SMS marketing for small businesses
Growing a small business used to take hours of time and effort, with marketing strategies that became convoluted and complex. While all of this might seem necessary, adopting a simpler outlook could prove to be more effective. An SMS marketing campaign is an important method to use to help your business grow, as we live in a world that is steadily moving toward becoming more digitally focused.
Personalization builds brand loyalty
The best small business advice to follow if you want to grow your brand is to grab the interest of your customers. This means that you need to offer them content that is tailored to their wants and needs. However, sending out irrelevant and unhelpful content for the sake of sending out content is not a sound marketing strategy.
Small business owners can use the personalization capabilities of SMS marketing and send out tailored messages about promotions, sales and even messages on a customer’s birthday. With successful SMS marketing, personalization is vital. Firing out generic, sales-oriented SMS messages decreases customer engagement and is ineffective at increasing return customers.
Strong customer relationships provide a strong foundation
Any small business owner knows that having strong customer relationships in your early days of starting out can help to build a business to new heights. With SMS marketing, you are consistently reaching out and making contact with your customers, and ensuring that their customer experience is positive and ongoing.
Customers love being treated like VIPs, which makes an SMS campaign an effective way to build customer relationships. You can send out personalized messages to your customers at just the right moment to show that you care about their experiences by rewarding them with exclusive offers. This paves the way towards strong customer relationships which will ultimately lead to business success.
SMS marketing is easy to track
Return on investment (ROI) is what marketing is all about. If a campaign is difficult to track and analyze, it won’t be very useful to a company, especially a small business. Fortunately, SMS marketing is easy to track, providing useful data for marketers and other departments to utilize effectively.
With an SMS marketing campaign, users either click on provided links or they do not, and it is this simplicity that allows a business to track how well their campaign is doing. Being able to understand the click-through-rate (CTR) of a campaign can help marketers to develop a better campaign and it offers valuable data to use in the development of future outreach efforts.
Increase customer awareness
If you’re a relatively new small business, following the small business advice of ‘grabbing attention’ can be difficult. However, using SMS marketing can help by significantly increasing customer awareness. There is no better channel than SMS to send targeted, relevant messages to clients about your growing brand.
It’s an effective tool to use during peak retail seasons too, such as the holiday season and when you have a sale or discount at your store. If you offer your customers tailored offers during peak seasons, you’ll be able to watch your sales grow by leaps and bounds. Customer awareness is vital for small businesses, so instead of printing out hundreds of flyers to hand out at your store, invest in SMS marketing to get your message across.
Best practices for SMS marketing
If you want to employ SMS marketing as part of your marketing strategy, ensure that you’re following these best practices for an effective campaign.
Timing is everything: Because SMS is immediate, the time which you send your messages out is vital to the success of your campaign. Remember that the customer will likely open these messages within five seconds of receiving them, so it is best to send SMS messages when you think a customer will make a decision. A coffee shop might send out promotional messages at ten in the morning when people are in need of their second cup of coffee, and a plumber could send out reminders for appointments an hour in advance, for example.
Keep it short and sweet: Keep your messages short and to the point. Consumers don’t want to have to read through a wall of text to find out about a promotion – they want to know everything upfront, and in twenty words or less. Keep your SMS marketing messages punchy and informative to increase customer engagement.
Calls to action are vital: Sending out a short, relevant SMS marketing message is a great practice but it’s futile if the customer doesn’t know what to do with your information. This is why a good call to action or CTA in every message you send is vital. You can include a link to a website or campaign page at the end of your message, or a word or phrase to send to a number to receive a promotional code. Whatever you choose, ensure you always add a CTA to your SMS messages.
