Marketing and communication are quintessential for a business’s growth. When you interact with your users the apt way, your engagement increases, and so does your audience. And in that endeavor, if you don’t include the best channels, you’re losing a big opportunity. Yes, we are talking about SMS marketing.
When above 50% of marketing experts relay on SMS, you can’t not include text marketing in your repertoire. But if you’ve already missed it and think it’s too late to get into this channel, let’s break the myth for you. It’s never too late. While new opportunities at the helm with the strike of 2023 knock on your gate, we would love to hold your hand and help you steady your feet in the fastest means of communication with your audience.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how to start with SMS and MMS marketing and communication.
Your Encyclopedia to Learn Mobile Marketing with SMS and MMS
- What is SMS Marketing?
The term doesn’t need any explanation. If your users use a phone—even a feature phone in the age of tablets and smartphones—SMS should be the vehicle to travel toward them. You can reach out to them individually based on their need. For instance, to send OTPs, transactional data, appointment updates, reminders for insurance renewal, shipping, and delivery updates, etc. In short, your fastest route is to penetrate a user’s mind through personalization.
With bulk SMS marketing and communication, you can tap the masses and advertise your services, announce your new ventures, products, and achievements, and update your audience with industry news. For this, short code works very well as they get priority from the mobile carriers.
The charm of SMS and MMS marketing is: No need for the internet makes it easy to communicate with people staying in remote areas. 8.6B mobile subscriptions globally are another reason to inculcate a text marketing strategy in your business plan in 2023.
Learn the 5 easy steps to get started with bulk SMS marketing and communication.
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Why SMS Marketing and Communication
Reach Wide and DeepSMSes are known to have a 98% open rate. This number is much higher than the stats for emails. SMSes don’t need internet connectivity like any other social media communicator.
Whether you’re in a remote location, traveling through tunnels, or just fancy going off the digital world for a while, you can still use SMS as your SOS. This makes SMS one of the most viable options for marketing. To reach a wider network anytime and anywhere.
When you send an SMS through a short code recognized and prioritized by mobile carriers, your probability of communicating is highest. You don’t get labeled as a spammer. Moreover, an ad-free zone makes this channel merrier.
Automation and Drip Marketing
Onboarded 1000 new users and toying with the idea of sending them a welcome message with a first-timer coupon?
SMS is the best way to do that because the chances of your welcome email landing in the junkyard are high. Just embed the discount voucher in SMS, identify yourself, thank them for joining, seek their permission for a promotional subscription, and tada… You’re done. All this is possible with the humble SMS because you can use an API with any of your existing tools for easy marketing.
Also, a tiny text is lesser intimidating than a phone call and long emails
With automation using the integration between your SMS tool and CRM, drip-market to the users at all stages of their journeys. Whether you’re trying to get back the churned users or trying to move the trial users to a permanent package, just use SMS and MMS automation.
Seeking Permission Is a Benefit, not a Hurdle
Despite being a spam- and ad-free zone, you need to seek user permissions for sending them promotional texts. It might sound like a hassle, but in the long run, permission-based marketing is a boon for your business. They understand you care about their privacy. It also enhances trust among the users. And 54% of consumers want to trust brands before they share their data.
If you offer double opt-in—a confirmation of their subscription approval—it even enhances their faith in your ethical working. When you offer an opt-out code, which you should in every SMS, they know you abide by the regulations and respect their choices and decisions to cancel an engagement.
Fun with the MMS Power
SMS marketing and communication are not only about 160 characters of text for your promotions. It also provides you the opportunity to share alluring content via MMS. Photos, infographics, videos, GIFs, and gamified content like scratch cards and spin wheels are possible through MMS. Also, this way, you get a lot of bandwidth to increase the size of your messages.
Helpdesk That Never Sleeps
Imagine a user stuck with a flat tire in the countryside where the internet is spotty. The only way they can contact customer care is via SMS. Isn’t that a great opportunity to impress your users?
Chatbot and email support need internet. Calls are irritating and time eating. SMS, on the other hand, is fast and short and quick. You can customize your helpdesk responses with keywords and predefined answers.
Who doesn’t love an always-available service desk?
Customer Loyalty
What could be the top reasons that a brand loses its customers? Most of the time, lack of proper communication or over-the-top marketing are the reasons other than product disappointment. Now, we can’t improve your product, but we can ease your marketing communication process with SMS and MMS so that you can concentrate on your work and grow your loyal customers.
Seek Feedback
You don’t need to invite users for a 1-1 feedback interview. No need for a call to ask for their feedback. Just send them a quick message seeking their availability. A simple YES or Y can initiate a feedback process. Send in short questions that demand one-word answers. Drive them to opine in the right way.
Need qualitative feedback that asks them to type long answers? Worry not. Send them a shortened URL and divert them to a feedback form.
