SMS marketing is often seen as a tool used only by large organizations, but SMS marketing campaigns can help businesses of all sizes grow using this efficient and reliable liaison tool.
Texts are usually read within seconds and get a higher click-through rate, making them an platonic format for consumer liaison and marketing. And consumers stipulate – 75% of people have signed up for at least one SMS newsletter a year.
In this post, we’re going to take a quick squint at some of the variegated ways text messaging can uplift efficiency, make life easier for your customers, and help you reach new audiences.
Why Use SMS Marketing?
First though, why should your merchantry use text message marketing at all? Without all, there are plenty of other marketing options for small businesses, such as social media, email, phone calls, and uncontrived mail.
There are plenty of reasons for companies in variegated industries to goody from SMS marketing. Let’s take a squint at 3 that can have a major impact on any small business:
SMS Is Affordable
Advertising agencies, uncontrived mail campaigns and plane phone calls are expensive. This makes it difficult for small businesses to reach unbearable people through these ways without breaking their marketing budget. In contrast, zillion texting services offer affordable unappetizing rates that let you send thousands of messages on a small budget.
SMS Generates Results
Text messaging works. It works just as well for big corporations as it does for small businesses and nonprofits. Here are just a few examples of small businesses that have found success using SMS marketing tools:
IXICA Communications Inc., a telecommunications service, found that email wasn’t working well as a billings and notifications system. However, by sending invoices by text, they managed to increase the number of customers they reached by 30–40% and at the same time increased the number of invoices that were paid by the due stage by 20%.
ElectricBlu Contractors, a small team of electrician contractors, was worldly-wise to reduce their missed appointments by scrutinizingly 80%, profoundly wearing lanugo on all the financing associated with driving teams out to no-show bookings.
Fort Scott Community College introduced SMS liaison without struggling to get students to read and respond to emails and other liaison channels in a timely manner. Without introducing texting to their liaison toolset, they saw a tenfold increase in the number of responses they got from students. And plane where they did not get replies, increasingly students took whoopee as a result of getting a text. This proved invaluable in helping students resolve issues with their wonk success, attendance, and financial aid.
It’s Good for Consumer Service
People expect unconfined consumer superintendency from smaller businesses. At the same time, they are moreover willing to spend increasingly with businesses that provide largest consumer service. SMS marketing tools make it easier for small businesses with limited staff and resources to requite every consumer a unconfined experience.
13 Small Merchantry Uses for SMS texting
SMS is a useful and constructive tool, but what can small businesses use it for? Let’s take a squint at 16 of the most worldwide and helpful ways that small businesses take wholesomeness of SMS to provide a largest service:
1. Sales Promotions
With an unshut rate of 98% and response rates as upper as 45%, merchantry text messaging is an extremely lulu (and cost-effective) way to promote sales. Furthermore, 78% of those opens are within 10 minutes of receiving the message. In contrast, the stereotype email wayfarers only gets well-nigh half of its total opens within 6 hours.
90% of the time an SMS is read within 3 minutes of receiving the message.
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That makes text messaging the platonic nomination for time-sensitive offers such as wink sales or attracting increasingly customers to your bar or restaurant the same day that you send the message out.
2. Marketing Campaigns
You may have heard of the “rule of seven” in marketing. The idea is that you have to make contact with a consumer using several variegated ways surpassing they will decide to make a purchase.
While the rule refers to seven, how many touches this takes is not as clear-cut. Nonetheless, successful campaigns are supported by multiple channels to send a wider variety of messages. TextMagic´s SMS Marketing campaigns aim to help customers do this effectively.
You can hands pair zillion text messaging with email marketing. By sending out both email and SMS campaigns you can see how people engage with variegated liaison channels. Over time you will build a clearer picture of how and where members of your database prefer to be contacted.
3. Orders
Payment via SMS can make it quick and simple for your customers to pay you. Small businesses use SMS payments to do everything from taking a supplies wordage order to sending an invoice for contracting work. Increasingly than a third of consumers will pay by text, according to a 2020 survey, but only 4% of small businesses offer the option to do so.
Some approaches require the user to set up their payment methods beforehand, such as Domino’s SMS ordering system. Others send customers a short link to a payment processing platform. This flexibility makes SMS payments a viable option for many types of business, whether you are providing one-off products and services or ongoing work.
4. Unbelieve Coupons or Vouchers
Creating unbelieve vouchers and coupons can be a bit of a headache, expressly with all of the sites on the web defended to sharing promo codes that can be used to get money off. These often rely on large networks of bot email finance to gather these codes.
Using SMS inboxes to harvest unbelieve codes is increasingly difficult and increasingly expensive, and as a result, much less common. This ways discounts delivered by SMS are increasingly likely to be redeemed, and increasingly likely to be redeemed by the intended recipient.
That is not the only reason, of course. Emails containing discounts are likely to end up in the junk folder, or overlooked due to the sheer volume of promotional emails in the stereotype person’s email inbox. Furthermore, SMS coupons are easier to use in-store, as customers can hands pull up the text while they are making their purchase.
5. Product Launches
Using a merchantry texting service is an spanking-new way to promote a new product. Using SMS for marketing offers:
- High unshut rates
- Easy linking to mobile sites/app store(s)
- Personalisation if the towardly data is available
Texting is a increasingly uncontrived and personal way to alimony your regulars in the loop well-nigh your upcoming products, expressly if you offer sectional info or early wangle to your SMS subscribers. This tideway works plane largest if you can gather increasingly information well-nigh your leads when they opt in. Knowing which demographics are interested unbearable to sign up, and why they are interested, can help you diamond your product and marketing to request to the right groups.
