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
SMS Messaging Makes Going to the Cinema Easier Than Ever Before
My family doesn’t go to the cinema often, but when we do, I dread the ticket line. So I almost always purchase my tickets online if we plan to go during a busy time, or for a newly released movie. Paying for the tickets is always easy, but getting them at the cinema can be problematic. Enter SMS.
Work 24/7 Without Being in The Office! The Benefits of SMS Scheduling
In our demanding, 24/7 world it is difficult to stay on top of your SMS marketing campaign but with scheduling you can ensure you are getting your message to your audience whatever the time.
Avoiding Fraud on Mobile Coupons in Your SMS Marketing
SMS coupons have redemption rates ten times email coupons. Averages run around 30%, but they could be as high as 45% for personalised messages. Even with those great numbers, retailers can still lose money to fraud. Find out how make sure customers only redeem your coupon once.
Do This One Thing and You’ll Improve Your SMS Marketing ROI
SMS marketing is not quite like most other marketing. You have such a limited space to get your point across, just 160 characters, more or less. It’s not unlike having to create a print advert for a small space, but somehow it can seem more intimidating. That’s why sometimes it seems like marketers forget one basic rule about writing offers: Always lead with the offer! Sounds simple, right?
Proof SMS Messaging Gets Results: Increase Traffic
One retailer increased their online mobile traffic by 93% year over year using SMS messaging. Another increased foot traffic by 21% after adding mobile coupons to their marketing. Do you want to know how? Find out in our blog on increasing traffic with SMS messaging.
What Makes a Great Call to Action in an SMS Message?
Marketing messages, whether in print or electronic have many parts to them. In the beginning there’s the hook that entices someone to continue reading, and near the end is the call to action. That’s where you make it clear what you want someone to do after reading the message. There are many parts in between these two, but these are, arguably, the two most important.
In Store SMS Service Could Improve Sales
Have you ever been inside a Walmart or ASDA Supercentre? If you have, you’ll appreciate the possibility of what I’ll share in a moment. If you haven’t, try imagining walking into a store so big you can barely see one end from the other, where the shelves are packed with everything you might ever need, and staff who are often less than helpful (not everywhere mind you, but often). The point is you can get lost or frustrated if you’re trying to find a certain item that you need, or is on sale. Finding the right section is sometimes challenging, and even if you think you’re in the right spot you might not be.
Drive Up Attendance During Festival Season with SMS Messaging Part 2
Festival season is upon us! Experienced festival organisers predict that to be successful you need more than just music. You’ll need to offer an experience to your attendees. In the last blog I covered some of the reasons for that, and ideas on how to start building your SMS marketing list before your festival begins. In part 2, we’ll take a look at how to use SMS to create engaging experiences for attendees while they are at your festival, and even after they leave.
Technology And Text Messaging Support In-Store Shopping Experiences
Shoppers are very tech savvy. Even when they shop in store they are using their mobiles to do price comparisons, look up reviews or post on social media. And while your customers are busy using tech, your store needs to be using it too. SMS is one of those technologies that can really enhance the shopping experience whether your shoppers are in store, or not.
5 SMS or Mobile Facts You Need to Know
So many of us are used to having our mobiles around nearly 24 hours a day that it’s easy to forget it’s still a growing industry. And though SMS has been around for over two decades, the ways we use it and people’s willingness to use it continues to grow. So for this blog I picked out five facts about mobile and SMS that really make the case that SMS for business has come of age. Let’s see if you agree.