Message Received: Mastering the Art of SMS Marketing
According to statistics, every second person uses a mobile phone 4–5 hours a day. Every year this indicator is steadily growing and at the same time the volume of purchases made using a smartphone is increasing. Experts predict that in 2024 more than 85% of e-commerce orders will come through mobile devices. Therefore, the task of attracting and retaining this category of customers is becoming increasingly relevant for businesses of any size. Given the high relevance of the topic, we have prepared a detailed article on SMS marketing. From it, you will learn what this direction is and what advantages it has, as well as get acquainted with the best practices and top SMS marketing trends 2023.
What is SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is a type of digital marketing that uses short text messages to send advertising and marketing content. Today, there are more than a dozen main types of such campaigns. With their help, you can notify clients about the following events:
- novelties and catalog updates;
- discounts and promotions;
- special and limited offers;
- seasonal sales;
- individual offers/discounts/bonuses;
- registration/sending/delivery of the order;
- successful registration on the site, service or application;
- feedback request.
In addition, SMS messaging is suitable for many other communication formats. They allow you to send greetings to new users, holiday greetings, abandoned cart reminders, incomplete payments (usually sent along with links to the payment page), authorizations, account changes, and so on. In general, all formats of such messages can be easily divided into three broad categories:
- Advertising/marketing/information.
- Transactional.
- Service.
The former are aimed at attracting, involving and informing both existing and potential customers. The second and third are triggers. They are designed to notify about interaction with the client (creating or changing the status of an order, delivery information, and so on).
Modern technologies have significantly expanded the possibilities of SMS marketing compared to those that were available 5–10 years ago. Today, entrepreneurs can send messages (up to 160 characters) with text and emoji to users. A promising variety of it is MMS marketing, which allows you to create mailing lists with multimedia content of various types: pictures, video, audio or GIF files.
Given the enormous potential of this type of digital communication, brands from various business areas are paying increased attention to the development and implementation of SMS marketing best practices. After all, this is a very convenient and functional channel for flexible management of interaction with existing customers and the target audience.
Benefits of SMS Marketing
SMS marketing has many advantages that distinguish it from other marketing communications tools. The key is versatility. It can be effectively used by companies of different levels (small, medium, large businesses) from many fields of activity. Other benefits of SMS marketing include:
- High level of involvement. The effectiveness of SMS campaigns is much higher compared to email campaigns, as they do not face spam filters and other similar restrictions. Such posts have a very high engagement rate. According to statistics, users open and read more than 90% of SMS within a few minutes after receiving. However, sending messages too often has the opposite effect.
- Speed and performance. Modern technologies make it possible to prepare and conduct mass SMS mailings as quickly as possible. You can be sure that the sent messages will be delivered to the phones of many subscribers around the world in just a few seconds.
- Large audience coverage. Unlike other digital marketing channels, SMS allows you to easily and quickly deliver messages directly to users' wearable devices. They do not need to install additional programs, register email addresses, accounts in instant messengers or social networks to receive your message. This means that SMS marketing reaches a wider audience than email newsletters and other communication channels.
- Availability for the advertiser. Another important benefit of SMS marketing for business follows from the previous point. Its essence lies in the fact that it is much easier and faster to prepare and conduct effective SMS mailings than other types of online marketing campaigns. At the same time, you do not have to further segment the audience and study which part of the users will see this newsletter, and for whom it will not be available for one reason or another. It is not relevant, since everyone has mobile phones and they can all receive SMS messages.
- Relationship with other types of campaigns. Although SMS campaigns are effective on their own, they also work well with other online marketing formats, significantly increasing the performance of each. For example, you can send SMS messages with links to promotions, contests or sales on your social media pages. No less useful are SMS with links to subscription pages, event pages, and so on. Properly conducted SMS-mailing will help you increase the number of subscribers to your email newsletters.
- Value for money. SMS campaigns are characterized by high profitability. Preparing and conducting such mailings requires minimal costs compared to other online and offline marketing formats. However, their performance is often much higher than that of more expensive campaigns. Therefore, SMS messages are in great demand among small businesses.
Key SMS Marketing Strategies
There are several key strategies in SMS marketing today that are directly related to the purpose of the messages sent out. Before proceeding to their consideration, let's outline the main types of SMS campaigns:
- Promotional messages. This is the most common type of marketing SMS. It helps to attract and engage the audience, introduce brands and products. Most of the message formats listed in the first section of our article refer specifically to promotional content. With their help, business informs customers about new products, discounts, promotions, sales, bonuses, special offers.
- Transactional messages are the second most popular type of SMS messaging. They notify customers about various technical aspects of interaction with the company. This includes transactional messages about placing/confirming/sending/delivering an order, with payment details, and so on.
- Service messages. This type includes those messages that are somehow related to servicing existing customers: outgoing SMS mailings from the support service, mailings with feedback requests (link to the questionnaire, page with reviews). An equally important component of this segment is the processing of incoming SMS from users.
Now you can go directly to SMS marketing strategies. The following trends are considered relevant today:
- Individual discounts and bonuses. Through SMS, you can effectively send personalized mailings with discounts, bonuses and other promotional offers to a selected audience. For example, for new or regular customers. High rates of deliverability and open rate of SMS-mailings will ensure the maximum effectiveness of such campaigns.
- Announcements of new products. Another powerful strategy involves sending short, concise, and intriguing SMS alerts about new product or service releases. You'll make them even more effective with segmentation, targeting these messages primarily to customers who have previously purchased or viewed products from the same category.
