5 Reasons SMS Marketing is Ideal for Retailers

SMS text messaging is one of the most effective marketing tools you can use to raise the profile of your business, communicate with your customers and send direct information to the people you most want to target. It’s a highly cost-effective way to reach customers as most people carry a mobile phone on them every day, and SMS text messaging doesn’t require your target audience to have a smartphone.

It’s quick and easy to pull together an SMS campaign, and it doesn’t require input from designers or lots of planning for the copy you’ll use in your message. You can easily segment the messages you send to different customers, ensuring that you personalise your communications to make them relevant to each individual.

If you work within the retail sector, SMS messaging presents several opportunities for you to reach and connect with customers, with the aim of generating increased sales. For some of the main reasons SMS marketing is ideal for retailers, read on below.

Exclusive offers

One of the best reasons for retailers to use SMS text messaging to reach their customers is to offer them exclusive offers and discounts on future purchases. By recording your customers’ mobile phone numbers, you’ll have much more direct access to them, compared to if you rely on speaking to them when they visit your store. You can pick up on your customers’ shopping preferences, such as in-store or online shopping, which will help you to better define the way you send offers and discounts to your customers in the future. Do they want a text that they can show in store to receive a discount? Or a unique code they can enter online? It will help you to understand where you should focus your marketing budget, based on the behaviours of your customer base, which you can track through the response to your SMS messages.

Customer satisfaction

You can review and measure the experience your customers have in store through SMS messaging, asking them to complete a quick customer satisfaction text exchange once they have made a purchase. By encouraging store staff to capture your customers’ phone numbers, you can react immediately to the time they’ve spent in store, sending a text message and asking them to feedback whether they had a positive or negative experience. It will help you to review the performance of your different stores and collate feedback for each of the store managers about customer experience. If you’ve created in-store activation spaces or held events, you can send text messages to your customers immediately after to understand whether they found the event enhanced their experience of shopping with you. This will provide feedback throughout the business to help justify or cancel future spend on certain in-store activities.

Stock updates

If you run an eCommerce platform (if you don’t, you probably should!), then SMS text messaging can be used highly effectively to keep customers up to date on stock volumes. If certain items are out of stock, you can ask customers to leave their phone number and inform them they’ll receive a text update once the item is restocked. This will help to improve customer relations, as they won’t have to miss out on items that they really want, and can be alerted as soon as the item is back in stock. It will also help to encourage purchases, which will lead to increased revenue – as customers are reminded of an item they wanted, and are likely to want to purchase it even more as it wasn’t available first time around. Put a time limit on the stock update text messages you send, or state that a limited number of the item has been restocked, so that customers feel an urgency to purchase too. This also saves your customers time and effort as they don’t have to search your website, return to a store or call you to see whether the item is available again, which will help to increase the value-added service you provide your customers.

Shipping and delivery

Another great reason to use SMS messaging if you work within the retail industry is to communicate up to date shipping and delivery details to your customers to make them aware of the progress of their order. This will help you to reduce the number of failed deliveries your company makes, which can produce huge cost savings. It will also help to improve your customer relations – because people are aware of the timings of their shipment, they will feel reassured their purchase is on its way to them and will have a by the minute understanding of when they can expect their items.

Focus groups

Retail companies who use SMS marketing effectively also use the platform as a sort of focus group. They can pose questions to certain segments of their customer base to generate insight about the business. If you’re thinking of opening a store in a new location or offering a new product, SMS text messaging can be a great way to gather feedback from customers about whether they think your plans would be of interest to them. In your earlier stages of product development, or before you launch a new store, this information could be highly useful and may save you a lot of time and money.

If you work within the retail industry, whether you own business, or work in a marketing capacity for a retail business – then SMS marketing should be in your plans, if it isn’t already. From generating customer insight, to improving customer relations through exclusive discounts and information about by-the-minute inventory re-stocks, SMS text messaging could revolutionise the way you connect with your customers. To speak to a market leading SMS platform provider, contact FastSMS today to see how we can help you. We develop our software in-house so you are always working with a market leading system, using the latest technology available. Call us today on 0800 954 5305 or click the chat button.