. You may create a text message that offers ‘10% across all stores today’, or ‘$20 off when you spend $100 or more with this text message‘. The main thing is the exclusivity that customer will feel when they receive this text message and also the creation of a sense of urgency.
With any of the above text marketing ideas you can create a sense of urgency and demand by carefully considering both the time constraints placed on offers, and the level of demand that you would like to create.
A simple message saying that the ‘First 100 people to display this message in store will receive 10% discount’ will be enough to create a sense of immediate urgency amongst customers.
However, businesses must also remember that millennials in particular are very tech and marketing savvy. Therefore, marketers must be clever when creating their text marketing campaigns.
Another key point to consider is that people trust SMS messaging and they don’t want to be annoyed with spam. Make sure all messages are relevant and add real value to the customers that are receiving them. Failure to do this could result in marketing disasters.
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