How creative is your SMS marketing? Are you seizing every opportunity to engage with your subscribers and ultimately boost sales with your ideas?
Simply put, SMS marketing is a type of digital marketing that communicates promotions, sales, coupons, confirmations, news and other updates to your potential and existing customers (who’ve opted in) through text messages on their mobile devices. And more than 560 billion texts are sent every month worldwide, and about 81 percent of Americans text regularly. In fact, Americans text twice as much as they call, on average.
Check out these seven benefits of SMS text message marketing for small businesses.
Beyond using SMS for reminders or order confirmations, the following are seven creative ideas to help you leverage your SMS text message marketing to grow your reach, increase your conversion rates and build trusting relationships with customers.
Welcoming subscribers
When consumers first sign up for SMS notifications from your brand, this is an opportunity to send them a welcome message that should include some sort of call-to-action.
You’ll want to briefly explain why the customers should continue subscribing to your notifications and what they can expect. Those reasons depend on your SMS marketing strategy, but they could include receiving exclusive discounts, sales alerts and other updates. (Don’t forget to include how often they should expect to hear from you.) And, of course, you can include a special discount with your welcome message to encourage a purchase.
Just remember that your welcome text message is only the beginning of your texting relationship. Keep your message concise. You’ll always have the ability to build on what you say in your welcome text with future texts.
Subscriber-only flash sales
Exclusivity is important in your SMS text message marketing strategy. Sending exclusive deals to your SMS subscribers is an effective way to make a purchase happen.
Depending on the nature of your business, you could include a link with your offer or require the recipient to show the text in the store when checking out.
Just make sure that you limit the time available to act on the sale so that you’re compelling your subscribers to act sooner rather than later. The idea of a flash sale is that it’s only around for a limited time. Learn more about FOMO and how it can boost your digital marketing efforts.
In addition, you’ll want to offer exclusive flash sales regularly so that SMS subscribers have a reason to stay subscribed but also not so frequent that they begin to get ignored.
Blog (or other content) promotion
Have popular blogs, guides, tips or other resources that would educate your SMS subscribers? Sharing that content shows that your brand is an industry thought leader that can be trusted. It also breaks up your more sales-related messages.
Weekly or monthly tips in particular are a simple way to regularly share your expertise.
By cross-promoting your valuable content through SMS text messages, you can boost your website traffic and click-through rates. This is a great opportunity to repurpose evergreen content that can benefit your audience at any time.
Running giveaways
Giveaways (which include sweepstakes and contests, depending on how you set them up and manage them) can help boost engagement and grow your SMS subscriber database.
To promote, consider directing contacts to a landing page or replying with a keyword through text. You also could announce the giveaway on your social media channels or website that aims to collect mobile phone numbers to enter.
Again, the setup entirely depends on your goals for your giveaway. Just make sure that whatever giveaway you’re launching is legally sound.
After your giveaway, it’s a best practice to follow up with those who didn’t win. Perhaps there’s some sort of consolation prize (such as a discount) that you can offer so that no one walks aways empty-handed.
Event promotion
Got an event coming up? Whether the event is a conference or product launch, another idea is to use your SMS text messaging to build up an audience or even count down the days until your event.
Text messages can share key details about your event. Just make sure that every piece of information you share is valuable to recipients. If you’re texting too much about details that they don’t care about, you risk losing subscribers.
Check out our eight tips to make your event marketing better.
Capturing abandoned carts
It’s very common for online shoppers to abandon their shopping carts before completing their order due to a vast array of distractions. In fact, the average cart abandonment rate is about 70 percent.
So, one idea is to leverage SMS text messages to capture these abandoned carts and encourage more completed orders.
If you’re set up for customers to browse your website while being logged in, you can track their behavior and have a text message sent to remind them to complete their order. If you can, include a link to their shopping cart so that the process is that much easier.
Offering more than a thank you
It’s one thing to send a thank-you text message after a customer purchases from you. It’s even better if you can sweeten the message with a discount or another offer that he or she can use next time.
You also can add a feedback survey link (or an online review link) with your thank-you message. Check out our eight tips to create a successful customer survey for your business.
In conclusion
When it comes to getting creative with your SMS text message marketing, the sky’s the limit for your ideas.
Think through your business operations and the customer journey. Would SMS subscribers want to be alerted to restocked products? Is there an opportunity to upsell your customers through text messaging? Can they pre-order a product at a discount? How personal or even interactive can you make your texts? What news beyond sales can you share with your SMS subscribers?
