10 Reasons Why Your Business Can’t Ignore SMS Marketing
Mobile marketing is no longer the impressionable young upstart it was 15 years ago.
It’s matured and the use of sms by businesses has grown and continues to grow at a steady rate.
Consumers are no longer surprised to receive offers from companies that they’ve opted into, in fact they have come to accept them.
According to research by SAP, 70% of people feel that an sms is a good way for an organisation to get their attention.
So if your company hasn’t yet taken the plunge, there’s a whole opportunity to generate eyebrow raising response rates that will impress even the most cynical of marketers.
Here are the top 10 reasons, to roll up your sleeves and dive into the world of mobile marketing.
1. Killer Open Rates
No direct response marketing channel can compete with the astonishing read rate of SMS. 90% of all SMS are still read within the first 3 mins (mobileSQUARED).
Despite the explosive growth of messaging apps and in app notifications, SMS still has the power to make us stop what we’re doing and check the SMS inbox.
It makes some sense, when was the last time you ignored a text?
2. Low, low Costs
Average industry rates for sending texts are just a few pence. So you can send a tailored message to 1000 customers for around £30 + VAT.
It’s an astonishingly low spend for a potentially massive return.
3. SMS has a 6-8 times higher response rates than email (Cellit)
For most businesses, email is at the heart of their communication strategy. As spam has increased though, so response rates have dropped dramatically. To help with this, there’s a huge range of email guides to help marketers maintain open and read rates.
Despite this, compared to email, SMS open and response rates are one of the marvels of the marketing world.
4. Reports of the death of SMS have been greatly exaggerated
Every week I read a new article telling us how SMS is on the verge of meltdown and will soon be swept aside as messaging apps take control.
In fact, when messaging apps first appeared around 10 years ago, many industry pundits reckoned the writing was on the wall for SMS.
While it’s undeniably true that messaging has rapidly overtaken SMS for person to person use, the use of SMS in business is still growing steadily and is predicted to do so for another few years.
According to Zion research, the A2P messaging market (application to person) will grow by 4% a year until 2020 where is will reach a global total of $70 billion.
5. SMS is still the only universal messaging platform
Zero learning curve.
Nothing to download, no web connection or data issues.
Every mobile phone ever built can send and receive texts.
We understand it, we don’t need to learn it and we still get a buzz from receiving them.
6. There’s a low spam rate
Remember a few years ago, when we used to receive dozens of junk texts a week?
It was infuriating to put it mildly. Pay day loan companies and ambulance chasers were the worst culprits.
Delightfully that seems to have almost completely dried up in large part due to the heroics of the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office). This is the publicly funded body whose job it is to police how data and communications are handled by organisations.
Since GDPR became law in May 2018, they’ve had increasing powers to punish the rule breakers.
They can and do hand out large fines to organisations who break the rules. Their work mean that our SMS inboxes remain largely spam free. Huzzah.
7. SMS marketing is trackable
Every mobile marketing text sent will receive a delivery report, letting you know whether the message has been delivered or not. Numbers that receive an instant failed report are most likely to incorrect.
These dead numbers should then be removed from your list so that no further effort is made to text them.
Links in your texts can be shortened and click through / engagement tracked, so you can measure exactly how your campaigns are performing.
8. Uncompromised by advertising
Messaging apps offer far more flexibility than SMS which is so basic and clunky in comparison. You can’t for example, create groups or send pictures easily, it’s all a bit retro 90s.
The issues with messaging apps is that the platform must generate revenue through in app advertising. For the business model to work and for advertisers to see a return on their ad spend, users will need to click away from the messaging to view the ads.
So ads are a necessary distraction that encourage users to move away and do something else.
By contrast, SMS operates in a cocoon. You’re either viewing or sending texts with no tempting exit doors.
9. Your competitors are using SMS
“If you’re not using mobile marketing to attract new customers to your business, don’t worry — your competitors are already using it and are getting those customers instead.” Jamie Turner, 60SecondMarketer.com
Whatever sector you operate in, it’s likely that other companies will be using SMS as way of communicating with their customers.
While it’s not a good idea to get too obsessed with what competitors are up to, you don’t want to let them dominate one of the most responsive communication channels.
10. You can get up and running fast
One of the joys of SMS is that you don’t need to involve every department in your company to get a campaign off the ground.
There’s no artwork to get bogged down in or media buying agency to consult. You can simply extract the mobile data, compose your text and your message can be landing on customers’ mobiles within the hour.
(Your campaign needs to be GDPR compliant. The ICO have put together a host of materials that will help ensure your campaigns stay the right side of the law.)
Come on in – the water’s fine
If you’d like to take a dip in the refreshing waters of sms marketing, there’s no time like the present.
Feel free to set up a free SMS API ccount with us.
You’ll automatically receive 50 free text credits which should be plenty to do some testing but please let us know if you need more and we’ll happily add as many as you need, within reason.
If you’d like some advice or just want to talk through what you’ve got planned, we’d love to hear from you. All our details are on the contacts page.
