It’s no secret that we love email, we even have it in
our name, but did you know we have recently started to really fall for
SMS campaigns too? Read on to find out how you can use an SMS campaign
within your business to support your email marketing.
After adding the SMS functionality into Maxemail
and with our latest update improving the way it handles replies, this
week I thought I would look at different ways that you can use an SMS
campaign within your business and how you can support that with your
emails.
SMS is generally a more expensive solution in comparison to email, so
it’s important that you have a sound strategy for how you are going to
use it within your business. Arguably SMS will not work for every
business, I mean would you really want to be contacted by your local
corner shop via SMS to let you know that a new delivery of milk has been
made? I know I certainly wouldn’t.
Another key part of using SMS is gaining your customer’s explicit
permission to contact them this way as you don’t want to be getting on
their wrong side. Be aware that having them provide you with their
mobile number does not permit you to send them SMS marketing. The best
practice for this is to make it very clear when requesting their details
and provide an SMS opt-in tick box.
What types of campaigns could you be running?
As I look through my own texts it’s clear that most businesses follow
the same kind of suit with SMS messaging by sending reminders. Reminders
for appointments, offers, and reminders that I need to collect my kids
from school, wait, no that last one is from my wife! It’s clear that the
SMS trend is being heavily used as a reminder tool.
If I look deeper into these SMS messages most of them, especially the
appointments, are also confirmed via email either the day or day before I
get an SMS message. SMS is generally the final reminder sent to
recipients as 98% of the time it will be opened* and read.
SMS campaigns need to be highly targeted and very relevant to the
recipient. You are using a channel that is predominantly used by friends
and family to communicate with each other, so keep this in mind, don’t
just send out messages to your whole database.
Retailers could use SMS in a number of ways; alerting of a new store
opening near them, a relevant sale or even an SMS on the day of delivery
to say you hope they like their new purchase and maybe include an offer
code for their next one.
The reminder model works really well for the travel business, using it
to remind your travelers of key travel information or to book insurance,
hire cars, excursions, etc.
Finance, Insurance and Service/MOT businesses can also send renewal
reminders to their customers along with pre and post-sale information.
There are countless options available to you and these are just a few
ideas of how you can use SMS. Take time to look at your whole process
and decide which areas would benefit from SMS the most and how it will
work. Looking specifically at the customer journey you will be able to
identify where SMS will be a useful resource and where it will not.
To find out how easy it is to start an SMS campaign, check out our new feature here.
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