Getting in touch with your customers quickly is an important aspect of running a small business. When you can’t get your messages, promotions, and content in front of your customers and audiences, it’s hard to build a real relationship that encourages customer loyalty and return business.
Cell phones and text messaging allow people to communicate directly with each other at any time. When a text comes in, people pay attention. So it makes sense then that text message marketing can be a powerful tool for your business. You can literally get your messages into the hands of your customers.
While this can be a great marketing channel for your brand, it’s also important that you do it the right way. In this article, we’ll help you understand what text message marketing is, how it can benefit your business, and help you learn how you can use it in your business before giving you some text message marketing tips to use going forward.
What is Text Message Marketing?
Text message marketing, also known as SMS marketing, is the process of sending messages or texts to promote your business, offer deals to customers, and build stronger relationships with your audiences. This allows you to create personal relationships with customers.
When a customer opts into your text messaging marketing, you can collect their phone number through forms or texts and add them to your list. However, it’s important to remember that you need to get clear, written consent before you can start sending SMS messages. You also need to offer a way to unsubscribe from text messages at any time.
Automated tools that help facilitate text message marketing can simplify this process and automate the sign-up and opt-out processes so that you don’t have to worry about violating any legal rules.
Benefits of Text Message Marketing
Text message marketing has many different benefits, especially for small businesses. It allows you to connect to your customers in a unique way, and stand out from your competition. Let’s dive into some of the main benefits that you can get from implementing text message marketing strategies in your business.
More Customer Engagement
If you thought that emails had a high open-rate, you haven’t seen anything yet. Text messages have nearly a 100% open rate, which is amazing potential for small businesses. Because customers are opening their text messages, that also means that they are engaging with them at higher rates. That can lead to more responses and better communication.
Higher Returns on Investments (ROI)
SMS messaging is a very cost-effective channel for marketing. Sending out a text message is a relatively cheap action, especially when compared to things like paid advertisements and promoting content. And because your customers have already opted in to receive the text messages, they are more likely to be interested in what you are sending them.
Better Levels of Customer Satisfaction
While you might think that customers don’t like text messages from businesses, the opposite is actually true. Rather than thinking that the text messages are invasive or unwanted, customers like having direct communication with a brand. That also increases the odds of engagement and real-time conversations. As long as you aren’t bombarding your customers with messages, text message marketing is a great idea.
How to Use Text Message Marketing in Your Business
Now that you understand the benefits of text message marketing, you might be wondering what exactly you can use text message marketing for. There are a wide variety of applications that can benefit from the use of SMS marketing, so don’t be afraid to get creative. Here are some of the common ways text messages are used in marketing strategies.
Reminders and Confirmations
Text message marketing works fantastically for appointment reminders and confirmations. You can send out a message to remind a customer of an upcoming appointment and give them an option to reschedule if necessary. This can help reduce the number of no-shows and missed appointments you have, which allows you to manage your time better. You can also use text messages for purchase confirmations, billing reminders, and welcome messages.
Customer Support
Have you ever spent hours on hold on a customer service line? It’s a frustrating experience that doesn’t make you think highly about the company. Using text message marketing for your customer support can help give your customers a better channel for communication. You can let them know when a phone line is open or work through a chat to find a solution to their issues.
Company and Industry Updates
When news comes up that impacts your audiences, it can be hard to get that information to them. You can post on your website and on social media, but unless a customer visits your pages, they won’t see the message you are trying to convey. Text message marketing allows you to deliver company updates and industry news directly to your customers.
Brand Building
Text messages give you a rare opportunity to speak to a customer one on one. When you engage with a customer directly, you can improve their experience and help create a better association between the customer and your brand.
Invites and Events
If you are hosting an event of any kind, whether it’s a virtual webinar, an in-person event, or an online giveaway, you can use text message marketing to spread the word. Even though the message that you might be sending is a mass one to all of your contacts, because it comes through a personal phone number, the invite can feel more personal and welcoming.
Sales, Promotions, and Deals
Sales messages are one of the most popular types of text message marketing that businesses use. You can send out codes for discounts, reminders for limited-time promotions, or exclusive flash sales that your customers can take advantage of. This encourages immediate action and encourages your customers to buy now rather than wait until later.
Text Message Marketing Tips
If you are new to text message marketing, you might not be aware of some of the best practices that you should implement when starting a campaign. Here are some text message marketing tips that you can apply to your processes as you begin to implement text message marketing within your small business.
#1: Pick the Right Provider and Tools
There are a wide variety of services and platforms that will help you with your text message marketing goals. However, each one will have different features and benefits that you’ll want to look into before making a final decision. For example, one service might not offer two-way texting, and another might have a limit to how many messages can be sent.
#2: Create a Strong Contact List
In order for your text message marketing to work, you need to have people to send them to. Building up your contacts list and getting customers to opt into your program can help you get the people you need in order for SMS messaging to work. You can offer opt-in forms on your website, social media sites, and emails.
#3: Keep Your Messages Short and Sweet
A long, dense text message is unlikely to be read in most circumstances. The messages you send to your customers should be short, sweet, and, most importantly, to the point. You don’t want to dance around the reason you’re reaching out with fluff. Instead, you want to quickly explain the purpose of the message without formality.
#4: Build Text Message Marketing Workflows
Sending out a message to every customer you have whenever they take action or reach a milestone would be nearly impossible. With the help of marketing platforms for text messaging, you can automate workflows for your text messages so you don’t have to manually send out a message every time you want to talk to a customer.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Demo
Text message marketing is an important part of modern digital marketing and is something that you should consider adding to your business. However, without the right tools by your side, it will be hard to ever achieve the success you want and manage your new initiatives appropriately.
That’s where Surefire Local comes in. Surefire Local is an all-in-one marketing platform that allows you to manage every aspect of your marketing in a single location. Everything from text messaging, website chats, email marketing, social media, website management, reviews, and so much more can be centralized into a single source of truth.
Surefire Local is the perfect platform for small businesses looking to grow and scale with a tool that expands with them. To learn more about what Surefire Local can do for your business, attend a Surefire Local marketing platform demo to see all the features and benefits today.
