Most marketing channels leave a communication gap between users and your brand. Either they’re good with reach or awesome with engagement, but rarely both. For instance, despite having a huge user database for brands, email marketing has seen plummeted conversion rates, making it good with reach but poor with engagement. Mobile apps have a reversed situation with a tiny database of users, making the reach low. Still, they register better engagement because of loyal customers.
If you’re trying to balance the mix of engagement and reach but can’t reach an optimum level, chances are you’re missing out on a channel that offers a good balance already.
Yes, we’re talking about SMS marketing. Do you know that 60% of consumers read a text within 5 minutes* of receiving it? That’s how fast the channel engages a user—one of the fastest ways to reach your consumers directly.
How Text Marketing Fills the Customer Engagement Gap
The size of a mobile database is somewhere between 2 and 10% of a retailer’s email database. And yet customers are 4.5x more likely to respond to an SMS than an email, according to Textmunication’s research*.
Reason?
The engagement with SMS marketing or other mobile apps (a brand’s dedicated app, more specifically) is direct and immediate. For instance, Glo Tanning, one of our clients in the salon and spa business, is thankful that text marketing exists. Its campaigns reached thousands of subscribers within ten minutes. A beautiful mingling of reach and engagement. And the campaigns can be blasted in just a few minutes.
Here is another example, although very specific, to cater to a particular need. One of our clients, Fit Factory—a health club chain—used automation with SMS marketing and communication and benefitted the most from the scratch cards. Whenever the company receives a text with a specific keyword, its auto-response SMS diverts users to a mobile-based scratch card to win a free yearly membership.
This became an instant hit among the members, and engagement shot up right off the bat.
Your users won’t easily use a scratch card in an email because of the spammy nature of emails. With such a lottery, you might push a mobile notification on your mobile app. Sadly, your users are limited and might miss any such notification if they’re offline. So, again, you can’t expect a lot of conversions when the reach is limited.
Your users won’t easily use a scratch card in an email because of the spammy nature of emails. With such a lottery, you might push a mobile notification on your mobile app. Sadly, your users are limited and might miss any such notification if they’re offline. So, again, you can’t expect a lot of conversions when the reach is limited.
But when it comes to SMS, you can even innovate with automation and SMS marketing, like scratch cards, raffles, gifs, and videos. Such gamification with SMS not only engages the users but also drives good engagement.
But when it comes to SMS, you can even innovate with automation and SMS marketing, like scratch cards, raffles, gifs, and videos. Such gamification with SMS not only engages the users but also drives good engagement.
How to Engage Better with SMS Marketing
Here are some tips to bridge the communication gap with your prospects and users and increase your reach.
Grow Subscribers List
An obvious strategy in any marketer’s list, right? But there’re ways to simplify this. When you ask your users and prospects for their email addresses, prompt them to share their contact numbers. If not all, you may still increase your subscribers by some percentage. If nothing, you add users to your list early, making the transition from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel easy.
Automated Workflow
Automated drip marketing works. And most automated marketing messages outperform the promotional ones on any channel because users wait for relevant messages, not promotional interventions.
Add relevant SMS to engage with your users at the high intent stage. For instance, share a coupon code with your welcome message. Hook your users at the trigger of a card abandonment event with an alluring message with images or reviews that compel them to return to your e-store.
Promotional SMS Marketing
Promotional SMS works less. But you can still reap some benefits from them. Run flash sales and holiday deals specially designed for your mobile subscribers. You would be excited to learn that SMS databases grow approximately 41% during the holiday season.
Be Considerate
Our research says the top two reasons customers unsubscribe from business texts are spammy messages (31%) and too many messages (30%). If you look closely, they’re related. So, consider your users’ time and privacy. Don’t bombard them with promotional SMS unless necessary. Choose a frequency based on their journey into your sales funnel and loyalty.
Ready to Bridge that Customer Engagement Gap in Your Brand?
If you’re convinced that SMS marketing and communication can save your user engagement from dropping further, voila. You’re at the right place. If you still need some cajoling, please book a free demo here. And, we can work out a free 30-day trial for you, too.
