Holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day are great opportunities to increase sales or improve your brand image. It’s during these times that your customers want to give love — and feel the love. As such, creating effective campaigns for the holidays is a must for marketers. And one important channel that marketers should use is SMS.
Why Use SMS Marketing for Your Holiday Campaigns
There are some misconceptions about SMS marketing that make marketers hesitant to use it. But the numbers don’t lie: with over 5 billion people owning a mobile phone, you can reach out to almost anyone in the world. SMS is accessible and it is such a simple way to communicate that 95% of SMS sent globally is opened within the first 180 seconds.
During the holidays, people are ready to spend but may not have a lot of time to think of what to buy. You can help them make that purchasing decision through your SMS marketing campaigns.
How Do You Use SMS Marketing to Get More Sales During The Holidays?
Running a holiday SMS campaign can be as simple as informing your clients of promotional offers for the holidays. You can create a more entertaining text message with the use of emojis too.
The simplicity of its call-to-action is part of its charm. No need for any complicated sign-up process – your customers can just show up, show the text message, and get a discount on the spot. This kind of SMS marketing is best for in-store visits especially when used with location-based services such as Near.
For businesses that are purely online, SMS marketing also is a great tool to use. Link up your CRM with an SMS gateway provider and you can easily do a lot of things to drive up sales.
You can target your customers who abandoned their shopping carts and offer them a promo code. Yes, you can do this with email but it shouldn’t stop there. Remember that the open rate for SMS is better than email. So take advantage of this and use SMS for your remarketing campaigns. You’d be like Santa Claus giving presents in the form of discount codes via SMS.
Now, don’t limit your campaign to discount codes to your own products. You can also use SKU rewards in your holiday SMS marketing campaign to reward loyal customers. You can use bCODE to enable your customers to redeem rewards from Starbucks, Jollibee, SM Cinema, and other establishments by scanning the bCODE with the establishment’s barcode reader. A simple thank you gift like this one can incentivize your customers to visit your website or one of your stores.
You can also use SMS raffle to dish out entries for every successful purchase of your product. Take a look at how Unionbank did this:
Not only does this give out raffle entries through SMS, they also effectively put a clear call-to-action at the bottom of the message.
Finally, you can use free load SKU to reward loyal customers with free mobile credits that they can use for calls, text, or to surf the net. While this might seem like a simple reward, it adds a lot of value to your customers and in essence, promotes brand loyalty even more.
Ready to start planning your holiday SMS campaigns? Make them even stronger by linking them with email campaigns. Read our article on how to supercharge your campaigns with holiday emails, and be the next best thing to Santa Claus.
SOURCES:
FastSMS (December 23, 2016). 3 Reasons Why SMS Marketing Is Perfect for the Holiday Season. Retrieved from
https://fastsms.co.uk/blog/holiday-season-sms-marketing.html
Bantigue, A. (August 2018). 3 Creative Ways to Use SMS for Your Brand. Retrieved from
https://adspark.ph/creative-uses-branded-sms/
Wisniewska, M. (December 11, 2017). Merry Christmas via SMS – how to prepare a breakthrough Holiday campaign. Retrieved from
https://www.smsapi.com/blog/how-to-promote-holiday-offer-sms-can-be-helpful/
Sopova, A. (December 24, 2015). SMS Marketing at Christmas: Have You Been Doing It All Wrong? Retrieved from
https://www.apifonica.com/blog/sms-marketing-christmas-2015.html
Krumins, C. (November 23, 2015). Maximize Your Holiday Sales With SMS This Christmas. Retrieved from
https://thehub.smsglobal.com/maximize-holiday-sales-with-sms-this-christmas
