When it comes to customer engagement nothing comes as close to SMS marketing not many other marketing channels are able to achieve the kind of engagement rates that SMS can deliver when you talk about a 97% open rate anywhere from 10 to 30%+ click through rates it’s hard to beat but even with these phenomenal engagement rates there are still areas that you can use to further optimise the performance of your SMS marketing campaigns.
Why should businesses be using SMS marketing?
1. It’s friendly for beginners
Most bulk SMS or SMS marketing services like SMS Papa are pretty simple and there are very few moving parts and that’s what makes this type of marketing attractive for business owners who have a limited understanding of either tech and or marketing.
The main components of an SMS marketing program are simply uploading your contacts, setting up your opt out, typing your message and then either sending or scheduling your SMS campaign – that’s it.
There are no graphic design issues to worry about no coding no having separate teams working on different parts of the text message it really is almost as simple as sending a text message from your phone which is one of the reasons why SMS marketing has been taking off inside the small business market.
Text message marketing is one of the very few areas where you can take a complete beginner and have them achieve engagement and conversion rates rivalling some of the best specialist marketers on the planet.
2. Engagement Rates
One of the most challenging parts of doing business is having the ability to capture the attention of a potential or existing customer if you’re currently running paid ads I’m sure you would have noticed that year-on-year those costs are climbing higher and higher and as a result, it is costing you more to acquire a new customer or even resell back to an existing customer than it did the year before and as more business owners and marketers jump into the online marketing pool those prices will continue to be driven higher and higher making it tougher for the average business owner to make paid ads work.
With SMS marketing you can achieve up to 97% open rates that means if you send out a thousand campaigns 970 people will open and read your SMS marketing campaign, try and find another marketing channel that delivers those kinds of engagement rates.
3. SMS is not an online channel
One of the other major benefits to SMS marketing is that it is not an online marketing channel; this may not sound very exciting for most as a lot of the business owners and marketers have been chained to the idea of using online advertising to reach their customers.
While online advertising is great due to its ability to track and measure and also target virtually any demographic, it is also plagued by things like algorithm updates, spam algorithms, quality scores and of course increased prices.
The Wonderful Thing About SMS technology is that it doesn’t need to worry about any of the above. there are no Savage core updates from Google to worry about there are no spam algorithms there are no quality scores to worry about and instead of increasing prices the prices are actually becoming lower meaning that it is cheaper to drive revenue than previous years using text message marketing.
4. You own the platform
Currently, there is a lot of big tech censorship happening which is making it tough for advertisers who have legitimate businesses to market their products and services on those channels Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Snapchat, etc. all have stricter rules on how you can use their advertising platform.
For example, with Facebook, they not only closely monitor the images and words that you use but they will also critique your landing page to make sure you are following their rules.
The problem with these rules is that they do negatively impact ad performance.
This of course is fair since this is their platform and they get to make the rules a similar thing is true with email you would think that when people subscribed to your email list that you should be able to reach 100% of those people since they put their hand up to receive your email promotions and content but email service providers and spam algorithms get to decide whether or not you should be able to have your email message delivered or not.
This is the same for any advertising platform there are rules and policies in place that were initially designed to stop spammers and scammers from taking advantage of people but What has happened is that these rules have restricted legitimate businesses from using ads in the most effective way which has reduced their overall performance.
With the SMS you own 100% of the platform which means there are no delivery issues, no spam algorithms, quality scores, no strict ad policies that can crush the performance of your ad campaigns overnight, etc.
This means that you actually own your platform and with this you are able to have more control over the revenue you can generate as opposed to having a 3rd party looking over your shoulder and having their say as well.
Conclusion
While SMS marketing is an incredibly effective tool for reaching customers and generating revenue it should be integrated into all of your other marketing channels.
Each marketing channel has its own unique strengths and so you need to understand what these are and how to use those combined strengths to build a solid business-building strategy.
For example, you can use the strength of online advertising (targeting) to collect mobile numbers and then use the strength of SMS marketing (almost 100% engagement) to send ongoing promotions to quickly recover the money lost of that ad spend and further grow sales revenue.