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Use Cases for MMS and SMS Marketing
Promotions and Offers
The first use of any marketing and communication channel is advertising and spreading the word. And with texting being the most reachable and readable source, there’s no reason you shouldn’t use it for adverts and direct marketing. You can share and promote a new product to your old users, a new feature to your churned customers, and a deal to your prospects.
Pro-tip: Approach for feedback and win the brownie points from your happy customers.
Transactional Messages
OTPs take the lion’s share when it comes to transactional SMSes. Because chances of direct hacking are minimal with SMS. Updates through messages on the deducted amount while shopping, credit and debit, and other transactions are also the easiest way for users to keep a tab on their financial exchanges.
Reminders and Appointments
Setting up a table for two or booking at a doctor’s clinic? Users love to send SMS. Fast and simple. Updates on an approaching appointment with a therapist or financial consultant? SMS can do that.
Customers really appreciate reminders for renewal of insurance, annual packages, and vehicle servicing. Things like these happen occasionally and are easy to miss. So, your users would love an SMS reminder.
Contests
Contests and sweepstakes are fruitful ways to grow footfalls in your shops and on the website. Just send a contest invitation via SMS, ask them to subscribe to your text messages if they participate, and see your audience growing. And who doesn’t love participating in (and winning) a contest for free?
Pro-tip: this is a great way to seek users to agree to opt-in.
Helpdesk
Reaching out to brands has become cumbersome. Not because the channels are limited but because of the abundance. IVR calls eat time and energy. Emails get dumped in the spam or are snails. Social media is a little too overwhelming for some users. But SMS… is perfect.
You can automate user communication using a chatbot. Using an actual human, you can solve users’ queries in real time.
Knowledge Nuggets and Trivia
Not everyone reads long blog posts. But people love to scan through tiny tidbits and tips about health, lifestyle, food and culture, general knowledge of finances, and real estate. Sometimes you might find an audience who loves to keep a tab on leisure activities like trekking, weekend gateways, movies, and musicals.
You can share such tiny snippets based on your audience’s taste and interest via SMS and MMS.
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Finding a Good Text Marketing and Communication Partner
Do They Hold Expertise?
Not only established in the industry but expertise too should top your list of traits in an SMS marketing and communication partner. Expertise comes with experience. Your partner may have a big brand name, but what if they lack the skills to support a marketing endeavor of a huge scale? Or if they don’t understand the finesse of running SMS marketing for the food and restaurant industry?
Choose an expert with wider knowledge in your industry and with good years of experience to handle clients of your scale.
Are They Value for Money?
Is your marketing partner offering you a good trial period? Trust us when we say a week’s—or even a fortnight’s—length of free trial is only going to leave you with more questions. Because such a short span is not sufficient for testing the waters.
A month’s trial period that doesn’t obligate you with a credit card is the best deal.
This is what we call value for money package. And then top it up with customization; that would make it worth every penny.
Ready to Offer Tailor-Made Package?
Because no one size fits all.
If an SMS marketing company can’t customize its package to suit your need, then you need to think twice before buying its product. Also, when it comes to bespoke solutions, a SaaS-based tool works better when you scale up or down. You pay for what you use. A great return on your investment.
Can They Facilitate Best Practices?
You also need to know if they help you follow all the national and international standards of SMS marketing. You don’t want to be tagged as a spammer with your first SMS, right?
Short codes, opt-in, double opt-in, easy opt-out, and unintrusive frequency of the SMSes—these are some basic guidelines your partner should be able to seamlessly sew into the tool.
Do They Help You Measure?
After every amazing feature that helped you launch and maintain your marketing campaign, all you need is to monitor the progress. So, do check with your vendor if they have a facility to measure your KPIs, generate insights based on various parameters, and share them with your stakeholders.
What good is a tool, otherwise, if it can only help you grow but won’t analyze the tangible data points?
Are You Driving or Depending?
You should be the one driving your campaigns. Dependency on your SMS marketing partner for admin activities could be limiting—although you might like them to take up the tedious task every once in a while. So, do check if you can manage your account completely.
This feature is more important when you buy a white-label partnership.
Learn more about the factors to consider while choosing the right SMS marketing partner.
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How to Start with SMS Marketing in 3 Easy Steps
Like any other promotional channel, SMS marketing and communication need a planned program before you launch. Here is a simple 3-step process, which you can use to implement your program from scratch and start making benefits within 6-9 months of your first campaign.
Plan
- Know what you want to achieve with your SMS marketing campaigns,
- Define a benchmark beforehand so that you know a tangible point to shoot your arrow at,
- Your previous campaigns or a proven track record from the industry can be your yardstick,
- Seek permissions from your target audience through website popups, shop displayed pamphlets, social media posts, and emails,
- Obtain a short code from your SMS marketing partner; this helps in bulk SMS marketing,
- Define your first campaign, customer segmentation, and target audience,
- Decide the apt time and frequency according to the target market,
- Preview your campaign and revise it for improvement.
