5 Reasons You Should Use the Power of SMS Marketing in 2018

1- Low Effort Investment in Copywriting

Ask a marketer – it’s a veritable headache to create marketing copy. Good copywriters are tough to find, and expensive to keep. This, in many ways, explains why Twitter enjoys so much preference among marketer (because it requires less than 280 characters worth of content). But you should always keep in mind the best time to post your social media content.

Thankfully, SMS marketing makes it easy for you, because you naturally need to make your SMS content concise and crisp. Trust these tips to create stunning SMS content:

• Use your customer personas to understand and segment audience for SMS marketing
• Focus on the CTA (an example; click here to get an instant discount of 25% for orders placed before midnight).
• Don’t use text-speak (LOL, L8R, etc) in your texts; they make your professional brand sound like a clueless teenager!
• Personalize the SMS content, using recipient’s name, and connecting the text with a very recent city-event, weather, etc.

2- Pure Numbers

Did you know – more than 6 billion mobile devices are in use, and all of them have SMS support? There are 4 mobile devices on a single computer. Also, let’s remember that Internet penetration in many geographies is less than 70%. In fact, it’s only in Europe and US that more than 80% population has Internet access (and even these audiences are relevant for SMS marketing). For other geographies, SMS becomes an even more important medium of marketing communications on mobile devices. Purely on a numbers basis, SMS marketing more than justifies its place in your marketing budget for the coming year.

3- SMS Interactions Are Easy to Track

Like email marketing, you can leverage the power of analytics to understand a lot more about your mobile-savvy audiences. You can track stats such as open rate, click through rate, conversion rate, etc., for SMS marketing. Also, you get tremendous insights about users who engage with your SMS marketing. This, in turn, lets you:

• Optimize your SMS marketing content for more traction
• Experimentation with different content strategies to measure engagement
• Replication of winning recipes across your buyer personas
• Leverage your SMS marketing findings for your Twitter marketing campaigns

Use business SMS applications such as Text Request or to easily manage 2-way communication with audiences from an online account. With unlimited storage, groups, saved contacts, users, you get limitless arsenal for SMS marketing via such tools.

4- No Automatic Filtering

A huge percentage of your marketing emails don’t even make it to the recipient’s mailbox, because automatic filters block emails that seem to be overly promotional, treating them as spam. Not every marketer’s email copy is actually spam, even though an automated filter might consider it so. Thankfully, there is no such automatic filtering on SMS and it still remains one of the most effective channels of lead generation. This means that you can trust your SMS recipients to actually get your message.

Of course, you need to live with the risk that the recipient could block your contact number or use an application to block marketing messages. However, that risk is ubiquitous for all kind of marketing media. To avoid this, make our SMS copy highly captivating. The perfect formula is to use bare minimum characters to entice the user into clicking a shortened link leading to a more content-rich web address.

5- Real-Time Deliverability

Often, marketers find themselves in a situation where they can benefit a lot from immediately deliverable messages. This is where SMS trumps email. Usually, text messages are delivered in between 2 to 10 seconds. This immediacy of message delivery makes SMS a powerful marketing tool for brands with time-sensitive content. Plus, a buzz in the pocket is all a mobile phone user needs to check the device, which pushes open rates for SMS up. Coupon deal sites like Wikigainsuses SMS marketing to send new coupon deals in order to bring in more customers on a daily basis.

SMS has proven to be a timeless communication medium, and it’s strange how many marketers fail to leverage its reach, immediacy, deliverability, and interactivity for their brands’ benefits. In 2018, make sure you do!

Image via Shutterstock