6. Product Verification/Password Confirmations
Keeping consumer finance and payment methods secure by verifying their identities is a vital part of providing a secure online purchasing process.
Texting provides a user-friendly method of two-factor hallmark (2FA) that anyone can use. 2FA ways that a consumer must provide two variegated types of proof to verify who they are. In most cases, a 2FA system will ask the user to provide something they know, such as a password, and something they have, such as a phone. Typically, the user will be sent a temporary hallmark lawmaking to their phone via an app, SMS, or email, that they enter without their password to prove they have the phone.
A worldwide weakness of 2FA security systems is that they are slow and inconvenient to use. As a result, often people just don’t use them if given the choice.
SMS-based hallmark offers a good level of security while still offering unbearable convenience that people will unquestionably use it. Mobile apps require customers to download and configure third-party software, and email inboxes are much increasingly likely to wilt compromised than an SMS inbox.
7. Appointments/Reminders
Whether your merchantry is a healthcare clinic, a restaurant, online retailer, real manor agent, contractor, or many other types of merchantry – missed appointments, bookings, and deliveries are costing you money.
As a small business, streamlined text reminders can be a lifesaver. With minimal forfeit or time investment, they can profoundly reduce the number of no-shows wearing into your productivity and profits each month.
8. Consumer Support
In recent years, consumers have shown a growing preference for both self-service support options and text-based consumer support channels. In fact, scrutinizingly 70% of consumers would use texting to contact consumer service if given the option. This is considering SMS delivers on both of these fronts.
Customers can get help with simple queries by texting keywords for an streamlined response, and AI-based text chatbots can handle increasingly ramified issues. And when the human touch is needed, you can of undertow text directly with your customers.
Texting has several benefits for consumer support. Customers don’t need to wait on hold for a live wage-earner to wilt available, and your employees can handle many contacts at once. Furthermore, they can start and protract the conversation at times that suit them, instead of setting whispered time for a phone call. In other words, they can quickly trammels for your messages and reply on their work unravel or on the train, picking up the conversation when it is convenient.
9. Short Surveys
SMS survey and polling tools can get much higher response rates than email, as long as you take the right approach. That usually ways keeping it short and simple, such as just one or two multiple-choice questions.
This tideway makes up for in numbers what it lacks in detail. As a result, it is a unconfined way to support your other consumer feedback strategies by helping to identify areas for resurgence or remoter investigation.
Email survey response rates are typically quite low – less than 25%less than 25% seems to be the stereotype – so if you’re struggling plane to hit that, you could think well-nigh implementing some micro surveys via SMS.
10. Recruitment
Both job seekers and recruiters still prefer text-based liaison to methods like LinkedIn, equal to a 2021 study. The same study moreover showed that increasingly than half of all successful job candidates communicated with the visitor via text.
Texting is increasingly firsthand and personal than an email, and is much increasingly likely to be opened straight yonder plane if a job write-in is at work.
And it is much increasingly unpretentious than a phone call, which most people will not be worldly-wise to wordplay during the working day. Plane for work-from-home employers, a phone undeniability from a recruiter can be inconvenient and disruptive to their work.
11. Human Resources
Anyone who’s worked in HR can tell you that many departments are overworked and understaffed. Implementing an SMS gateway can help to lighten the load for your HR team for a couple of variegated reasons.
- Firstly, it’s increasingly efficient than sending an email. Brevity is expected in a text message, and that can definitely work to an HR consultant’s advantage.
- Secondly, we’ve once seen whilom how texting can be used to automate the process of making and adjusting appointments.
- • Thirdly, SMS makes for an easier conversation than email. The latter is drawn out and considered, whereas SMS is firsthand and less formal.
12. Goods Tracking
It’s now the norm for both brands like Amazon, Argos etc. and wordage providers such as Yodel and Hermes to offer wordage updates and tracking notifications. In most instances, this includes SMS.
Instead of waiting virtually all afternoon for a package to arrive, customers can rely on a text zestful to let them know when it is on its way.
Small businesses can profoundly goody from raising this practice. It provides a largest service to your customers and helps to stave inconveniences to your consumer that dampen their wits with your business. Furthermore, missed deliveries forfeit you money in redelivery, consumer service time, and potentially plane order cancellations and refunds.
13. Important Information
There’s a LOT of email spam out there. Provided you’re not too fast and loose with your mobile phone number, the same isn’t true of SMS. You may get the odd unsolicited text message, but, for the most part, text messaging is still a secure option.
As a result, when you need to get an urgent zestful out to your customers, texting is the way to go. Your message will not be lost in the noise of a rented inbox, and customers are likely to see it straight away. If you need to let a vendee know well-nigh a receipt surpassing they travel to an appointment, or request an urgent whoopee from them, texting is a fast way to explain the situation unmistakably and outline the next whoopee you need from them.
And That’s Just the Beginning…
We’ve only really scratched the surface of the variegated ways you can use SMS text messaging to modernize relationships with your customers and help your messaging stand out.
Take a tropical squint at all the variegated components of your merchantry plan and see where there are leaks or improvements to be made. Merchantry text messaging could just be the wordplay you’re looking for, and it’s staring you in the squatter every time you hear your phone ping.
The post 13 Use Cases of SMS Texting for Small Businesses appeared first on TextMagic.