Text messages require no introduction as they hold their own when it comes to telecommunication. The term text messages refers to electronic messages typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters sent over a cellular network or via the internet. Said text messages could be exchanged between two or more users of mobile devices.
With the personal touch associated with text messages, they mostly were used for personal interaction but have since evolved to accommodate business text advertising.
How Text Messages are Used in Businesses
Businesses have made the move to communicate with customers for various reasons, from giving reminders and updates to advertising products – in what is called SMS advertising. Also called, business text advertising, this is basically the promotion of goods and services via text messages through mobile devices.
Using bulk SMS services from a text messaging service provider, businesses send short texts with information they need to convey to subscribers across the globe. It goes a long way in increasing brand awareness.
Before getting started on using text messages for advertising, there are a couple of things to take note of if you are to get it right:
Allow Users to Opt In
It is only common courtesy to ask customers for consent before sending them unsolicited promotional messages. Do this by developing a list of phone numbers asking people to opt-in. it is safe to assume they would definitely not be interested in content they didn’t give consent to and perhaps products they don’t want to buy.
Make Time-Sensitive Offers
This is best suited for local businesses where businesses can attract customers with time-sensitive offers to encourage spontaneous impromptu shopping.
Segment Your Audience
Segmenting your target audience is perhaps the most important bit of advertising via text messages. Businesses can send different messages to different parts of their audience based on different variables like age, country and whatnot.
Doing so consequently leads to much more efficient communication and more trust from customers.
Keep It Short and Straight to the Point
There is no point in droning on and on incessantly in a business text message. It is always best to keep it short but descriptive and informative enough. This is partly to do with SMSs having a character limit of 160 characters.
Make it Creative
Try as much as possible to make the text enjoyable to the reader. You can try implementing some humor in it with clever wordplay – depending on your target audience of course.
SMS advertising has been constantly on the rise owing to some advantages it has over other digital methods of business-customer interaction.
Advantages of Business Text Messaging Over Other Means
Has A Global Reach
After the whole setup has been put in place by a text messaging service provider, SMS services can deliver messages across the globe to anyone using a mobile device regardless of whether they have an internet connection or not.
High Engagement
To start with, text messages have an average opening rate of 98%, which is just light-years ahead of emails. With respect to that, it is almost guaranteed that your text message will be viewed upon reception.
In the same line of thought, people open their phone about 80 times a day, what’s there to add?
It is clear that businesses and companies can utilize this to increase brand awareness as well as distribute their content to customers.
It Compliments Other Marketing Methods
Business text advertising can work with other marketing channels like emails to further your marketing cause. In particular, SMS supplements emails as a marketing tool.
They serve as a safety net of some sort in case customers don’t open the email.
It Is Fast to Set Up
Setting up a channel or network to send bulk SMS to customers is not as complicated and can all be done in a few minutes.