In this day and age, you’ve probably received an SMS from a brand either to promote a new product or to inform you of an upcoming sale. This is SMS marketing. It is the act of sending messages for marketing purposes to customers using SMS or text messaging as the primary channel. It’s usually used in conjunction with other forms of marketing, such as email marketing. In fact, it’s among the Top 5 Mobile Marketing Trends of 2018.
Although SMS has been around for over 2 decades, many brands have yet to add it to their repertoire of marketing tools. However, it actually offers some advantages that aren’t common to other marketing channels. Here are 3 key benefits of using SMS marketing in your business:
1. High Read and Response Rates
Almost all of us can probably leave the house without our wallet but not without our mobile phone. This is how ingrained mobile is in our daily lives; according to We Are Social, 89% of Filipinos are using any type of mobile phone, with 65% using smartphones. It should come as no surprise, then, that SMS marketing has a 98% open rate and 45% response rate. This means there are more opportunities for lead generation and conversion. One likely reason cited for the high open and response rates is that text messaging has the greatest reach among any marketing medium; after all, 61 million Filipinos are using mobile phones. Internet connection isn’t even required for your target audience to receive text messages.
Not only do 98% of text messages get opened, recipients read 95% of all texts within 3 minutes. This is a very good indicator for improving customer engagement in your campaign. At the very least, awareness of your marketing campaign is achieved when your audience opens and reads your text message.
2. SMS Marketing Offers a Personal and Direct Form of Communication
Deloitte reported that 33% of consumers check their phones within the first 5 minutes of waking up. On average, consumers check their phones over 150 times a day. Combine these with SMS marketing’s higher clickthrough rate (CTR) and lower cost per SMS send (CPS) and you get a very effective marketing channel.
More importantly, SMS offers a direct and personal communication line to the target audience. Unlike email marketing where your emails can be buried deep in the inbox or even marked as spam (alongside over 65% other emails), less than 10% of text messages are spam. This is why it is a more direct way of reaching your target audience since their disposition is that text messages are not spam.
3. SMS Marketing is Budget-Friendly
In the Philippines, you can launch an SMS campaign for just 20 to 50 cents per SMS sent, depending on the total volume of SMS sent. This is very affordable compared to email marketing, given that SMS marketing has higher open and read rates.
Furthermore, there are SMS gateway providers that enable you to easily send millions of SMS using an automated dashboard. Most of these providers have tools that can help you properly segment your target customers, send personalized SMS content, and even send different text messages to customers depending on their location.
You can track the performance of your SMS marketing campaign once you push the text messages to your customer list. You can include promotional codes to improve customer conversion too. Conducting A/B testing is also a breeze. With the built-in analytics tool of most SMS gateway providers, you can easily adjust your campaign to improve the results.
There is no doubt that SMS marketing is here to stay. While more and more people go online, they have not totally left the SMS world. You can use SMS marketing as an enabler for your digital marketing campaigns. You can include a call-to-action in your text campaign where you direct customers to visit your website and get access to great deals and discounts using the promotional codes in your SMS marketing campaign.
So you’re wondering an SMS campaign sounds great, but how do I even get started? If you have your own database, what would come to mind is texting each and everyone of those subscribers one by one. Not only is this inefficient, but it’s also ineffective due to local restrictions on mass sending. A better way to do this is through a platform. If you’re already doing Email and are looking for a way to integrate SMS with that campaign, look no further than Ignite.
With the right SMS marketing strategy and the right people to implement it at the right time, you can achieve higher ROI for your campaigns. Ready to take that step? Drop us a line at https://adspark.ph/contact-us/ and let’s make something happen!
SOURCES:
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https://www.textmarketer.co.uk/blog/2018/06/business-sms/what-is-sms-marketing/
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