Launch
- Execute your campaign on time and wait for the impressions,
- Measure the outcome and responses you receive,
- Share the outcome with the right stakeholders,
- Update the campaign according to the feedback,
- Relaunch; replicate the process for the next campaign.
Scale Up
- Design new campaigns according to your business plan,
- Utilize the benchmark set from the previous campaign,
- Expand your area of coverage and customer segmentation
- Include more offerings in the SMS campaigns strategy,
- Revise, repeat, and gather feedback to improve.
You can read the detailed post about launching your first SMS campaign. This can help you make the best of a trial period subscription from your SMS partner.
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Dos and Don’ts for Mobile Marketing with SMS and MMS
Subscription Consent and Easy Way to UnsubscribeAccording to various national and international regulations, and directives mobile carriers follow, you must seek users’ consent to promote your content in their SMS inbox. If you don’t have a record of previous consent because it was verbal, you need to ask for consent again.
Likewise, in all your SMSes, you need to mention the opt-out code for the users. Not following these norms is neither ethical nor according to the industry policies.
We suggest you opt for a short code when you send SMSes to your users. Not only are they prioritized by the mobile operators but are also fast and non-spammy.
Personalization for Better User Engagement
Don’t send your SMSes as if you’re talking to an unknown crowd at a stage show. No one likes to be addressed as a nameless, faceless crowd on such a personal channel. Mobile marketing with SMS is personal because you’re communicating on a phone number that belongs to only one person.
Also, go for customer segmentation based on demographics like age, gender, location, choices, and professional roles. Segmenting helps you to promote the right message to an apt group. Imagine sending deals on designer apparel to users who like to buy high-street clothes or vice versa. They wouldn’t correlate with such messages.
Nowadays, technology helps to personalize so much better. With location sensing and IoT, invite your users to the store nearest to their current location.
Your Identification as the Sender
Imagine this. You get a letter without a stamp or a sender’s name and address. It says you’ve been invited to a grand wedding. But how would you attend it when you have no clue from the letter or the envelope?
The same is with an SMS. How would anyone buy your pizza despite a festive offer if you don’t identify yourself? Also, putting forward your brand name might just be enough for someone to chase that URL you have embedded in the text. And when they can tag a face (or logo) to a text, the chances of your SMS getting deleted or blocked are minimum.
Time and Frequency Matter
Let’s assume the letter came from your old pal. Although you’re keen to make your friend happy, the wedding is in the coming weekend and needs your three days, including travel. Neither can you make it on time, nor does this message create the right image of your friend. Couldn’t they have been more thoughtful by sending the invitation 2 weeks ahead of time?
The same goes for the time and frequency of your SMS. Send your text to users in Asia when you’re working, and you will disturb their good night. Likewise, if you circulate an offer every day, chances are you soon would reduce your subscriber list.
So, time and frequency matter. Go moderate and mind the time zone of the users. That’s why segmentation matters.
Look and Feel
Even if you send an amazing 30% deal, if your fonts are too fancy to be read, no one is going to make use of that offer. We suggest choosing simple fonts in plain colors. You might complement your content with the right GIF or an image, but don’t go overboard. SMS is more about the utility of the content than the beauty.
Additionally, if you’re sending text purely in emojis, smileys, or short-cut language that teenagers use for texting, you’re hurting your brand. As always, go simple and crisp with your text.
Real-Time Customer Support
SMS is a personal way to market and communicate. Many users, as the stats reveal, still love to reply to companies via SMS. So, if you have a bot deployed that can take care of most of the communication, it is amazing. With automated texting, you can take care of many advanced questions. If you have a dedicated service desk, it is even better.
Read more about the best practices for MMS and SMS marketing and communication in 2023.
Why Choose Textmunication as Your Text Marketing Partner?
Because we deliver.
Other than the factors the best SMS marketing partner should have, we can gamify your outreach to users. And so much more with our cloud-based Smart Automated Marketing or SAM program. You get:
Scratcher
After users send you a predefined keyword, they can scratch and win big prizes like free or discounted meals, movie tickets, trips, gifts, and gift cards.
Spinning Wheel
Send your users a spinning wheel during a sweepstake or raffle, and let them win some gifts and deals.
API Integration
With our customized API integration, you can do so much more with your CRM and our SMSing platform together.
Campaign History
Full history of your old marketing campaigns and reporting at your fingertips so you can set your benchmarks and KPIs and measure your success.
Documentation and Support
We do the installation in a jiffy for you. Our documentation is deep and thorough in helping you weed out all the hurdles.
Plan, Go, and Embrace the Power of SMS Marketing and Communication
With Textmunication, you get hand-holding and expert assistance from the moment you initiate your discussion with us. Then articulate your marketing ideas with us and execute your strategy near perfection. Reach out to our team of experts here for a marketing breakthrough in 2023.