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Four Reasons Why Text Marketing Benefits Your Business

Text messaging is the most effective and direct method to reach your targeted recipient. Now most companies are using bulk text messaging to promote their products and services. It has the following benefits for business:

1. Increased Sales

SMS text marketing is the perfect tool for sales and promotions of your products or services. Using text messages, companies send all important benefits about using their products and services directly to the customer or recipient. This can be very beneficial to your business.

2. Brand Promotion

When companies launch new products or services, they can send a bulk SMS text message to their subscribers to make them aware about the new additions.

3. Instant Delivery

Instant delivery makes it more effective to get a quick response from the recipient. When you send SMS, it takes hardly 5-6 seconds to reach its recipient.

4. High Open Rate

If you compare email marketing vs SMS marketing, then you will find that the open rate of SMS is higher than email. Ninety percent or more of SMS text messages are opened and read.

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Falling Email Open Rates

Open rates for email are continuing to fall and marketers are feeling the pinch. Historically email has been the perfect medium for communication, either for personal or business means. Email revolutionised communication in the early 90’s by speeding up information delivery, reducing telephone and fax costs whilst also improving service delivery.

It wasn’t long before marketers realised that email was perfect for getting ‘eyes on the deal’ and soon started campaigns to deliver advertising by email. Not only was it extremely cheap, it was highly effective. For once, marketers got their messages opened, read and money was made.

With any good thing, it was not long before email was abused and people started getting thousands of advertising emails per day, clogging email servers and delivering virus’ everywhere.

Of course, Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) had to protect themselves by installing filters and programs that filtered email. ISP’s could now electronically ‘read’ every email to decide whether it was Spam or not. Privacy issues had to be put aside in order to stop the onslaught of spam and viruses.

Suddenly, whole industries were spawned to solely deal with the prevalence of Spam, unwittingly creating thousands of jobs and creating lots of money for the economy.

Governments world wide created legislation to control Spam and provided strict fines for people who sent unsolicited emails.

Despite this, the trend continues, and filters are now even stronger, often trapping legitimate email in their attempts to thwart Spam. Even Google’s email client, Gmail filters your emails into ‘tabs’ so that you don’t have to read advertising style messages in your feed.

This new feature alone, cost marketers millions of dollars in lost sales. Overnight, marketers watched as their messages filtered into ‘promotion’ tabs and spam folders, wiping tears away as they watched their email open rates plummet even further with absolutely no control over it. Money lost, business’ faltered and Marketers walked around scratching their heads as to what to do about it.

“Big Brother” now decides who gets what email and where it needs to be put.

A change in focus is needed. Marketers need to move away from email and the obvious move is towards mobile marketing.

Mobile Marketing is a system of marketing that is aimed towards mobile devices. Just like email did all those years ago, Cell phone possession and use is increasing exponentially. SMS/Text message open rates of 97% are astonishing, just like email was in the beginning. Technology has progressed so far that almost anything can be sent by SMS and you know it will be read. Why will you know? Because people will want to receive what you are sending.

Because SMS is so personal and powerful, lawmakers have ensured that the telephone companies have in place strict opt out systems to protect their users. Lawmakers have also created laws that heavily penalise people who send unsolicited text messages.

The Money Is In The List!

Mobile Marketing is very easy to implement, users see an irresistible offer and text a code word to join and receive that offer. In return, you can start marketing to them, but be careful, users can simply send a STOP when they want. Because of this, marketers have to change the way they communicate with their audiences. Methods used in email marketing will not work well on Cell phones. Annoy the user and you will get a STOP. Provide targeted, relevant and personalised content and you will have a friend and customer, for life.

Just like you did with Email, you must create a relationship, however it must be closer and stronger with your cell phone users. The content you share must be relevant to the user and targeted to their needs. If you do this right, you will reap the rewards similar to that which were gained by email use in the 90’s.

I see so many companies just blasting away with discounts and coupons, but where is the engagement? These marketers are using a shotgun approach in the hope that something will stick. This marketing is haphazard and not as effective as it could be. You will get the opt-in to get the coupon or discount but I can guarantee you will get an opt-out as soon as the first non relevant message is received.

SMS systems have evolved to be powerhouses of list segmentation by using interactivity. Interactive Text Response (ITR) acts like a ‘human’ is speaking to the prospect by text, silently working out the needs of the prospect and segmenting these people to specialised lists based on their answers. This provides marketers with a very powerful set of information about their prospects. Information that will allow a tailor made campaign to be sent that will guarantee high conversions.

Marketing is increasingly about personal conversations with individuals rather than with personas. When we as marketers, want to share a great piece of information with a user, we will be able to do so in a way that gets more easily noticed when the message can go to straight to their phone, especially when it is tailor made to their needs.

People sleep with their phones, suffer real anxiety if they lose or forget it,  AND use it in company, and at the dinner table with friends. It is the perfect medium to send your message and get it read!

Mobile Marketing, done right, can dramatically increase your profits and create a loyal and engaged list of customers who spend more and rave about your services.

Contact us today if you wish to know more on how Mobile Marketing can help your business.

 

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