Gathering Data with SMS Marketing

For businesses across all industries, gathering data is vital to ongoing success. Whether you want to understand the mentality of your target market or use existing customer experiences to tailor future products and services, accessing information is essential.

Actually obtaining this kind of data can be complicated, however. Time is precious and consumers aren’t always able or willing to provide feedback. Whilst companies have traditionally used face-to-face focus groups in order to gather data from consumers, this can be time-consuming and extremely costly.

There are, however, effective alternatives available. SMS marketing has proven to be extremely effective in terms of reach and you should, therefore, be able to contact a large number of people as and when you need to.

It is estimated that over 98% of SMS marketing texts received by the intended recipient and the vast majority are opened within a relatively small timeframe. Unlike email marketing, SMS marketing content doesn’t face opposition from spam or junk filters.

In addition to this, the content of an SMS message is likely to be visible to the recipient immediately. Unlike emails which can simply be deleted without being opened, over 90% of SMS messages are read by the recipient.

Furthermore, most people carry their mobile phones with them and good signal coverage in the UK means that they are accessible at any time of the night and day. As people can respond to your SMS messaging content immediately, whether they’re at home or elsewhere, they are more likely to do so.

How can this data be used?

Although SMS data can be used for a variety of reasons, it’s particularly useful when it comes to gathering insight and increasing customer loyalty. If you want to access feedback from existing customers, for example, you can do this by using business text messaging services.

Often, these feedback requests take the form of surveys and ask recipients to rate the product they’ve bought or the service they’ve received. Also providing recipients with the opportunity to add more information, this is a quick way for companies to get genuine feedback.

As a result, businesses can refine their products and services in order to boost profits. If you ask existing customers how your service could be improved via SMS marketing, for example, you may receive a number of similar responses.

If customers would like to see a larger product range, more delivery options or stores in new locations, they’re able to convey this to you quickly and easily. As a result, businesses can shape their growth strategies in accordance with existing customer demand.

In addition to obtaining feedback via online SMS marketing, you can also use this form of communication to obtain information about your customers. Identifying what values matter to your customers and what entices them to purchase a product or service ensures that you’re able to enhance and replicate this in the future, thus increasing sales.

It’s clear, therefore, that data has a significant impact on the success of businesses. Whilst third-party data is accessible, this can have a limited usage period and may only provide generalised views.

By conducted data gathering via SMS services, however, you can obtain honest feedback from a subject group of your choice and reap the financial rewards that can follow.

Whilst this is valuable in its own right, using SMS marketing to facilitate this data generation also helps to build a relationship with your customer base. The majority of companies seek to increase brand loyalty and there are various ways to do this.

Building a relationship with customers

Incentives and tailored offers, for example, encourage existing customers to make regular purchases and this has a considerable effect on the business’s finances. Rather than simply making these discounts available to everyone, however, you can use an SMS provider to deliver this content to customers within a certain target demographic.

If you want to reward customers who make a specific number of purchases per month, for example, SMS marketing will enable you to do this. Similarly, you can use business text messaging to reward loyal customers.

With many businesses now hosting events and promotions aimed at existing customers, you could even use SMS marketing to send invites to repeat customers and to raise awareness of exclusive brand events.

Whilst companies always want to increase their customer base, the increasing use of the internet and social media means that many businesses also want to build a community around their brand. Particularly effective for companies targeting younger consumers, this can easily be achieved by using business text messaging and working with an SMS provider.

Of course, businesses have different target markets and even one company can appeal to various demographics. As a result, companies may run complementary but different marketing campaigns at one time.

It follows, therefore, that you won’t want to send the same marketing content to every recipient. If you want to alter the content based on the recipient’s age, gender, location or previous purchases, for example, you’re able to do so.

This ensures that you can deliver targeted marketing content to relevant recipients. As tailored marketing is shown to be more effective than generalised content, this should enable you to achieve even better results when you launch new campaigns.

Incorporating SMS messaging into your existing systems

In order to deliver SMS marketing content to recipients, you can use a cloud-based provider to send and receive these messages. Alternatively, you may want to use an API in order to integrate SMS deliveries into your own existing systems.

In doing so, you can send automated messages to customers and you’re able to specify the criteria which prompts a message to be sent. If you want to thank a customer for making a purchase, issue a limited edition voucher code or prompt them to sign up to your newsletter, you can do this easily when you use integrated or cloud-based SMS marketing.

If you want to find out more about developing an SMS marketing strategy, why not get in touch with us today?