- Trigger mailings are one of the most popular SMS marketing trends. They allow you to qualitatively attract and engage the audience through trigger messages. This is a large group of mailings, which includes abandoned cart reminders, notifications about discounts and seasonal sales, assortment expansion, items viewed/added to the cart (which were not available before), and so on.
- After sales communication. A smart approach to SMS messaging includes more than just marketing or transactional/service messages. There are also a number of other formats that will help the brand to remind about itself through pleasant and/or useful information for the client. These include, for example, birthday or other holiday greetings, invitations to online or offline events, membership anniversary reminders.
Case Studies of Effective SMS Marketing
We suggest you familiarize yourself with examples of successful SMS marketing. Let's start with what areas of business get the most benefit from this format of marketing communications. These include:
- Online shops. SMS mailings are a real must-have for them, as they help to effectively interact with potential and existing customers at all stages of cooperation.
- Travel companies and travel agencies. Thanks to SMS, the travel industry can quickly convey to customers information about last-minute tours, individual offers and various technical issues (flights, transfers, visas, weather, and so on).
- Service companies. SMS-mailings effectively notify and remind customers of the reservations they have made. They optimize business performance by reducing no-shows or late arrivals.
- Medium and large businesses with more than 100 employees. Such enterprises need tools for operational internal communication. SMS-mailings will be a suitable solution for this. Notification SMS will help a business to always be in touch with its employees, informing them about important things much faster and more clearly than through email, instant messengers or other communication channels.
Now let's highlight some of the most notable SMS marketing case studies:
- HBO. The company's marketers have prepared an original personalized promo mailing for the next episode of the Game of Thrones series. By launching it to the target audience, HBO gained over 70,000 new subscribers, and the promoted episode reached 18.6 million viewers.
- Airbnb. A popular private rental service uses SMS to promptly inform hosts about booking requests for their apartments, houses, or rooms. According to Airbnb's rules, the host must accept the guest's request within 32 hours of receipt, or it will be automatically rejected. Hosts do not always see and read email notifications about requests within the specified period, so the service began to duplicate them via SMS, which helped reduce the share of auto-refuses.
- Pizza Hut. The company launched an SMS campaign offering a free big pizza by texting FREEPIZZA to their short number and following a few simple steps. During the week of the promotion on social networks, Pizza Hut collected 160,000 leads with phone numbers and email addresses.
- Dell. One of the largest brands of computer equipment is actively using SMS to inform customers and confirm orders. The company claims that 98% of the SMS it sends are read within 4–6 minutes of being sent, compared to just 22% of its emails.
Best Practices and Future Trends in SMS Marketing
We have already discussed the main marketing trends 2023 and how you can use them to optimize your newsletters. Meanwhile, you'll get another collection of marketing tips to help you run effective SMS campaigns, as well as learn about SMS marketing trends that may become relevant in the near future.
Remember about opt-in
SMS mailings will be effective only if the user wants to receive such messages. Before adding a new contact to the mailing list, you should ask for permission to do so by sending the appropriate request. Also, the audience should be able to unsubscribe from certain mailings of your company.
Consider timing
Most people read SMS almost immediately after receiving it, which distinguishes them from other mailing formats. This is considered a key benefit of SMS marketing, but does not give a reason to abuse the attention of subscribers. Therefore, when preparing mailings, you should not only correctly prepare the content of messages, but also choose the optimal time for sending them.
Always introduce yourself
As a rule, SMS providers send marketing, transactional and other mailings via a short digital code. Therefore, most often, subscribers do not see by the number who exactly sent them a message. To avoid confusion, we recommend that you indicate the name of your company or brand directly in the header of the SMS message or in its first sentence.
Call-to-action and links
This is a must-have. Always place a call to action (CTA) at the end of every promotional post. This will help increase its effectiveness by providing the audience with additional motivation to perform targeted actions. Also, don't forget to add a link to your website, social networks or other resources there to improve the context and traceability of SMS campaigns.
As for the future of SMS marketing, experts predict the following trends will spread:
- Advanced personalization. Every year, SMS marketing will become more personalized and more flexible to adapt to the client. Perhaps soon, the distribution of the same messages to a mass audience will become a thing of the past. Instead, subscribers will only receive mailings with individually tailored products, promotions, discounts, and so on.
- AI targeting. Audience segmentation and campaign targeting will be performed using artificial intelligence technologies. In addition, AI will begin to analyze the behavior and preferences of the audience. This will help make SMS marketing more relevant and effective.
- Two-way communication. In the future, SMS campaigns will become more interactive, which will help them engage and retain customers more effectively. At the same time, subscribers will be able not only to receive information, but also immediately respond to it through outgoing messages. No less promising is the trend associated with SMS chatbots, which can be used for operational support and user service.
- RCS. The RCS (Rich Communication Service) technology developed by Google is rightly called the SMS of the new generation. Integration with modern messenger applications greatly expands its capabilities. Using RCS, you can send not only text, but also a lot of interactive content: images, videos, GIFs, notifications and much more.
- Automation. The use of special tools for automation will greatly simplify the work with SMS services. Marketers can set up integrations with systems such as ClickSend, BulkSMS, Twilio, and more to increase the speed and effectiveness of SMS campaigns.
Summing Up
It is not in vain that SMS mailings are considered one of the most effective digital marketing formats with an optimal cost-to-result ratio. With their help, companies and brands can flexibly interact with their audience by sending them different types of messages.
By listening to useful SMS marketing tips, you will significantly improve the results of your campaigns. We have shared the most important and universal of them in this article. Remember that SMS marketing does not stand still, but is developing rapidly: new promising trends and technologies are constantly emerging and spreading in this area. All this makes it user-friendly and profitable for businesses of various spheres and scales.
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