SMS is an abbreviation for short message service, better known as text messaging. Although SMS is most commonly used for personal communications, businesses are quickly realising that it’s also a powerful marketing tool that can complement an existing strategy.
Read on to learn more about what SMS marketing is, how it ties in with email marketing, and how it could help your business.
What is SMS marketing?
SMS marketing involves communicating with customers through text messaging. It’s a strictly opt-in service; sending SMS marketing communications without consent violates privacy laws, so make sure you have a robust sign-up system in place.
This opt-in requirement does signal that people who sign up are open to incentives to further interact with or buy from your brand, so they should be receptive. In fact, research by marketing and communications experts Gartner found that marketing text messages have a massive 98% open rate.
SMS messaging can be used within a broader marketing strategy and offers a valuable way to get your message directly in front of warm leads.
How can you use SMS marketing in your business?
You can use SMS marketing differently to suit your business model and sector. Let’s look at some specific examples of how hospitality, medical and retail businesses could utilise SMS marketing.
Hospitality
- Advance reminders of bookings
- Discount codes or links to upsell an add-on service
- Link to a feedback form
- Incentives for repeat bookings
Medical
- Appointment reminders with a link to confirm, change or cancel
- Advise patients/clients of special instructions before their appointment
- Link to a feedback form
Retail
- Time-sensitive special offers or discounts
- Loyalty reward offers
- Shipping updates
- Feedback surveys
Implementing SMS alongside email marketing
Many of the popular email marketing platforms, like Zoho Mail and Active Campaign, provide the option to add SMS marketing to your campaigns. Depending upon the provider, this is either through a native platform solution or integration with a third-party tool, like Twilio or BulkSMS. Some email service providers (including Mailchimp) require you to set up the integration yourself, which does add an additional element of complexity to the process.
If your email service provider doesn’t offer SMS marketing, you can also go directly to the third-party provider to set up your SMS campaign.
If used well, email and SMS campaigns can complement one another and reinforce your brand messaging. You can send detailed information and complex images via email, followed up with short reminders and updates via text.
Although it’s possible to send lengthy text messages, it’s best to be as brief as possible. As well as negatively impacting user experience, longer messages may also cost more to send. Twilio recommends no more than 320 characters per SMS.
Other considerations
At the moment, relatively few companies use SMS marketing. That means most customers receive a limited number of marketing messages, so the texts don’t feel intrusive or overwhelming. In contrast, their inbox probably receives multiple marketing emails daily, so yours could get lost in the noise. Now is the ideal time to capitalise on the ‘novelty’ aspect of SMS marketing before your competitors do.
As with all marketing methods, SMS marketing does have its drawbacks, the main one being cost. Although you get the benefit of high open and click-through rates with texts, you can expect to pay more for an SMS campaign than for its email equivalent.
And finally, remember that your customer or lead has given you the privilege of accessing them directly by text message – respect this and limit texts to a handful per month for the best chances of avoiding high opt-out rates or overstepping privacy laws.
If you’d like help integrating SMS marketing into your strategy, we’d be happy to help. Send us a message or click below to use live chat.
