What Is Text Message Marketing and Why Should You Use It for Your Business

Are you looking for ways to discover new customers while retaining old ones? Do you want to improve your existing marketing campaign to get ahead of the competition in your industry? If you answered "yes" to both questions, SMS text message marketing is an excellent option for your business.

According to statistics, text marketing has an open rate of 98%, a far cry from the open rate of email marketing, which is only 20%. By extension, text messages also have better response rates compared to emails. These numbers show that your existing marketing campaign will reap better results if you invest in an SMS marketing service.

If you're still new to text message marketing and find it intimidating, don’t worry. This article will discuss everything you need to know about utilizing this marketing platform. By the end of this article, you'll know how SMS marketing works and how crucial it is for your business growth.

What is Text Message Marketing?

Text message marketing is a form of communication that enables businesses to contact customers through text messages. With this form of marketing channel, you utilize short message service, or SMS messages, to create and send bulk messages to customers. Mobile marketing also allows businesses like yours to engage with customers through mobile devices.

Aside from being able to reach more customers faster, customers often choose to read and respond to text messages over emails. This is one of the reasons why you should use SMS marketing as your business's main communication strategy. You can also integrate text messaging into your email marketing campaigns to implement an omnichannel approach.

Why Should You Use Text Message Marketing for Your Business?

In a 2022 survey, 75% of customers said they would prefer receiving text messages from small business owners rather than emails. In fact, 30% of customers worldwide become loyal customers of the products and services from small businesses as a response to the text message they receive.

Still not convinced about the impact of SMS text message marketing on your business? Perhaps the reasons listed below will help you change your mind.

It’s an Immediate Channel

When choosing a marketing channel to use for your business, you need to consider how fast your customer gets the message. Delays can leave a negative impression on your business, which can turn away potential customers.

Using text message marketing software will solve this problem as text messaging is a direct, immediate channel. As mentioned earlier, SMS messages have an open rate of 98% within 15 minutes of delivery. This means that recipients can read your text message almost immediately.

Using a direct channel for your marketing campaign lessens delays. This can be very beneficial, especially if you have limited-time offers and discounts for your customers. You don't want to waste time informing them about exciting sales and promos, right?

Integrates With Other Marketing Channels

Reaching out to customers will require different marketing channels. This is especially true if you're new in the industry and you'd want to cater to a broader audience. Customers have different lifestyles, and no single marketing channel can meet all of their unique preferences.

Although text message marketing reaps countless benefits when used on its own, it can also be integrated with other marketing channels to produce better results. Are you already marketing your new products through social media? Or perhaps sending emails to inform customers about your new store opening? SMS marketing can enhance all of these channels and increase the effectiveness of your overall marketing campaigns.

For example, if you want your customers to read your email inviting them to your new store opening, you can send a text message saying, "Have you checked your email lately?" A simple follow-up message sent through text messaging can improve the open rates of your emails by up to 30%.

Enables You to Learn More About Your Customers

It has been said repeatedly that your customers are the lifeblood of any business. Without them, your business will not gain profits, survive the competition, and operate in the first place. Customers play a vital role in the success of your business, which is why you should exert time and effort to know them better.

One of the easiest yet most effective ways of learning about your customers is using SMS messaging when asking for feedback. Research shows that 31% of customers worldwide respond to SMS surveys faster, with an average response time of fewer than six minutes. This means you can get plenty of information about and from your customers in a shorter period of time when you utilize text messages.

The information you can get from your customers can significantly impact your business in countless ways. Surveys help you determine which among your existing strategies appeal to your customers and which ones require improvement. With this information, you can streamline your efforts to ensure they're spent on strategies based on customer interests.

Increases Customer Engagement

For your business to succeed, it's not enough to haul in customers and convince them to buy from you once. You need to keep them engaged all the time - the more engaged your customers are, the more loyal they'll be to your brand.

Another reason you should definitely use SMS marketing platforms for your business is that it increases customer engagement, which encourages customer loyalty. Text messages enable you to contact customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle and ensure that they stay engaged with your brand from start to finish.

