Should Your Business Be Using SMS? Yes! And Here's How

Research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98%, and 90% of recipients open SMS messages within 3 minutes.

However, not a lot of businesses use this tactic. While they spend a lot of time and money on other mobile-targeting tactics, they forget about SMS marketing.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of SMS for business, and how you can use it effectively.

The Benefits of Using SMS

Here are just a few of the reasons SMS can be a powerful marketing tool for your business.

Immediate delivery and results

SMS texts are delivered instantly, meaning you can reach a huge number of customers in a matter of seconds. 

Not only that, but you can quickly see how many people have opened the text messages and how many have taken action.

SMS is cost-effective

SMS messages are cheap, especially when purchased in bulk. 

While emails may be free, SMS is about the cheapest alternative. When you consider other forms of paid advertising, none of them are anywhere near as cost-effective as SMS.

Personal and direct marketing

These days, most people can’t stand direct calling or telemarketing. 

SMS, however, is still direct and personal as a phone call, but less intrusive. People ignore emails and screen phone calls, but most will open a text message. This means you can deliver your messages directly with this much more personal channel.

For example, Pizza Capers used SMS to start a conversation and inform customers of their promotion:

They also set up automation journeys triggered by recipients’ actions. When the recipient replies ‘YUM13’, they immediately receive this automated message:

SMS is quick and time-efficient

Text messages are short and sweet, so you don’t need to spend a lot of time preparing them. We’ll touch on technology later, but the systems used to send SMS make it extremely quick to send messages to a vast audience.

Segment your audience and track results easily

Using a CRM, you can segment your audience based on numerous factors. One might be location, so if you have specific deals you want to send via SMS, you can send it to just your key audience. 

You’ll also get great analytics from this, so you can keep refining your methods based on what works and what doesn’t.

How to Use SMS for Your Business

One of the easiest ways to use SMS is through your marketing automation platform or CRM. Customers’ details are already collected, and you’ve hopefully segmented them into groups. A marketing automation platform, like ActiveCampaign, makes it so easy to send an SMS to multiple customers and track the results. 

If you don’t use a marketing automation platform, you can try bespoke SMS software to make the process simple. However, remember that without an automation platform behind you, the process may be a little more manual in terms of collecting and inputting target phone numbers.

SMS marketing tips

Just to finish, here’s a couple of things to remember when using SMS as a marketing tool.

• Only send to customers who have opted into communications – people don’t like spam
• Keep messaging relevant to individual customers
• Don’t message too frequently. If it ends up feeling like spam, customers will opt-out
• Use SMS to build loyalty by sending thank you emails after purchase – not every SMS needs to be selling something

Keep your marketing relevant and personal, and see how SMS can boost your sales and provide a terrific ROI.

Contact our experts or book a free strategy session with Cemoh if you need help with SMS marketing. Personalised, targeted campaigns aligned with your business needs are our specialty.