Growing Your Business with SMS Messaging

SMS marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools businesses can use to raise awareness of their product and service, directly communicating with their target audience. From the simple method of creation to the speed in which text messages can be sent out from your business, there are so many cost effective reasons to use SMS marketing campaigns to help grow your business. As with everything you invest time and money into, you’ll want to understand how SMS messaging can help you to grow your business so that you see the direct return on your investment. Below we’ve listed out some of the key ways SMS marketing can help you grow your business, and achieve your objectives.
Get personal
One of the biggest benefits of using SMS marketing to communicate with your customers is that your messages are all direct, effectively reaching the target audience you want to speak to. As you capture your customer’s details, you can get your relationship off on the right foot by asking for a couple of personal details which will help you tailor your messaging – to make it personal and relevant to the person you’re sending it to. With simple segmentation and auto-fill mail merges, you can send personalised text messages to every one of your customers.
This will help your customer feel they’re being spoken to as a person and by a person, increasing the way they feel valued by your business. Sending out blanket communication to your customers, on top of all the messages they already receive from brands and companies wanting their time, is a sure fire way to encourage people to delete your messages and turn off from your company. By personalising your customer text messages, you’ll begin to stand out from the other forms of mass communications your customer’s receive, giving them a more personalised experience of you and your brand. As your customers feel more considered by your brand, they will start to prefer purchasing from you over your competition.
Make it convenient
Text messaging can be used to help remind your customers about appointments, important notifications regarding any accounts they might have with your company, changes to information, or changes in terms in a convenient way. The easier you can make your customer’s lives, and the more time you can save them, the better your relationships will be. Your customers spend their money with you, so in return, they want to feel you’re working on their behalf, by providing additional service to the products they purchase from you.
By adding additional value to the transactional relationships you have with your customers, you’ll be encouraging them to give their repeat business to you, as they enjoy the extra value they get when buying from you. Sending alert or reminder text messages gives your customers the opportunity to reply to you easily if they want to cancel or rearrange an appointment. This offers you the opportunity to rebook any last minute vacant appointments, ensuring the downtime in your business is minimised. This increased efficiency gained from using SMS text messaging will help you to grow your business by decreasing the downtime and money lost through missed appointments.
Offer a benefit
One of the main benefits of using SMS text messaging in your business is that you can directly communicate with your intended audience, making it a highly cost effective and efficient way to grow your business. For your customers, they need to understand the benefit of giving away their personal details before they’re likely to feel comfortable to do so. By offering your customers exclusive benefits through text messaging, you’ll be incentivising them to sign up for communications through that channel. You’ll then be able to directly track and measure the number of people who open and action the information in your SMS text messaging. This will help you grow your business as you are able to monitor how cost effective your campaigns have been so that you can create and send a greater number of effective campaigns.
Improve your relationships
Text messaging can be used for a variety of marketing activity, from promotional campaigns to customer surveys. The greater number of activities you can use your SMS messaging for, the more your customers will become accustomed to communicating with you via the channel. You can use text messaging as a quick, convenient way of generating responses from your customers, to help you to make informed business decisions. For example, you could ask customers about their thoughts on a new service or product you’re intending to launch, you could react quickly to information that’s been published in the news about your company, or use your SMS text messaging as a method of generating customer feedback off an experience they’ve had with your company. In generating customer feedback, you can make improvements and changes to your business or service, which will help to satisfy your customers and grow your business.
Due to the simplicity of using text messaging to communicate with customers, you should use it as a two-way communication stream, encouraging customers to respond to your messages. By using an effective text messaging platform, you can also offer your customers the opportunity of sending texts into your business, to book appointments, which will help to improve your relationships as you offer customers a flexible service. Rather than bombarding customers who don’t wish to participate in surveys with long winded, or multiple texts, you can send a series of text messages only to those customers who respond, which will help to improve relations with customers who feel their opinions are valued and being listened to.