For example, did a new customer visit your website after hearing about your brand from your ads? You can send a text message informing them that you offer free shipping to first-time online buyers. Do you want to encourage existing customers to buy from you again? Get their phone numbers and tell them they're entitled to your brand's loyalty program.

Text messages are highly versatile, so you won't have any problems sending personalized messages depending on where your customers are in the customer lifecycle journey. Sending the right messages at the right time will encourage them to know more about your brand, which ends up in a purchase.

Builds Loyal Customers

As a business owner, you should strive to turn a potential customer into a loyal customer. Loyal customers spend 31% more than new customers, resulting in an increase in revenue and ROI for your business. Loyal customers also become your brand advocates, which can help you reach a newer target audience.

There are plenty of ways to build loyal customers, and using SMS services is one. You can utilize an SMS marketing service to offer promotions and discounts to your existing customers to make them feel appreciated. You can also create a loyalty program and offer freebies to repeat customers.

Offering exclusive promos to your existing customers will eventually encourage them to stay loyal to your brand. In short, the more you give to them, the more your business gets back.

Generates Word of Mouth

Of all the marketing methods available for businesses today, word-of-mouth advertising remains to be one of the most effective. This type of marketing is free yet enables businesses to develop brand loyalty, build social proof, and increase conversions and sales. Word-of-mouth advertising also highlights a brand's unique selling proposition, making it easier for them to gain customers.

Do you know that text marketing also generates word of mouth? Whenever you use SMS marketing to inform prospects and existing customers about your brand's promos and discounts, they will likely share the good news with their friends and family. The recipients can inform the news personally or easily send the message to the phone numbers of their friends and family members.

Improves Communication

Communication is vital in every relationship, including the relationship you have with your customers. For your business to thrive in the industry, you need to maintain healthy, professional relationships with your customers. How else can you engage with your customers if you don't consistently communicate with them?

Using text message marketing helps improve communication between your business and your customers. Aside from being able to inform your customers about upcoming promos and discounts through text messages, your customers can also use the same medium to reach out to your brand.

Text message marketing services now offer two-way messaging. With this feature, two parties - a business representative and a lead - can text back and forth. This feature is highly beneficial for answering any of your customers' concerns or questions. Two-way messaging also helps re-engage lost leads, drive more reviews, and offer targeted upgrades.

Since two-way messaging aims to provide one-on-one interactions, your customers will receive faster responses from your brand. This will significantly improve their overall experience with your business and can become the reason why they'll choose to buy from you over your competitors.

Gives Customers the Ability to Opt in..

Traditionally, marketing campaigns rely on the law of large numbers in order to succeed. Large and small businesses worldwide send a marketing message to as many recipients as possible, thinking this increases their chances of getting more customers. This type of advertising requires more resources from the business but doesn't guarantee results. In fact, sending too many messages will only frustrate customers, which can cause them to ignore your brand.

Text message marketing is different because it allows customers to opt in. This means that before they can get SMS messages from your business, they need to sign up first.

Opt in marketing offers several benefits to businesses. For one, it ensures that your text messages are delivered to individuals who have already shown interest in your brand. This will help increase your business's revenue as it'll be easier for you to lead these individuals to buy.

Opt in marketing also saves you time and effort from sending text messages to individuals who haven't heard from your brand or aren't interested in buying from you. This type of marketing also helps your business build professional, long-term relationships with potential customers.

…Or Opt Out

Competition is tough in the business arena; your business probably has a lot of competitors regardless of its size or the niche it operates in. Given this status quo, customers often find themselves in an endless cycle of receiving countless messages on promotions and discounts from different companies every day. Being in this situation can annoy customers and will become the reason why they'll never buy from you.

Fortunately, using text message marketing prevents this from happening. Similar to email marketing, SMS marketing allows your customers to opt out. This option will help your business portray a more likable, positive brand, which can influence customers to become patrons of your business.

Affordable

One of the biggest concerns of small businesses when it comes to choosing a marketing channel to use is the cost. Small businesses usually have limited financial resources, which is why they should be careful about how and where they invest their money.

Text message marketing is affordable, making it an excellent option for small and new businesses. Unlike other marketing platforms that require businesses to place a full ad in front of a single customer, text marketing allows a business to create bulk messages and send them to thousands or even millions of customers at the same time.

