Yes, You Can Get More Customers with Text Message Marketing

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Traditional advertising can be rather hit-and-miss. The point is to cast a wide net, getting your message out to a large audience of people who will drive past your billboard every day, or see your television spot, or glance at your ad in the newspaper. In a perfect world, your customers would engage with traditional advertising, and you wouldn’t have to spend money on it in the hope that a mere fraction of those who see it actually act on it.

We don’t live in a perfect world, but with text message marketing, you can get the direct messaging and high levels of engagement you can’t get with traditional forms of advertising. Consumers trust text message marketing, and that’s why marketing texts have a 98 percent open rate. You can use this advertising channel to get time-sensitive messages out to your loyal customer base, directly contacting only those customers who you know are interested in your products and services.

Text Message Marketing Boosts Customer Engagement

Customers simply don’t engage with most forms of traditional advertising. When an ad comes on TV, customers get up and go to the kitchen to look for a snack. They may drive right by your billboard every day for weeks or months without really seeing it. They aren’t even that interested in other forms of mobile marketing, like email marketing. That’s why marketing email open rates are so low -- only about 20 to 25 percent of marketing emails get opened, and it’s probably safe to say that a substantial portion of those opens are performed by accident.

But people check their texts right away. FCC rules require you to get customers’ express written consent before you can send them marketing messages via text, and that means that customers who sign up for your text messaging service are doing it on purpose because they want to get those text messages. They’re already interested, active, and ready to engage before you even send your first message. And those customers are all but guaranteed to open and read your text messages within 15 minutes of receiving them. You can even use polls, surveys, and other interactive elements to boost engagement with your marketing texts.

It’s a Great Way to Advertise Time-Sensitive Offers

Maybe you own a restaurant and want to get butts in booths for your daily lunch specials. Maybe you’re running a flash sale or a limited-time promotion that your customers need to know about.

Other forms of advertising don’t give you the flexibility to send out time-sensitive offers to customers on the spot, but when you enlist the help of a mass texting service, you can quickly and easily send out time-sensitive offers to your interested customer base. That means you can send out a mass marketing text about your daily lunch special at 10:45 a.m., and expect customers to start showing up right away. Customers who are already in the area will see your time-sensitive offer and may impulsively decide to act on it.

SMS Marketing Is More Effective than Traditional Advertising

Unlike traditional advertising, SMS marketing allows you to target a demographic that has already opted into receiving your text messages -- there’s no need to cross your fingers and just hope that your radio or TV spot, billboard, Facebook ads, or newspaper ads hit their mark. Texts often feel urgent, and that encourages customers to open your texts right away. They may not always click on the link in the text or take advantage of your offers, but you can rest assured that almost every customer on your list will at least see your text message within minutes of receiving it. That’s a lot more assurance than you’ll ever get from more traditional forms of advertising. About 45 percent of your text messaging campaigns will generate a positive return on your investment.

You can combine your text message marketing campaigns with other channels, too, to cover all your bases. For example, you can use text message marketing to amplify the reach of your email campaigns and improve email open rates by 20 to 30 percent, by simply reaching out to customers asking them if they’ve seen your recent email.

SMS marketing can also build customer loyalty because those marketing texts don’t get lost in the shuffle of a cluttered email inbox -- and they definitely don’t go to a spam folder. They go right to your customer’s SMS messages, and when customers see that your messages have value, they’ll develop more brand loyalty.

If you’re looking for a way to bring in new customers and foster more loyalty among old ones, it’s time to try text message marketing. More and more companies are seeing increased customer engagement and sales when they implement SMS marketing, and there’s no reason yours couldn’t be among them.

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