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With the ubiquity of smartphones in recent years, wouldn’t it make more sense to drive engagement through a more direct marketing approach? While email marketing and social media marketing strategies are great for high engagement rates, SMS marketing helps businesses close the gap and is the perfect method for emerging marketings. Continue reading to learn more about this powerful, communicative strategy. 

What is SMS marketing?

By definition, SMS marketing means short message service marketing. This technique uses text messages (SMS) to communicate time-sensitive offers, updates, and reminders to customers who have consented to receive these types of messages from your business. While SMS marketing is a great way to enhance your digital marketing strategy, it’s no for everyone, which is why it’s important to analyze how it’s done and emulate if it would work for your target audience before investing the time and money into developing a platform to send out texts. How’s that for proactively developing a relationship with your digital marketing strategy? 

What are some industry best practices for SMS marketing?

As consumers become more attached to their phones, text message marketing for small businesses can quickly become the most direct line of contact and effective form of communication. 

Here are some rules for SMS marketing:

• Ensure that your contacts have opted in to SMS: Like any type of digital marketing, you need to receive permission from your customers to send them straight to their phones. 
• Be mindful of the time you’re sending: Unlike email, which is likely only checked by users a couple of times a day, when a text message is received, people tend to open these messages almost immediately. So, when you’re crafting texts, ensure that you’re not disturbing your contacts at odd hours. 
• Don’t forget to include your company’s name in your message: How awful would it be if your text message generated a lot of interest, but the users couldn’t remember what businesses they’re subscribed to. 
• Combine text message marketing for small businesses with other elements of your digital marketing strategy: There are a variety of channels to interact with consumers, so be sure they tie together to create a marketing communication system that works to build up these customer connections. In our professional opinion, both SMS marketing and email marketing complement each other quite well!

What is SMS marketing used for?

There are two types of messages that you can send with SMS marketing, a campaign message that is linked to coupons or an upcoming event or a transactional message that is triggered by a certain behaviour (order confirmation, shipping notification, etc.). However, text message marketing for small businesses can be used in several ways.

• Short-term promotions for retail and other e-commerce businesses
• Urgent updates about events or customer orders
• Appointment reminders
• Internal alerts

Are you ready to start SMS marketing? If you have any further questions about how it works, please drop them in the comments section below.