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Text Marketing is No Small Matter to Your Success

Sarah Brooks

March 31, 2015

Text message marketing, also known as SMS marketing, is the process of sending a short, informative text message quickly and easily to your customers.

SMS stands for 'Short Message Service' and can be used for all types of businesses as a way to market their product or service.

Between traditional marketing strategies and social media marketing campaigns, text messaging seems to get thrown to the wayside.

As it stands, if you hope to grow your small business and create a lasting relationship with your customers, you need to be involved in text message marketing.

Close to 100 Percent Open Rate

For starters, text messages have close to a 100 percent open rate.

Think about it - if you receive a text message on your mobile phone, you can't delete it without first opening it.

Since the messages are kept short, you most likely will get the gist of what the company is trying to tell you without even reading it word for word.

Emails, on the other hand, can be deleted without being opened. Emails only have a 20 percent open rate, making text message marketing much more effective.

The article "7 Clear advantages of text marketing" clearly states why your small business should incorporate an SMS marketing strategy into your overall marketing plan.

In addition to having higher open rates than email or direct mail, text message marketing also allows for detailed analytics to measure open rates and sales. It's simple, people have their phones with them almost all the time, you're reaching a specific, targeting audience, it's environmentally friendly (no sending out advertisements that will wind up in the trash) and you're reaching young customers who prefer texting over phone calls.

Be a Successor with SMS

Let's look at a few ways small businesses can see success with text message marketing.

Imagine your local sub shop decides to launch an SMS campaign. They get customers to "opt in" (or sign up) to their text message services by offering 10 percent off of their order today. Most people would love to save some money on their meal right now, so they decide to opt in.

By the end of the week, the restaurant has hundreds of subscribers. They decide to send out their first message a few weeks later during the mid-afternoon slump, when sales are typically low. The message states customers can receive half-off their order between now and 5 pm.

All of a sudden, customers are coming in to take advantage of the discount. The customers are happy to be saving money and the restaurant is happy their sales for the day increased.

Another example of a successful text marketing campaign is by furniture store Ashley Furniture.

They offered a secret sale to those customers that opted in to their text message services. The secret sale generated more than $30,000 in sales, more than half of which came from the SMS marketing campaign.

Whether you run a small, local restaurant or a national corporation, SMS marketing should be incorporated into your overall marketing plan in order to increase sales, provide excellent customer service and grow your regular customer base.

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