How churches can use Bulk SMS service from USMS-GH
In our modern age, more and more people are connecting and communicating through digital means, one of the leading methods being SMS messaging, and it’s important to communicate how churches can use Bulk SMS service from USMS-GH
Using our simple, automated, and out-of-the-box bulk SMS solution, church leaders and staff can touch base with thousands of individuals with just the click of a button.
USMS-GH grants API access allowing engineers of churches to integrate their existing church marketing software with our platform. USMS-GH can get very technical with our API and/or keep it simple with our all inclusive inbox that allows simple one-on-one and bulk text messaging campaigns.
We’ve compiled some church promotional ideas that can be utilized to optimize your church SMS marketing campaign with USMS-GH.
1. Send Prayer Requests
When there is a need for churches to send prayer requests out and actually get them read, how do you do this? Using text messaging of course.
Your church community leans on each other through thick and thin. When the time comes that a member of your congregation requires a thought or kind word said for them, you can use bulk SMS messaging to kindly send out a request to the other members of your church.
2. Send Scheduled Service Reminders
On a weekly basis, you can choose to send out a scheduled service reminder to members of your church, and in turn, receive any information about patrons who cannot attend that week.
For example, during Easter and Christmas, churches see a lot of people at service. Have the pastor ask everyone to opt in to your contact group. Then, after Easter and Christmas, keep in touch with them by sending them Sunday service reminders.
3. Provide Daily Devotionals to Your Congregation
As a regular attendee and active member of your church, your community looks up to church leaders to help them work their faith into their everyday life. By sending out a daily devotional via SMS, you can provide members with a little reminder of their faith each and every day.
4. Give Reminders for Special Events
If your church has a special event going on, such as a family night or summer barbeque, you can send out an SMS message prior to the event acting as a reminder of the community gathering.
5. Host Contests for Your Congregation
Want to build up anticipation leading up to your next church service? Create a fun contest for church members. Perhaps for the next service, everyone who wears green will get a special gift. Have fun with your church promotional ideas by creating SMS contests!
6. Message Specialized Church Groups
Within many large churches, there are sub-groups who actively participate in other church-related activities, such as youth groups, men’s clubs, or women’s clubs. With USMS-GH’s business bulk SMS service, you can organize contacts into specific groups and easily communicate updates with these specialized groups.
7. Send Emergency Updates or Last Minute Communications
Emergencies happen. If this is the case, USMS-GH bulk SMS services can help you quickly reach the members of your church and communicate any last-minute updates.
8. Promote Holiday Services
Special holiday services, such as Christmas and Easter may occur at different times than your regularly scheduled service. Make sure that your members know by sending out a couple of SMS reminders surrounding the service so that your entire community can gather and celebrate together.
Whether you have a large congregation, or want a simple and accessible way to contact your entire church community, USMS-GH bulk SMS services can help you manage your communications and your church marketing with ease.
We understand how important keeping in touch and building good relationship with members is, that is why we created this platform with guides on How Churches can use Bulk SMS services from USMS-GH.
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Tips to improve your Text Message Marketing
Once you’ve legally collected subscriber numbers, you can send out an SMS text message marketing campaign. Here are some helpful SMS marketing best practices.
PROVIDE VALUE
In both SMS marketing and MMS text message marketing, there’s a reason your subscribers signed up for your texts. It may be to receive updates and information, but most of the time, it’s to receive value in exchange for them giving you their phone number. It’s essential to provide value in your SMS text message marketing campaigns to prevent subscriber churn and increase subscriber satisfaction. Providing value by offering an incentive to sign up is also a great way to build SMS subscriber lists.
Tip: State the offer first, then the texting details. For example:
Take [discount amount] off when you [take an action]. EXP [date]
GIVE A CLEAR CALL TO ACTION (CTA)
As a best practice, every message should include a clear call to action directing the recipient to take action. This is your chance to help your subscribers take the next step. A good call to action should include the action they need to take to receive the value.
Tip: The call-to-action should be cohesive with the offer provided. For example:
A store might want to increase foot traffic, so their call to action could be, “Visit a store today, save 15% w/code 67859.”
ADD AN EXPIRATION DATE TO INCREASE URGENCY
Especially for promotional text messages, including an expiration date is a text message marketing best practice to increase urgency and strengthen conversion rates. Without an expiration date, subscribers might not know when to redeem the offer, or worse, they might never take action.
Tip: Experiment with the language and placement of your expiration date. For example:
Try “END” or “EXP” for urgency and mix up the date notation; “END Midnight” or “EXP 12am Tonight.”
