Mobile SMS Marketing: A Guide to Mass Text Messaging for Business

Many businesses hesitate to use Mobile SMS Marketing, indeed many businesses use it badly. As with any marketing campaign or channel, the key thing is that it needs to be done at the right time with the right content, providing value to the customer. Find out how you can use Mobile SMS Marketing to drive business and encourage existing customers to engage with your brand.

As The New York Times points out:

“mobile text messaging may be the closest thing in the information-overloaded digital marketing world to a guaranteed read“.

While Smartphone use is still on the rise, it is fair to say that most adults nowadays have a phone capable of receiving and sending SMS. And on top of that, people carry their phones around most of the time with them, giving an ideal opportunity to reach them directly.

The business case for using Mobile SMS Marketing

• The personal proximity of the phone and its social capability allow us to have an intimate relationship with our phones and what they can do. SMS is an immediate way to capitalize on those qualities without having to worry about downloading an app or compatibility issues. SMS, if done properly, is an effective way to reach customers both domestically and globally. (Mashable)
• With a 95% open rate, and accessible to 98% of all mobile consumers, text message marketing is a quick and effective way to communicate with a mobile customer and drive a desired response. (Mobile Marketing Association)
• Email has less than a 20% open rate, Tweets are read by less than 1% of followers. Text messages on the other hand, have a 95% open rate in 4 minutes. (Remarkamobile.com)

Getting started

As with any other marketing channel, make sure that using SMS for a campaign meets your business and strategic objectives. Before you start, ask yourself:

• What are your goals and expectations for each SMS campaign?
• What is the key objective of each SMS campaign?
• Who exactly do you want to reach through the campaign?
• What offers/messages are you going to use?
• How often will you run campaigns?

Think of SMS Marketing as another way of extending your marketing strategy and extending the relationship you have with your customer. SMS Marketing shouldn’t be a stand alone campaign, it should tie in with your strategic marketing objectives. Design your SMS campaigns very carefully to make sure they meet those objectives.

Mobile SMS best practice

Here are some tips for best practice in SMS Marketing:

Build a compliant database of happy customers

Repeat after me: “never spam customers… never spam customers…”

How many times have you received a text message from a business that you transacted with and thought to yourself, “I never opted in for that?”. You can send people SMS campaigns if they have

• entered a phone number online
• clicked a button on a mobile web page to say they wish to receive SMS
• sent in a text message to a designated number e.g. for a competition
• signed up offline e.g. filled out a form giving their number and ticking consent

Don’t obtain consent deceptively. Give people a strong call to action as a reason to give you their number then use it wisely. Change their mindset from “Why should I give out my precious number?” to “I definitely want to give you my number because I think you’re going to give me exclusive offers or special access”.

For more information and advice, I recommend the Mobile Marketing Association’s guidelines for text regulations and best practice.

Make sure there’s a clear opt out on all mobile SMS campaigns

I have received SMS from businesses that I never opted in for without any clear instructions on how to opt out of future messages forcing me to text Unsubscribe wondering if they will take note and take me off their list. Put an instruction at the end of the SMS to show people what they need to do if they want to opt out e.g. “To opt out reply STOP”.

Track the opt out rates on each campaign. There will always be customers who don’t want this form of communication so expect some opt outs but if you are doing a good job on offering customers what they want then your opt out rates should stay low (3.7% according to research carried out by Cellit)

Tell your customers how to connect

Tie in your SMS campaign with your other marketing channels. Tell your customers what they can expect or how to connect with your SMS campaign on your other channels or even in your physical locations.

• If it is a push out SMS campaign, communicate how signing up to receive texts is going to benefit them. Tell them “WIIFT” (What’s In It For Them).
• If it is a pull SMS campaign where you get them to text in, show them what they will gain by doing so.

Use your other channels or even your physical environment to communicate your SMS campaign. Think outside the box: signage can be placed prominently in your premises where people wait. What about putting signs on your table tops if you own a restaurant to encourage people to sign up? Use your social media and website to reinforce your SMS campaigns.

