How Does Text Marketing Work For Business?

What is text marketing?

Before we get started with anything else, it’s important to know what text marketing actually is. It’s the practice of sending marketing or business information to your customers via an SMS text message. As well as traditional marketing, such as discount codes or sales promotions, text marketing is also perfect for appointment reminders and other informational messages. With the ever-changing situation we now find ourselves in, it’s the perfect way to reach large groups of customers quickly with important information. Of course, it will never replace other forms of marketing for a large amount of information, but it can and should be part of your overall strategy. 

How can text marketing be used?

As we’ve touched on above, the applications of text marketing are super varied. It lends itself best to short messages that can be quickly read and understood, without too much time investment from the recipient. If you need to reach a large number of customers quickly with important business updates or short-term sales information, text marketing is the way to go. 

With Smart Messenger Text Marketing you can send messages to as many or as few recipients as you like. It can also be used incredibly effectively to send text appointment reminders for both physical and virtual appointments and events - great for reducing no-shows and wasted time. 

How does it work with GDPR?

The most important thing to know before you start sending out any form of marketing, is whether you have the correct permissions in place. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as having blanket permission to contact customers, you need to be able to demonstrate that you have the correct permissions to make contact via text message. Don’t worry though, this is something our inhouse GDPR practitioners can help with. Before getting you set up with text marketing, we’ll run through everything you need to have in place, so you never have to worry.

What should I use it for?

Text marketing is a fantastic tool but, like most tools, it needs to be used correctly. The best application for it is targeted, useful information that your customers actually want. There is nothing worse than your phone pinging only to realise it’s a marketing message, so it should never be used for general marketing or brand awareness. Text marketing is best used for short term promotions such as booking or discount codes, delivery updates, appointment reminders, or important business updates (but only if they directly impact the customer). If you’re not sure whether text marketing is right for a certain promotion, speak to your account manager. They’ll make sure you avoid spamming customers with messages they don’t want or need. 

What are the benefits?

The best thing about text marketing is that pretty much everyone has a smartphone in their hands most of the time. An easily-reachable audience means open rates are much higher than more traditional methods. It is considerably easier to ignore other forms of marketing, as they are usually in places customers are doing other things, for example during ad breaks on the telly, texts are much harder to ignore as most people check their phones regularly. 

Higher open rates mean more people seeing the message you’re putting out. The shorter nature of text messages means that you must be significantly more targeted and to the point with your messaging, which contributes to higher engagement and click-through rates as recipients go onto your website to get more information. 

Text marketing is a really effective way of reaching out to your customers with key information that’s relevant to them. With high open and click-through rates, it could be the answer you’re looking for.

To find out more about how text marketing could work for your business, get in touch.

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