What a year it has been for SMS as a medium. The most used communication method known today has continuously helped solve so many engagement challenges that marketers in the digital age face.
It has also done it in a such an intuitive way that the teams that make up SMS engagement providers know that there is so many more ideas and effective use cases to harvest from the ubiquitous medium.
Whatever your product or service, this era has proven that their is a huge dependence on the mobile engagement experience we have with our consumers and how we must surround it with our brands.
This is evident because consumers put so much pressure on the mobile experience that businesses provide and you may ask why? Well, consumers love being on their mobile phones so business should feel invited to join the culture.
Reflecting on SMS
Since we are in a bit period of reflection before the new year arrives. Let’s zoom out on the value driven methods behind the power of SMS and what it has done for business to consumer communication.
Immediacy of engagement
SMS communication is instant. In an elementary understand, you type of message, pick a recipient, hit send and that it. We know you have already heard it before but we’re happy to tell you once more. Benchmark research shows that SMS has a 98% read rate within 3 minutes.
Ubiquity
The proof is in the pudding. Next time you are leaving your home and in transit to your next stop. Just look up and observe what every person is doing, you’ll notice the gesture of humanity all gazing into their mobile devices, their smartphones.
Directness
SMS communication is like a dart on its way to the center of a dartboard. Since your mobile audience is and should only be in your campaigns because they chose to. You know exactly who your message is going to.
Trackability
What is done, has to be measured as George Doran, Arthur Miller, and James Cunningham would say who are responsible for creating the SMART goal acronym. Reporting used to be very simple for service providers, only giving our clients data on successful deliveries. Now we can see the details on who gets the message, if they opened it, what they received, and if their were any other interactions such as clicks.
Automating engagement
No question, this has to be one of the most profound benefits of the medium. Which is also kind of bias for a service provider like us who has been the leading health and fitness SMS engagement provider for almost 10+ years. Hooray! We have a collection customer success stories to back up that accolade as well, you can visit them here.
The idea of SMS automation has birthed the branch of so many uses and ideas behind SMS outreach. With the addition to automation in the mix now your business has a tool that can do more for less. Here is a list:
- Automated birthday alerts
- Automated new prospect alerts
- Automated cancellation alerts
- Automated billing decline alerts
- Automated new member alerts
- Automated we miss you alerts
- Automated appointment reminders
- Automated acknowledgment alerts for keyword, webform and keypad opt-ins.
That is just a short digest because with the trajectory that the SMS technology is on, now you don’t have to have any constraints at all. With the boundless barrier of our imagination we can start think out more sophisticated engagement models that uniquely fit our business and consumers specific needs, through the involvement of APIs. We have instruction and documents for those by the way, you can view them here.
Friction against the idea
Now there are two stigmas that our team has uncovered from research and development that we still see as a cognitive friction against the full adoption to SMS engagement providers. They are:
- SMS is a too intrusive medium
- SMS is too personal for business to be involved with it
Our answer to both of those fears is one word, compliance. Now, what exactly is compliance or practicing mobile engagement, especially SMS engagement lawfully? For those that like to dive into the legal texture of it, you can find that information on FCC’s domain. Here is directory to that.
Although for a more easier version from our team here, you simply must have your mobile audiences consent and a record of it. There is a lot of underlying meaning when we speak of the consent though. It is the reason your SMS strategy will or will not work. Understanding your consumers will definitely help and we get it. Just because everyone is on their phones, doesn’t mean a business has to text them. It is ultimately how you brand the subject and invite topic into the minds of the most important thing all businesses service, you, me, us, the clients.
Happy New Years, farewell 2018 and a warm welcome to 2019.