Engage your customer

Put your hand up if you have received a text from a company which you have looked at and then instantly deleted because it neither engaged you or gave you what you wanted. Now put your hand up if you bothered to opt out or if you keep deleting because it’s less effort…

Never assume inaction just meant the offer wasn’t right. As with email, it’s easier to delete than go to the effort of opting out.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Examine your own reaction to SMS messages that you have received from other businesses. What did you like? What didn’t you like? What made you think? Ask your customers if you are still unsure!

Make them sit up and take notice and look forward to your texts. Why not invite them to send in a photo, a funny joke or a short video to win a prize? Or ask them to text you back if they had some feedback about their experience of your product or service.

Vodafone uses a simple but clever SMS feedback system to gain feedback on their customer service:

• They text you question 1 asking you to rate e.g. how well the customer agent dealt with your enquiry on a scale of 1 to 10
• You text back a number between 1 and 10 to indicate your feelings on the matter
• They text you question 2 again using a scale of 1 to 10
• You text back the number and so on.

Know your customers and segment

Never assume every customer wants the same offer. Know your customer base. Ask them what they want.

I receive regular SMS campaigns from different companies from a hairdresser to a wine shop to a garden centre. Never once have any of those businesses asked me what kinds of offers would interest me. Nor have any of them checked what kind of customer I was for them, what buying patterns I had and then tailored the message.

All of them continue to blindly send me messages which I delete (because I can’t be bothered to opt out and because I am a bit nosy when it comes to marketing anyway so I always like to see what other companies do).

Change the message depending on if it’s a high value, high spend customer vs. a low value, low spend customer. Change the message to encourage different actions depending on who the segment is:

• If I have bought once from you, I might like to receive an SMS not long after my transaction with you with a discount to encourage a 2nd visit. ”Thanks for visiting us and for becoming our customer. Here’s 10% off your next visit”
• If I have bought once from you but haven’t been back for 6 months, I might like to receive an SMS saying “We haven’t seen you for a while. Come back for a free bottle of wine the next time you buy 6 bottles”.

Test and measure the results

As with all your other marketing efforts, there is no silver bullet. You will need to try something, measure the results, tweak it, test again, measure again. It’s a continuous cycle. If it’s not working, don’t waste the money again. Try to learn why it didn’t work so you can improve for next time. Ask your customers next time you see them what they thought of the message.

You should constantly monitor and measure the results of your campaigns (and compare to previous campaigns): What was the response rate? How many sales were generated? Did I get an uplift compared to last time? Did the response rate go down on this type of message compared to that kind of message?

6 Ideas for mobile SMS marketing

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Use it to hand out free trials of your product or service: Make customers feel valued to be offered a free trial of a new product or service.
2. Offer discounts to boost slower times: Send SMS with offers to help increase footfall on slower days or slower times or during off-peak seasons.
3. Give prizes via unique codes: Use SMS to share codes that customers have to match to products that they buy to win prizes. Or SMS a special code to a small number of winners to indicate that they have won a prize.
4. Use SMS to enhance customer experience: A busy restaurant could SMS to tell customers in advance of arrival how long they can expect to wait and then text them when their waiting time is over. How delighted would you be if e.g. your physiotherapy clinic texted you to let you know they were running 30 minutes late and then texted you to say they were ready for you, so instead of sitting in their waiting room you could spend the time productively?
5. Advertise special customer-only events or regular events to encourage attendance: Why not give your “special” customers advance warning of your sales so they can get in first?
6. Give tailored information: For example, a real estate agent might use SMS to highlight properties that match a prospective buyer’s wishlist.

ROI

• Sales: Snapple, the beverage brand, sent unique codes for special prizes that had to match products to encourage increased sales. As well as that, they chose specific times (e.g. lunch time) to send the SMS to match customer buying patterns. 93% of all consumers who received the SMS alerts read them; 24% were more positive about Snapple as a result of receiving the messages and a whopping 33% of those who participated bought additional Snapple products as a result.
• Customer loyalty: The Hilton Hotel Group has successfully used SMS messaging to increase guest numbers ot its hotels and build customer loyalty. The hotel sent out on-site specials and promotions directly to members’ phones which resulted in a 10-25% increase in offer redemptions.

We hope that this information will help with your business and its use of SMS Marketing. How is your company or brand using SMS to market to customers? Have you seen benefits from using SMS Marketing?

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