What is SMS Marketing and How Can it Help Your Business?

As a business owner, your business is your baby and you’re invested in its success! So let’s lay out a scenario that you can probably relate to: you craft a beautiful email, it’s funny, it’s relatable, you expertly blend teasers or info about your product beautifully with your storytelling skills, you hit send, and then… you wait.

Did they open it? Did they read it? How long will it take for them to see it in their inbox? Questions that have surely passed through your head at one time or another. It’s estimated that about 80% of Americans check their email at least once a day. This is great for email marketing but do you want to hear another statistic that might change your opinion? It’s also estimated that Americans check their cell phones 80 times per day. 

I think it’s safe to say that they aren't checking their email every time they pick up their cell phone. It’s also safe to say that they are checking their text messages way more often than once a day. Enter SMS marketing.

If you haven’t yet crafted an SMS marketing strategy there’s a lot of benefit to be found in adding this to your marketing efforts. Brand visibility with your customer base increases greatly when you show up not only in their email inbox but in their unread messages as well. 

If you don’t know how to jump into SMS marketing, stay tuned to get our SMS marketing strategy best practices to get you started and improve your relationship with your potential and current customer base. In order to do that, you need to know how to keep your SMS marketing strategy on the up and up (AKA legal.) 

Best Practices When Mapping Your SMS Marketing Strategy

Adding SMS marketing to your business can increase the number of eyes on your offers. For the most part setting up an SMS marketing campaign is simple, but just as with email marketing, there are some legalities that we must abide by in order to comply with regulations [and avoid some steep fines]. 

Keeping it Legal

• Provide an Opt In 

Firstly, you have to allow people to opt in to receive messages from you. If you don’t allow people the option of opting in to your messages, you are effectively spamming them with texts, which isn’t good for anyone. 

Most mobile devices allow their users to easily report spam messages these days, and this is the last place that you want to be. If you really want to cover your bases, set up a double opt in to ensure that your customer wants to hear from you.

As part of this opt in you need to make three things known: 

1. Your customer is agreeing to receive text messages from you [and that carrier rates may apply]

2. The expected number of SMS marketing messages they will receive from you per month 

3. Where they can access your privacy policy 

• Identify Yourself

When you send your first message be sure to identify who you are so that your new subscriber immediately knows why they’re getting a message from you. You want to remove any confusion and potential unsubscribes from your SMS marketing list.

• Make Unsubscribing Easy

Just as in email marketing, you are legally required to give your customer an easy way to unsubscribe from your SMS marketing list. Do this by adding a simple “Reply STOP to Opt Out” clause at the end of your first message. 

SMS marketing messages are popular enough these days that most people know how to unsubscribe already, but legally you want to include those instructions.

• Time Your Messages Well

As a business owner, you’re required to send marketing messages only between the hours of 8:00AM and 9:00PM in the recipient's time zone so make sure that you schedule your messages accordingly within your marketing platform.  

Aside from the legal aspects of starting your SMS marketing campaigns, there are also some best practices that we’ve found to improve the efficacy of your SMS marketing strategy.

Supercharge Your SMS Marketing Campaign

• Keep it Short and Sweet (KISS)

This SMS marketing strategy is a must do. Messages should be as simple, concise, and straightforward as possible! Think like you’re writing a tweet. You want to get to the point right away [because no one likes paragraph long text messages popping into their unreads]. 

• Break Up Text with Graphics

Don’t be afraid to break up SMS marketing messages with images! Typically, message threads are heavy on the text, so use graphics to stand out. 

Depending on your target client, an SMS marketing strategy that incorporates things like GIFs and memes can boost your customer interaction and brand relationship with your customer. Don’t forget about emojis either! Clever use of emojis in messages makes them much more memorable.

• Combine SMS with Your Other Marketing Efforts

We discussed the feeling of writing a great email and not knowing when [or if] it would be read, so why not use your SMS marketing strategy to bolster your email open rates too?

Reach out with a text message with a call to action of checking their email for more information. With the attention span of the average person being very short in this social media forward time in history, we all need reminders to take action sometimes! 

• Provide an Element of Exclusivity

Use your SMS marketing strategy to create a feeling of exclusivity for your subscribers. You can do this by branding your SMS list as a club or collective that gets access to deals or discounts not available elsewhere in your marketing efforts. 

After all, if the same discount is available through your Instagram bio link, why would they need to sign up to be on your SMS list? 

• Be Clear in Your Messages

Because we are trying to keep our SMS marketing messages brief, it can be tempting to use abbreviations but this can quickly lead to confusion. Stick to conversational but easily understandable messages that are quick to scan through.

• Integrate as Part of Your SMS Marketing Strategy

SMS marketing on its own is powerful, but integrating it with your business ecosystem allows you to increase the value of your messages tenfold.

By integrating your SMS marketing strategy with an all-in-one marketing platform, like Social Fox, you can send targeted messages to people who abandon their carts at checkout, interact well with your emails, or have shown interest in a particular offer you have.  

A huge benefit here is that this allows you to customize and individualize your SMS marketing strategy for your subscribers by segmenting your SMS list and being better able to target their interests specifically.

Adding an SMS marketing strategy to your efforts has the ability to improve your conversions drastically! The true magic comes, though, when you can effectively combine that with all your marketing efforts. 

If you’re adding SMS marketing to your business this year, you’ll want to make sure that the platform that you use to manage your business is optimized for your SMS marketing strategy. We might be a little biased, but we believe Social Fox is just the right fit for this!

The Benefits of Being Able to Use SMS In Your Marketing Platform

Drafting an SMS marketing strategy is the first step in your plan but the execution is really where the rubber meets the road. At Social Fox we’re committed to providing you with not only an all-in-one-marketing ecosystem for your business, but also high-ticket coaching so that your implementation is just right. 

Social Fox allows you to not only manage your SMS marketing strategy but also allows you to have your email marketing, customer management, website, calendar management, sales funnels, reputation management, and social media integrations all in one place. Under one login.

Simply put, you have the ability to manage your business processes from one place with a system that handles all marketing and communication aspects of your business. You can blend your SMS marketing strategy in with your email marketing strategy for maximum effectiveness and track your leads through their customer journey so you’re in touch with them every step of the way. 

We know that behind every successful small business there is a small business owner who is likely looking for ways to simplify and streamline their business. We are here for you. As a company we embody strategically automating business processes to allow our business owners to gain back their valuable time [and maybe a little bit of their sanity, too].

If you’re curious to know more about how Social Fox could streamline your business, we’d love to spill the tea. Hop on our calendar for a live demo so we can show you the missing link in your business!