Business

How to Get Quality SMS for Business Service for Marketing Purposes

Social alerts from friends, family, work, and brands are constantly barraged on consumers. Due to these interruptions, many people disable their email and other social network notifications. If you want to market in real-time, you must send a text message. However, for an SMS gateway campaign to be successful, one that uses text message marketing as the main method of contacting current clients, it must be structured, and legal, and it must generate traceable, useful leads.

However, not everyone prefers text message marketing, so businesses using it must make sure their messages are pertinent and helpful rather than intrusive and spammy (or worse, illegal). With your messages, it’s simple to tip the scales and alienate listeners. Here’s how to include texting in your digital marketing plan without upsetting your target audience.

What is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing is the act of sending promotional texts via mobile devices.

It is an instance of opt-in marketing that necessitates a contract subscription. This sets it apart from social marketing, in which the marketer publishes open content that users can select to like or follow.

Examples of common SMS marketing types include:

  • Personalised discounts or promotions
  • Emarketing surveys
  • Customers are becoming more used to contacting businesses through mobile devices. They frequently look forward to texting or messaging businesses.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that more than half of Australian retailers planned to increase their digital marketing investment in January 2020, before COVID-19 upended how businesses interact with customers.

What characteristics distinguish a top-notch SMS app?

1. Two-Way Messaging

Being able to send true two-way messages, allows you to converse with your customers. This is not a list of apps for sending 100,000 text messages per second in marketing SMS. All of these apps are designed for small businesses that want a way to communicate with their clients directly. This indicates that effective two-way communication was required for inclusion, just like when texting a friend. With many of them, you can still automate responses, gather survey information, and schedule texts.

2. Send Only After Receiving a Clear Opt-in

Most likely, you already obtain customers’ phone numbers. That does not imply that you should begin texting them in bulk. Similar to email marketing, SMS text marketing demands a clear opt-in.

On your website or other online platforms, you can request that users opt-in to receive text messages from you. However, you should receive a text confirming that they want to subscribe before you start sending.

Sending a single SMS (and only one) to thank them for signing up and asking them to confirm their opt-in with a simple Yes or No is one way to achieve this.If they don’t respond, don’t text them again. Of course, if they respond “No,” you shouldn’t text them again.

3. Simple to Use For Everyday People

Employing a specialised marketing firm shouldn’t be necessary to set up an SMS app for your company. Without having a tonne of technical knowledge, many fantastic apps can be integrated into your current setup. Some of the apps—and particularly the API services—were simply too complicated to be recommended. All of our recommendations are simple to use once you get going, though you might need to read through the help materials or ask the support staff a few questions.

This effectively means that almost every app on the list has a separate web application where you can log in and send and receive messages. Many of them also support sending and receiving text messages.

4. Avoid Spamming Users.

While it may be tempting to share every announcement or promotion about your company, be careful not to overdo your SMS advertising. Text messages are more difficult for customers to simply ignore than billboard or social media advertisements. They will unsubscribe if they get an excessive number of messages from your company.

Instead, plan your text message marketing campaign so that you only send texts when necessary and to an appropriate number of clients.

5. Send at The Appropriate Time

Any marketing message must be sent at the ideal time. However, it’s crucial for SMS. People are more likely to have text alerts enabled, so this is the case. You can’t rely on this, even though some people put their phones on Do Not Disturb when they don’t want to be disturbed.

The last thing you want to do is to interrupt your customer’s sleep with a marketing offer. Additionally, likely, your clients don’t want to get messages during dinner.

The good news is that area codes make it relatively simple to determine the time zones of your target audience.

Sending SMS messages soon after an appointment is another excellent choice if you run a brick-and-mortar business. The customer is already thinking of you and you are aware of their activity level. For instance, immediately following a recent appointment, my dentist sent me this message.

Final Words

We now hope that anyone still debating SMS marketing will realise just how beneficial it can be to their e-commerce marketing plan.

Additionally, you can incorporate a successful strategy alongside your emails to create a successful omnichannel experience by using the full set of tools available from Guni for SMS campaigns and automation.

From a single dashboard, use Guni to interact with your customers and respond to messages sent via SMS, email, live chat, and social media. With chatbot and CRM integrations, provide a seamless cross-platform customer service experience.