So you are seated in your office, coffee in one hand and a pen in the other, thinking hard. You are thinking about digital advertising. More specifically, SMS advertising. You have ignored it until now. You didn’t think much about it earlier on, because you were busy with your email list. You have reached your customers through email and internet ads in the last couple of years. But now everyone is crazy about advertising with text messages. And from the look of things, your fiercest competitors have jumped onto the texting bandwagon as well.
But while you don’t want to miss out, you are not sure why you should leave the advertising methods you have been using and take up an entirely new method of advertising regardless of its popularity. So you wonder, is it really worth it? Shouldn’t you stick with what has served you all these years?
And just how effective is SMS advertising anyway? What’s all the fuss about? Keep reading on to discover 7 reasons why smart businesses are using intelligent mobile messaging to engage their best customers, and the text message trends your business should be following.
Research has shown that about 5 billion people around the world now have mobile phones. To put that into perspective, only about 1 billion people have access to a PC and only about 4 billion use email. And as for the 5 billion with mobile phones, not all use the internet. In fact, a large number of people in low and medium income economies still don’t have access to the internet. Yet, nearly all of them have communicated using text messages.
With these positive numbers, SMS is becoming a key advertising channel for most businesses. And as a result, they are able to reach their customers on mobile. But SMS advertising isn’t just effective, it is easy to use too. You only need an SMS API (an efficient internet software that enables you to send text messages and pin codes to subscribers of mobile network carriers) and you can send personalized messages to up to 100,000 customers.
You get to send customer notifications, confirm transactions, authenticate mobile numbers, and much more. The best part is: your promotional messages are sure to reach your customers no matter where they are, and regardless of whether they are online or not.
Conventional advertising methods are having a hard time coping with new and innovative advertising options. These methods just aren’t as rewarding to advertisers as they were back in the day. Internet ads, email, television, print, these aren’t personal or relevant enough. And for that reason, they don’t convert that much. Besides, the rise of personal and intimate methods of communications such as SMS and messenger apps has turned people nearly blind to these traditional advertising options.
In fact, SMS advertising is the most effective advertising method today. While the response rate of emails is below 8% across most industries, the response to SMS advertising goes as far as 45%. And that’s why smart businesses are now channeling most of their advertising budget to SMS marketing.
No advertising method enhances other advertising methods like SMS. If you are struggling to build your email list, you can use hyperlinks in SMS messages to channel more traffic to your email subscription page. Alternatively, you can use the same hyperlinks to channel a large number of opt-in customers to your blog or website. This is an effective way to promote a new product, or a new business blog post without relying on your email list alone.
The best thing about using SMS advertising to boost other advertising channels is that SMS comes off as personal and intimate. As such, people are more likely to click a link in a text message than in an email. If you are promoting a product by offering discounts or coupons, SMS is the fastest way to inform your customers of the promotion, because they take their phones wherever they go.
There is so much information available about mobile phone subscribers. Businesses can use this info to create tailor-made advertising and promotions for each mobile user. Unlike, a PC or a TV, a mobile phone is a personal device used by only one person. So your advertising can be targeted to the needs of that one individual and not a group.
You can use user profiles, website visits, and profile builders to get a clear picture of the demographic info, profile, and behavior of a user. Such information can be used to create tailor-made text messages that cater to the specific needs of the customer. Customers find these targeted messages interesting because they are relevant to their needs. As a result, you will get more positive responses to your marketing campaigns and ultimately more sales.
Ever received a bunch of unsolicited emails? There is no denying that unsolicited emails and spam mail are the bad side of email advertising your customers have to cope with. But it’s not just these unwanted emails that annoy customers, the many irrelevant ads on web pages and mobile apps get to their nerves as well. The reason? They make them feel distracted and misunderstand.
But SMS advertising is different. Each mobile number is unique and it is hard to reach people unless they have opted in to receive your SMS ads. And that’s the great thing with SMS advertising. The fact that people have to subscribe first, means they are likely to respond positively to the messages. That means they are also likely to buy the products you are promoting.
This is another advantage that SMS advertising has over other advertising options. Internet ads on the PC are almost always hard to respond to. First, the ads are not relevant enough to the needs of the user, and if they are, there isn’t a clear way to respond.
Most of the time, users have to stop what they are doing and open a new tab to respond to the ad. That’s often too much investment into something that the user isn’t even sure will meet their needs. Emails aren’t any different. The truth is most people just don’t find emails personal enough to reply to on the go. Most businesses don’t even provide an option for customers to reply to emails.
SMS advertising solves the communication barrier between businesses and their customers efficiently. For one, texting is the most popular method of communication today. People love how intimate it is, even more, intimate than calling in fact.
Another advantage of texting is that it is a casual way of passing information. Unlike email, there is no pressure to give the message a formal look. That takes a lot of pressure off users, enabling them to communicate freely. Your business, can leverage the intimate and friendly nature of SMS to reach customers, and have them respond directly to you. It is the only way they can give you their honest opinion of your products and of any improvements that they would want.
Traditional advertising methods make it impossible to respond to real-life interactions that customers have with your brand. It is not feasible to send follow-up messages to your customers using ads on the internet. And it is not feasible to send immediate follow-up messages to the customers in your email list.
That’s where SMS advertising comes in. The only way you can monitor your customers’ purchases, or any kind of interaction they have with your brand is through their mobile phones. You are not going to do this through the internet, you can’t do this through the TV and you definitely cannot do it through email.
SMS advertising can be triggered by customers’ behavior. Take this, for instance: A customer enters your brick and mortar store and makes a purchase. Your SMS software gets this info and sends a follow-up message to the customer offering them an enticing discount on another product. This kind of follow-up can boost your sales by encouraging customers to take advantage of offers they didn’t even know about in the first place.
You have spent so much advertising on web pages and email, thinking that this is the best way to reach your customers. But the numbers just aren’t coming in. Deep down, you know that your campaigns haven’t been as effective as you would want them.
Yet, You can’t pinpoint one area to improve on and get those numbers flowing in. So you continue to use your old marketing methods, thinking you don’t have a choice. But what if you really had a choice? What if you could give your whole marketing strategy an overhaul and start using SMS advertising to reach your best customers?
Everything would change for the better of course. And your promotions would be more personal, more intimate and more tailored to customer needs than ever before, wouldn’t they?
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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