SMS Marketing Best Practices

SMS Marketing means sending transactional campaigns or promotional messages utilizing text messages (Short Messaging Service) for marketing purposes. Such messages are usually meant to bring forward time-sensitive updates, offers, and alerts to subscribers; that is, people who have given their permission for receiving information from your company.

Ensure that your recipients have chosen SMS updates
Messaging can be a very efficient and direct form of reaching out to your customer. There are several rules for planning a long-term SMS marketing campaign. The first one is getting consent from your contacts for receiving SMS messages.

SMS has a high conversion rate, but that doesn't matter much if your recipients don't even check them. An active "opt-in" is demanded by several SMS marketing platforms.

Set your messages' timing 
Different from an email that can be checked only at certain times in a day; people check their phone's messages almost promptly. This works for urgent messages, but you mustn't overuse this feature by disturbing your subscribers at different hours during the day.

Some regions even have certain rules and regulations about the time at which you can deliver SMS messages (e.g. France prohibits SMS marketing after 10 PM, on Sundays, as well as on holidays).

Mention your business's name in your text messages.
While sending SMS texts en masse, several software tools deliver them via a shortcode. This means that your subscribers will never know that the message is coming from your business. This is why you must let your recipients know who is delivering those SMSs.

Use SMS as part of your digital marketing campaign.
With digital marketing, you can access different avenues to interact with your potential and loyalist customers. All these avenues bind a cohesive marketing communication strategy to enable companies for building better bonds with leads and customers on a much greater scale.

Email and SMS marketing are two complementary avenues. You can generate custom campaigns by utilizing both: using email for detailed information as well as SMS for urgent or time-sensitive information.

Why is SMS marketing effective?

SMS is the best marketing platform for many reasons:

• Rampant of Smartphone Usage:  81% of adults in the United States owned/used a smartphone regularly in 2019. SMS is the best way to access customers' reach. You can include links in your messages to drive further interaction with your online business.
   
• Tighten Your Email Marketing Strategy: Although SMS and email marketing strategies have several similarities in their execution, they complement each other. As mentioned before, you use SMS for sending prompt notifications, whereas email works on a more long-term format.
   
• Engagement Rates: Engagement rates via SMS are amazing as compared to email marketing, with as many as 90% of SMS messages read urgently within at least 3 minutes. This enables SMS to be facilitative of sending crucial information with a big turnover rate.
   
• Emerging Markets:  If your company is currently operating in regions with expensive data and low wifi availability, SMS can be a cost-effective channel for information communication.