Additionally, plenty of providers offer text message marketing services with flexible pricing schemes. Some even provide bulk packages so that you can send hundreds or thousands of text messages monthly for a cheap flat rate.

It’s the Most Cost-Effective Marketing Channel

As a business owner, you're always concerned about the cost of the marketing platform you'll use for your business. Money is an essential resource in every business, and you'll want to choose to spend it on investments that bring countless benefits to your business.

Using a text message marketing service will not disappoint as it's the most cost-effective marketing channel available for businesses today. This marketing channel ensures a drastic reduction in your marketing expenses and an increase in your ROI. This happens because you can use text messages in several ways besides marketing your brand.

You can also personalize messages and use them to collect payments from your customers. In fact, collection agencies worldwide say that SMS messaging is yielding the highest success rates of repayment. Customers even report that they prefer this communication channel because it's more convenient for them.

Aside from collecting payments, you can also maximize SMS marketing to connect and upsell. Residential communities reported better engagement rates after using text messaging. This communication channel helped them gain better responses after sending payment reminders, neighborhood watch initiatives, and even emergency alerts.

On the other hand, retail stores have been using text message marketing and reported that it helped them save a lot of time when promoting discounts. Through text message marketing software, retail store owners can plan promotional activities, make templates in advance, and let the software personalize messages with the customers' names. This method drives more impact and helps businesses achieve higher ROI without spending too much time and effort.

Reaches Wider, Bigger Demographics

Almost everyone in the world owns a smartphone, so text messaging casts a very wide net. Since more and more people worldwide have become more dependent on their smartphones, using text message marketing enables your business to reach a wider, bigger demographic. 

Do you want to invite customers outside of your city to visit your website? Send them an SMS message with your website link on it. Do you want to market your products and services to another target audience? Let them know what your business offers through text messages.

Being able to reach wider, bigger demographics improves your customer database. Having access to more audiences also helps you determine who your brand appeals to the most depending on age, location, income, gender, and other variables. With the right demographic data, your business can market more to enthusiastic individuals and stop spending resources on individuals that aren't interested at all.

Doesn’t Require Coding or Design Experience

Certain marketing strategies have requirements. For example, if you want to market your products and services through a website, you must learn about web design and development. This process is expensive and requires time. On average, web development boot camps take three to four months to complete.

One thing that makes text message marketing different from other forms of marketing is that it doesn't require coding or design experience. It’s as easy as sending a text message to a friend.

Saves You Time

In business, time is money. If you're a business owner, you need to maximize your time and complete as many tasks as quickly as possible. Using a text message marketing platform can help you achieve that goal by saving you a lot of time.

When you use an SMS marketing service, you can simultaneously send automated messages to thousands of recipients. These services also enable you to sort your recipients based on different demographic factors, so you can send personalized messages to each of them. You can even arrange SMS surveys today and schedule them to be sent at a later time.

All of the features of a text message marketing service help you save time without compromising the quality and reach of your marketing efforts. When time is on your side, you can finally take care of other vital areas of the business.

Allows You to Track and Monitor Progress

Marketing campaigns require time. Once you have implemented one, you need to exert time to track and monitor progress. This process is just as important as creating a marketing campaign as it enables you to determine if you're actually meeting any of your marketing goals. How can you tell if your marketing campaign works if you don't track progress?

With SMS marketing software, you can easily track and monitor the progress of your text message marketing campaign. This software enables you to identify the number of customers engaging with your text messages, monitor delivery rates, and check other metrics.

The information you can gain from these analytics helps your business create more targeted, better marketing campaigns in the future. This information can also help you better understand your customer database and provide products and services that suit their needs and wants.

Partner with Professionals

Regardless of the industry your business is operating in - whether it's in construction, fashion, finance, or food and beverage - expect that there will always be competition. And that competition will become tougher in the years to come.

To stand out from the competition and earn long-term success in today's competitive business landscape, use innovative marketing strategies by outsourcing text message marketing services, such as Salesmsg. Working with these service providers will ensure the effectiveness of your business's SMS marketing campaign!

This blog was optimized and updated on July 24th, 2023.