SMS marketing
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What is SMS marketing?
SMS Marketing is sending promotional campaigns or transactional messages for marketing purposes using text messages (SMS). These messages are mostly meant to communicate time-sensitive offers, updates, and alerts to people who have consented to receive these messages from your business.
How does SMS marketing work?
SMS marketing messages are sent from “short codes,” as opposed to full telephone numbers. These short codes are typically 5-6 digits, and can be associated with one sender, or shared across multiple senders.
Many countries (including the US) do not allow sender information to be altered. This means your message will appear as a text message from whatever short code your provider used (not from your business). That is why it’s important to include your company’s name in the message.
There are two message types you can send with SMS marketing:
- Campaigns: Campaign messages are the classic “one-to-many” bulk text messages. They are typically used to communicate promotions (coupons, sales, etc.), or general information (event details, updates, weather alerts, etc.).
- Transactional: Transactional messages are “one-to-one” messages that are triggered by a certain event or behavior. An example of this would be an order confirmation or shipping notification for an e-commerce purchase. These messages communicate relevant and timely information to an individual.
What is SMS marketing used for?
SMS can be used in a number of different ways. I will share with you some of the most common use cases to give you a better idea of what you can do with SMS and how it might help your business.
Short-term promotions for retail or e-commerce businesses
Coupons and promotions are an excellent way to drive more people to your store or website. If you are conducting a limited-time sale or promotion, you obviously want as many people to hear about it as possible.
SMS is a great channel to communicate these offers, especially if you want to let customers know while they are on the move. That way you can be sure that they don’t miss out because they didn’t get the message in time.
Urgent updates about events or customer orders
There are a lot of moving parts that go into planning and executing an event. The more people you have attending the event, the more challenging it becomes to communicate the necessary information to everyone.
With SMS, you can easily communicate any changes, cancellations, general information, or updates with better real-time engagement than email or other channels.
Appointment reminders
If your business runs on scheduled appointment times, then you know the frustration of having clients forget appointment times and showing up late. Even more frustrating, is when clients fail to show up at all.
Not only does this throw off your schedule, it wastes your time. It means that you may have turned down other appointments because that appointment slot was taken. Sending reminder text messages is a fantastic way of making sure that people don’t forget their appointments and show up at the right time.
Internal alerts
If you have a large number of employees, it can be hard to communicate urgent messages (office closures, emergency updates, etc.) to everyone all at once. You can send them an email, but they may not see it (I know I don’t check my work email too often outside of work). SMS is a great way to guarantee that everyone receives your message on time.
Who can benefit from using SMS marketing services?
Text messages can be a great addition to your digital marketing efforts regardless of what business type you have. They serve the unique function of communicating very urgent information in a highly reliable way.
But, there are certain businesses that cannot live without SMS in their marketing strategy:
- E-commerce stores : Whether you’re sending a promotional campaigns, or order/shipping confirmations, SMS is a great tool for e-commerce stores.
- Travel companies : SMS is essential to travel companies because customers need real-time information. This includes flight time updates, gate changes, cancellations, weather alerts, and many more. With SMS you are able to tell customers exactly what they need to know, without having to worry about if they will see it in time.
- Service businesses that require appointments : Make sure that your clients never miss another appointment by sending them SMS reminders. This will save you tons of time and money wasted on no-shows and late appointments.
- Large organizations with 100+ employees : Internal communication is important, but it’s hard to communicate with every employee in a large company. For urgent information, email is too slow. Using SMS for your internal communication is the best way to ensure that every employee gets the information you want to send them at the right time.
Can SMS marketing work for your business?
Only one to find out – test it on it your audience! If you’re already using email marketing (or considering it), try including SMS in your strategy.
Now you should have a better idea of what SMS marketing is, and why it is great. Here’s a quick recap of some of the pros:
- Reliable delivery
- Direct line to the customer
- High engagement
- Compliments your email marketing strategy
If you sign up for Sendinblue, you can send promotional and transactional SMS messages from the same platform as your email marketing campaigns.