USE SUBJECT LINES
With MMS messages, you can include a subject line, a perfect way to add even more effective mobile marketing. The subject line can be up to around 40 characters, which allows you to really hook customers and entice them to keep reading the message. On some mobile phones, the subject line appears in bold type, so it attracts the customer’s attention to the message. In an SMS message, a subject line isn’t an option.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF CHARACTER LIMITS
SMS messages have a limit of 160 characters per message. So be sure you get straight to your message to avoid long chains of SMS.
Get started with bulk SMS makrting now. Learn how to register on USMS-GH
The Top 3 Benefits of using USMS-GH for SMS Marketing
So, is SMS marketing effective? Statistics show SMS open rates are as high as 98%, and that’s higher than any other marketing channel. Not only that, but most customers prefer receiving texts over other forms of communication.
And, while some marketers think SMS marketing is dead, preferring to use email marketing to get in touch with their customers, there are many advantages of SMS marketing that can’t be beat.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of SMS marketing:
1. Fast Delivery Rate
Mobile marketing is lightning fast. When you send out a text message, it gets delivered immediately.
Because of this, you can send time-sensitive messages like flash sales and event-related promotions. For instance, you could send users a message on Cyber Monday to maximize sales for that single day.
So, once you press that “send” button, hundreds of users will instantly get your message.
Plus, people always have their phones with them, increasing the chances that your message will get seen as soon as it’s delivered.
In fact, 90% of SMS messages are read in the first 3 minutes.
2. Much Higher Open Rates
When users get an email marketing message, they have to “check” their inbox. This means receiving a notification, opening up a mobile app, and scanning through the messages in their inbox. And with so many email and social media notifications on a daily basis, users are more likely to ignore them.
But, with SMS marketing, users will be instantly made aware of a new message with a text notification. Since people usually get texts from their friends and family, those notifications are less likely to be ignored.
Plus, most phones display a snippet of text messages right on the screen. SMS marketing is more personal and stands out from other notifications, causing SMS marketing to have a higher open rate than any other marketing channel.
What are SMS open rates?
Well, in 2018 they were as high as 98%!
Compared to email marketing at an open rate of only 20%, SMS marketing blows email out of the water.
A good open rate is important to the success of your SMS marketing campaign. If users aren’t opening your messages at all, you’ve basically wasted your time.
3. Higher Response Rates
Not only do SMS marketing messages get opened by users more frequently, but they also have higher response rates too. The average response rate for SMS marketing is 45%.
Your response rates can show you if your SMS marketing messages are effective. For instance, if a particular message has a low response rate, you can tweak your message and send it again. If more users respond the second time, you know you’re on the right track.
Plus, higher response rates can lead to more sales.
For many customers, receiving texts is their preferred way of communicating. And 70% of customers say that SMS marketing is a good way for businesses to get their attention.
By communicating with customers the way they want you to, your business is more likely to see engagement and get a response.
Aside from these 3 awesome benefits, SMS marketing is also cost-effective and easy to set up.
Now that you know the advantages of SMS marketing, you’re probably ready to jump right in. But if you want to create successful SMS marketing campaigns, you need to do it right.
Why you should use SMS marketing.
Reasons why you should consider text message marketing as part of your customer communications
As more brands look to target customers on the move, SMS is becoming an increasingly essential part of effective multi-channel marketing. However, with few digital marketing agencies featuring SMS as a core offering, their clients are potentially missing out on communications with customers and increased ROI.
Organisations mistakenly believe that mobile marketing requires heavy investment in apps and does not allow for personalised, targeted communication and lacks strong analysis to support ROI. The reality is that access to mobile communications is far easier than perceived and gaining access to mobile consumers (smartphone and non-smartphone) can be as simple as sending a personalised, targeted text message. The means to instigate two-way SMS messaging between a company and their mobile users is essential to building a brand in households around the world provided consumer privacy is protected through legal requirements for opt-in.
In this post we will summarise the key findings from our latest whitepaper which we explain in our webinar on The benefits of using SMS in your marketing mix and discuss why SMS should be used in a communications mix as well as looking at how it can be used as part of a multi-channel strategy for engaging with customers across the customer lifecycle.
1. It’s a direct, immediate channel
SMS is one of the most immediate channels available; with a read rate of 97% within 15 minutes delivery, you can be reassured that your time critical messages will be read almost instantly. A significant 45% of SMS campaigns generate a successful ROI, reaching over 50% when combined with other popular channels such as email and social media.
2. You can use shortcodes to simplify response and build your database
Have your customers make the first move by adding a shortcode or keyword to print collateral, advertisements and advertising boards as well as social media. This strategy means that customers soon become familiar with a brand’s code and keyword and are therefore more likely to interact and respond.