If you’re ready to start growing your business through SMS text messaging and want to ensure you have a cost effective solution which allows you to communicate directly with your customers, improve your relationships and generate more business, contact FastSMS today. With market leading awards under our belt, we are confident we can help your business to exceed your goals, connecting you more effectively with your customers than ever before. For more information, contact us today.
Related Articles
The Ultimate Guide to SMS Marketing for Small Businesses
SMS marketing or short messaging service marketing is swiftly gaining popularity all over the world. Using text messages for business purposes is convenient and quick. It's also extremely cost-effective when compared to other methods of communication. When used correctly, an SMS marketing campaign can do wonders for your business reputation, not to mention your profits.
SMS Marketing For The Equestrian Sector
The British Equestrian Trade Association’s findings from their National Equestrian Survey 2015 put the economic value of the equestrian sector at £4.3 billion of consumer spending across a wide range of goods and services, with the average spend per horse during the same year at £3600. It is an incredibly varied industry encompassing all types of businesses from sole traders making a living in remote areas to multinational companies. Their customer base typically tends to be busy people who lead largely outdoor lifestyles so the obvious and most effective means of communicating with them is by mobile phone, yet very few equestrian businesses appear to be utilising SMS text messaging marketing. So how could businesses in this sector benefit from this method of marketing?
SMS Marketing: Don’t Forget About Print!
The focus for advertising campaigns today is often mobile, web, or digital. It’s certainly true that more and more people are using technology for just about everything. But with all that technology, it’s easy to overlook another, more traditional form: Print!
3 Reasons Your Customers Want You to Use SMS Messaging
In my last blog I looked at five reasons you want to use SMS messaging in your business. In this blog we're looking at the same topic, just from the consumer's point of view. For example, how do you really know your customers want you to send them messages via SMS? Isn't email or a phone call good enough? Is it worth your time to learn how to use SMS messaging in your business?
Why SMS Marketing is Perfect for the Automotive Industry
Most car dealerships and garages already have almost everything in place to start an effective SMS marketing campaign. When customers go into a car garage to have a service or a MOT done, they almost always give the dealership their mobile phone number. The reason for this is simple: if a customer is bringing their car in to get checked and they don't want to wait around for any work to be carried out, they'll simply head into town or run a few errands, until the garage gives them a call on their mobile to let them know the work has been done. That means most garages will have a healthy amount of mobile numbers already in their database, but quite often a garage will overlook the potential that their database of contacts presents.
3 Reasons Why SMS Marketing Is Perfect for the Holiday Season
Everyone knows the holiday season is a peak time for making sales and marketing. Predictions are that the UK will spend £73B in retail stores before the season is over. Find out three reasons you’ll want to use SMS marketing to get those shoppers into your store.
Do Your Customers Trust You?
I think for much of the last decade, people used the Internet and then mobile devices, without giving too much thought about what they were doing. Or more accurately, what other people were doing with their information. But then came Edward Snowden in 2013 who revealed governments were collecting and using our personal data in ways we hadn’t imagined.
How to Increase Retail Foot Traffic with SMS Marketing
Here's a great real life example of how a retailer used text messaging to offer out a discount voucher to customers who had visited their store. Their approach is simple and intelligent and very focused on one segment of their customer base, those who had recently visited a store.
Using SMS Messaging For a Cause is Catching On
As old as SMS messaging is (going on 25), is it surprising to know that for non-profits and political campaigns it’s just now catching on? It might be, but if you think about it maybe it isn’t surprising. Until the last few years, people have been very reticent to hand out their personal mobile number. Now though, they’re more willing – if they care about the source of the messages.
4 Tips for SMS Marketing Success
SMS marketing is one of the most effective and efficient marketing channels currently available, enabling businesses to directly communicate with their target customers. If you're considering building your first SMS marketing campaign, or you have already ran a campaign but achieved limited success, read on to see how you can build an effective SMS marketing campaign to achieve your business objectives.