16 Advantages of Text Marketing
SMS marketing, mobile marketing, and text message marketing are all on the rise today because of easier access for everyone. We as consumers see that we receive many promotional offers, new product launches, and online promotional events that are being offered by various companies across the world. We are used to seeing text campaigns all through our lives.
Your business faces a challenge — cutting through the noise to convert and retain customers. Using the wrong tools or tactics to reach users can cost you time, money, and customer trust. Customers pay attention to SMS, it’s up to you to make the most of the medium and your message. SMS marketing gives you power to do just that. The profitable benefits of SMS marketing easily supersede the most common pitfalls of this unique channel.
Here are 16 advantages of SMS (short message service) and MMS (multimedia messaging service) marketing, that can outperform other channels and automated tactics.
1. People Always Have Their Cell Phones
People are less likely to forget their mobile devices when they leave home vs a cut out coupon or one sent via mail. They look at their smartphones out of boredom. Nearly a third of millennials globally check their phone screen at least once every five minutes without being prompted by an alert or notification.
2. Awesome Open Rates
The average open rate for SMS marketing campaign is 98% — compared to just 20% for email. This means a business can almost guarantee that its marketing campaign will reach the intended target audience, making it an incredible investment. Research suggests that 48.7 million people will opt-in to receive business SMS messages by 2020, which represents an increase of 23% on its current levels. With open rates as high as 98%, that's a staggering increase in the potential audience for businesses’ marketing efforts.
3. Impressive Response Rates
The response rate of text marketing is nearly 30%, while the average click-through-rate for email marketing campaign is around just 2.5%. Consumers are also 10 times more likely to redeem promotional codes and vouchers sent via text than any other platform. This is great news for Marketing Managers seeking to achieve stakeholder or senior leadership level buy-in for an SMS marketing campaign, as they can demonstrate the potential return on investment (ROI) compared to alternative methods.
4. Texting is the most-used mobile device feature
The only thing more personal than the phone itself is the standard messaging app, where users spend more time than anywhere else on their device. 97% of all smartphone users text their contacts at least weekly.
5. Immediacy
On average, it takes just one to three seconds for SMS messages to be sent and received. Although not all messages will be delivered, 90% of all text messages are read within three minutes, and the average person replies within 90 seconds. This allows businesses to send flash sales, last-minute deals and other time-sensitive promotions and be more likely to elicit a response.
6. Availability
Texting doesn’t require any new skills or learning curve and is available on any device, at matter of fact you don't even need a smart phone to receive text messages. This makes it the most available and reliable media to communicate with your audience.
7. Cost-Effective
An SMS marketing campaign will consume more budget than sending out bulk emails, but it's still a relatively low-cost option when compared to other marketing activities, such as running a PR campaign, printing and distributing flyers or purchasing ad space on Facebook. SMS marketing can also often be included in a business phone service package at a relatively low cost, allowing you to take advantage of the many benefits of having a professional number. Taking into account the potentially high ROI due to the exceptional open and response rates, SMS marketing represents a cost-effective option for any business.
8. Versatility
Text messaging can be used at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You could use text messaging to engage at every stage of the buying process like marketing, sales, service, which becomes more and more important when we're challenged to create better and better customer experiences across our entire customer relationships.
9. Customizable
Personalized marketing can return a significantly higher ROI than a blanket approach if it's done right. Receiving a text is a more personal experience than being shown an advert on social media or receiving a mass-produced marketing flyer in the post. With bulk SMS software, it's easy to send promotional messages to an entire contact list, a sub-group or an individual. By sending consumers only relevant messages, an SMS campaign will achieve a higher response rate while delivering better customer experience. Many SMS marketing services also allow consumers to “blacklist” themselves if they do not wish to receive further promotional messages, meaning your SMS list becomes a goldmine of highly targeted and primed customers ready to engage.
10. Texts are interactive
Text message marketing offers better interaction with your targeted consumers. All they need to do is just tap on the ‘reply’ button or else merely click on your link. Hence, it is easy to reach out to your consumers. Text messages are designed to make it so easy for them to interact with you and your communication. Also SMS keywords keep the interaction dynamic so you can customize the response based on the keywords they reply to.
11. Reliability
Marketing emails often get filtered out by an individual’s inbox spam settings and it's impossible to ensure 100% deliverability. Recent research revealed that over half of all email traffic worldwide is categorized as “spam”. Mobile spam filters are much less stringent and if a consumer has opted to receive marketing emails from a company, it's unlikely that marketing messages won't reach the intended recipient. This makes SMS marketing an extremely reliable method of business communication.
12. SMS marketing is one on one
When using SMS keywords and text messaging, the customer decides when to interact with your brand. This takes all guesswork out of the "right people at the right time with the right content through the right channel" formula.
13. Helps SEO
If during the SMS Marketing campaign, the consumers or prospects click on your links, they can help you in improving your mobile SEO. It will also get directed to your mobile website, which will help you see your numbers rise.
14. Quick response
Since the nature of text massages being delivered fast, within a few minutes of you sending your text campaign, you can start seeing the results of the messages sent and analyze your data and get your results faster.
15. Better exposure than social media
This is not to say that brands should stop using social media altogether. Twitter and Facebook are great places to build a brand identity, but social media is simply not where engagement happens. Text message marketing is where real relationships are built – and where the real value is. Research has shown just 29% of Tweets and 12% of Facebook posts get read whereas 98% the text messages are read.
16. Effective distribution
With text marketing it's easier, faster and more reliable to distribute discount coupons, temporary passwords and authentication codes than printed media, email or social media.