3. It can support and integrate with other channels
It is important that all channels work well together within the marketing mix and SMS is no exception. SMS is a great standalone channel, however it also has the ability to enhance and support other marketing mediums, such as social media and email.
As well as being great on its own, SMS can also function to enhance and support other popular mediums among consumers, such as social media and email.
For example they can serve to remind customers to read an email sent by a brand hours or even days before. A simple follow up SMS asking “have you read our email?” can help increase email open rates by 20%–30%.
4. You can learn more about your customers
SMS is a great channel to get feedback from your customers via surveys. Research shows that on average 31% of consumers will respond to a survey via SMS with the average response time for users being just over 5 minutes. Meaning you can get great results in a short period of time.
5. You can increase customer engagement
Think of SMS as a way to enhance how your brand engages with your customers across the entire customer lifecycle. Businesses should remember to vary the type of content they send out – while customers may value updates and news on forthcoming developments within the brand, this information is best delivered via email where longer, more creative messaging is more appropriate.
Although marketers may feel that texting is invasive, many consumers are now familiar with text from when using local services like dentists, garages or hairdressers or public services like the NHS. This is a great example of how the NHS is engaging its audience in an admittedly high-engagement occasion!
Additionally, brands can use texting for more immediate, expected sales-related offers such as vouchers, discounts, promotions or even birthday messages.
6. Response data enables you to monitor, track and improve
Tracking meaningful ROI, identifying customers engaging via text message and monitoring delivery rates are all possible through SMS revealing the realities to the misconception of SMS being an untrackable channel and bringing it more in line with what has been possible with email for years.
By using these analytics, businesses can create further targeted campaigns and continually build a better understanding of their mobile database. Not only does it mean they save money and improve ROI but by profiling and segmenting out numbers that are least likely to respond, SMS allows a company to target those customers via email or another channel.
Some Frequently Asked Questions about the “Sender ID”
What is the maximum length for an SMS sender ID?
If the SMS sender ID is alphanumeric, the maximum number of characters permitted is 11. If the sender ID is set as a numeric value, allowing the recipient to reply, then the maximum permitted number of digits is 15.
So there are two different sender ID maximum lengths, depending on whether you are using letters or numbers.
- Alphanumeric sender ID (Letters)
- Numeric Sender ID (Digits)
- Maximum 11
- Maximum 15
Why is there such a small limit on the number of characters permitted in a sender ID?
This is simply one of the SMS standards that has always been the case.
When SMS began, way back in 1992, the sender ID was set at 11 characters and has remained as the standard since then.
Back then, screen sizes were comparatively tiny, so it may not have been possible to fit more than 11 characters on all phone models.
Can you reply to a message if the sender ID contains letters?
If you set the sender ID to letters, recipients will not be able to reply to the text. (See example below where a message send was attempted and the sender ID of the incoming text was JohnLewis.)
So you have a choice. You can set the sender ID to letters, in which case you cannot reply to the message. Alternatively, you can set the sender ID as a reply number, allowing replies to be sent.
Can the SMS sender ID contain spaces?
The sender ID can only contain letters or numbers, spaces are not permitted.
No other GSM characters are permitted either. So no dashes or other imaginative ways to create visual interest!
Can the SMS sender ID contain a mixture of letters and numbers?
A sender ID can contain both letters and numbers. See below for an example SMS sender ID that contains both letters and numbers – Test1234. If numbers and letters are used, the maximum character limit is 11
Different countries and networks set their own rules on how much control they allow in setting the SMS sender ID.
Can the sender SMS sender ID be spoofed?
In many countries the sender ID can be set to whatever the sender wishes. This means that there is a danger that a fraudster could attempt to impersonate an organisation or individual.
There have been many illegal smishing campaigns that attempt to convince consumers to visit fake websites and enter their account details. (Smishing is similar to email phishing except the fraud is attempted over SMS.)
SMS smishing fraudsters will often use the sender ID to convince the recipient that the message is from a legitimate source.
Alarmingly if someone sends a text from a sender ID that is already a contact in your phone, rather than just displaying the digits of the number set, the person’s name will be displayed.
The message will also appear in the message thread, making it appear even more genuine.
Country restrictions on setting the SMS sender ID?
The ability to set the sender ID depends on which country you are sending to. In the UK, you have complete control over what you set it as. In many countries including the US, the networks do not permit you to send messages from a custom sender.
All messages must come from either a local long code (that looks like a normal mobile number) or from a short code.
Each country and network has its own rules on what is permitted.
If you attempt to send a message with a customised sender ID to a country or network that does not permit them, then the sender ID will usually be replaced with a local long code or the message may fail to be delivered.