What is SMS Marketing and how to make the most of it
Find out in detail what SMS Marketing is, how to use it for your company and if it really works in the age of social media
Although companies today have increasingly innovative and advanced tools at their disposal to make lead generation , acquiring and profiling new useful contacts, traditional SMS is still one of the most effective ways to interact with their customers. The explosion of social networks and instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp, in fact, has revolutionized the world of communication, but SMS Marketing has managed to keep its effectiveness almost unchanged.
What makes SMS a practical and performing means of communication are both their ease of access and understanding, and their fixed presence on all smartphones, tools that many have with them at any time of the day.
The reading rate of SMS is also very high and rarely a message sent in this way is deleted without being read, as is often the case with e-mails. SMS tend to be preferred by many users even with respect to phone calls, as they are considered less invasive.
Although SMS are a means capable of bringing interesting advantages to those who integrate them in their marketing strategy, every company or brand that wishes to promote itself with this communication channel should first of all try to analyze its specific objectives, the prices of SMS Marketing. and the budget actually available for the investment.
Let’s see together, in more detail, what SMS Marketing is and how it is possible to use it effectively to improve your business.
What is SMS Marketing?
The English acronym SMS, which stands for Short Message Service, indicates a mobile telephone service used to send short text messages from one mobile device to another. In common language, in Italy, the term SMS is also used to indicate the single text message sent through this service. The SMS Marketing activity consists in sending SMS to consumers, in order to inform them of new promotions, discounts, limited offers and, more generally, news regarding the commercial activity. Text messages thus prove to be a useful tactic to incentivize target customers to action, build customer loyalty and consequently increase sales and revenue. This tool turns out particularly
also useful for small and / or local businesses: gyms, hairdressers, shops and restaurants usually use SMS Marketing in an advertising key to communicate discounts and offers to their customers. Professionals, on the other hand, generally resort to so-called transactional SMS to keep their clients updated on future appointments.
The best SMS Marketing strategies
The first step in implementing a good SMS Marketing campaign is to obtain the consent of consumers to receive this service. There are several ways to do this:
through an explicit notice published in the physical store / premises or on the website of the business;
through the expedient of a loyalty card / points card (to obtain it, customers will have to fill in a document in which it will be possible to request consent to receive SMS);
through the so-called “shortcode” campaigns , which invite customers to send a text message to receive a special discount or a gadget.
Equally important, once the consent of consumers to receive promotional SMS has been obtained, is to segment the database of contacts collected into specific clusters of typical customers, divided on a geographical, demographic and behavioral basis . In order for the SMS to be effective, in fact, it must be tailored to the recipient , to leverage his interests and be immediate and convincing. By its nature, an SMS is a short message and, therefore, it becomes crucial to choose the right words and the correct tone of voice to attract the customer’s attention and entice him to take advantage of the promotions offered by the company. A step that should not be underestimated is also the identification of the
Right time to send your promotional SMS : to do this, you can predict the behavior of users but, above all, find confirmation of your forecasts through the analysis of the statistics extrapolated from your campaigns.
The importance of a CRM in SMS marketing
Collecting contacts and organizing them in a precise and functional way can be a complex process, when not supported by the most appropriate tools to do it in a streamlined manner. The same can be said of the monitoring of campaigns and the study of the resulting reports, which are decidedly difficult to perform if you do not have data, numbers and flows of user behavior under control. However, there are platforms created specifically to create and manage company contact lists and always keep an eye on the progress of marketing campaigns launched, including those of SMS marketing: we are talking about CRM, management systems designed to facilitate the work of entrepreneurs and marketers dealing with valuable company-customer interactions.
A Customer Relationship Management platform, such as Web Digital Media Group Contact Development CRM , allows any type of business to store information on its customers in an orderly manner, in order to use them in the construction of effective and engaging marketing strategies. In addition to names, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, a good CRM allows you to collect relevant socio-demographic data, customers’ buying habits, their preferences and previous contacts with the company, in order to take advantage of these information to create customized, targeted and successful SMS marketing tactics. But not only: thanks to the CRM Web Digital Media Group
from the same platform it is also possible to create and send coupons and launch email marketing campaigns . It is therefore an indispensable single point of contact, from which to manage in a practical and efficient way every interaction with the target audience. Tracking the progress of your campaigns or grasping the market response to the stimuli proposed by the company is therefore, thanks to a CRM software, extremely easy, as well as incredibly convenient.
