SMS Marketing is a tactic that businesses use to send promotional messages to their customers. Also called text marketing, SMS marketing is perfect for sending customers more information about products and services, special offers, or invitations to events. SMS marketing is hands down the most cost effective way for brands to reach their customers and build an audience, leading to higher revenue and customer loyalty.
The first step is to create a way for customers to opt in to receive your messages. There’s a lot of legal reasons for this, but just know that in order to message customers, you need them to opt in first. There are 3 common ways to do this.
This step may be as simple as logging in to your account and composing your message. Depending upon the system you are using, you could even do things like schedule the message to be sent at a later date & time, target your message to a specific subset of contacts, or insert shortened links for your customers to click.
Once you’ve sent your message, your service provider should be able to give you an assortment of statistics on things like engagement and open rates. This way, you can gauge the efficacy of your campaigns, what went right that’s replicable for future campaigns, and what may need some tuning.
We touched on it briefly above, but there are many rules and regulations that dictate proper practices when using SMS in marketing. It’s very important to stay compliant with these, as failure to do so can often result in fines and the deprovisioning of your texting code. That would mean the number would no longer work, and all the work you did to advertise it would be a waste.
You need to be able to prove that every customer knowingly opted-in to your messaging program. This also includes clearly disclosing what you will message them about, as well as how frequently.
There are a number of messages you cannot send via SMS marketing, even if they are technically legal. This includes messages about firearms, alcohol, recreational or illicit drugs, and much more.
Of course, timing is imperative when you’re sending an alert that needs instant attention or a message about a particular event like your holiday promotion. But sending a message too early or too late in the day can alienate your customers and lead to mass opt-outs.
If you’re sending irrelevant messages, you risk customers getting annoyed quickly and opting out, missing out on important alerts. Imagine a vegetarian receiving coupons for rib week at their local restaurant.
Trumpia offers easy-to-use tools to help you collect customer information (Data Capture) and use it to target promotions or any other messaging with pinpoint accuracy (Smart Targeting).
As your organization grows, you likely have less and less time to manually carry out campaigns yourself. Trumpia’s Automated Workflows takes this off your plate by running campaigns for you, like sending reminders to redeem a coupon a week before they expire to only those who haven’t redeemed it yet.
Tumpia gives you an omni-channel platform, combining traditional and proven communication channels like email and voice calls with newer and more wide-reaching methods like texting.
You’re likely already using different applications to run your business, whether it’s a cart management software like Shopify, a CRM like Salesforce, or other programs. Trumpia offers a number of ways for you to integrate with these systems so they work seamlessly together. See more details on integrations.
SMS Marketing is very cost effective, as SMS messages cost only a fraction of a cent per message. If you choose an SMS marketing solution like Trumpia you can also pair SMS marketing with voice, MMS, and email marketing to drive even further results.
A mobile keyword is a word or phrase you select for your customers to text in order to subscribe for your alerts. When a customer texts in your keyword, your text messaging software will automatically capture their phone number and store it in your database. In an ad reading, “Text ‘DEALS’ to 12345 to join our mobile alert program, ”DEALS” is the mobile keyword.
An online signup page, or OSP for short, allows you to opt subscribers in to your SMS marketing campaigns by filling out a form online. OSPs are a great way to collect more information from a subscriber like their name, interests, birthday, etc.
Short codes are 5- to 6-digit numbers that are exclusively for text messaging and SMS marketing. This means these numbers cannot be called. They are “short”, easier to remember, easy to text on the go, and allow for high throughput SMS marketing.
Landline Texting (also known as text to landline) enables your business's existing landline or toll-free number to send and receive text messages. This way, people can get immediate interaction with your business without interrupting their busy day by being stuck on a long phone call or playing email tag. This also lets you only advertise a single number in your collateral, rather than one number for calls and a different number for texts.
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages enable you to send pictures and videos, making them great for grabbing your audience's attention and keeping your SMS marketing fun and engaging.