There are lots of reasons, statistics, and benefits that are associated with text messaging which makes it a popular means for the businesses and brands all over the world to take it up for their promotional benefits. If you love statistics then you will be delighted to know that:
- There are about 8 trillion text messages sent every year.
- If you break it down further it comes to about 23 billion messages each day and
- Almost 16 million messages per minute all over the world.
Now, you do not need a calculator or a piece of paper and pencil to calculate 1% of it: 0.16 million or 160000 a minute. If you can use these number of messages for your business and can successfully convert just 1% of it to your prospective clients then you will have 1600 clients in a minute! Really, math and stats are interesting subjects.
Now every marketer may not be s calculative as you but they still have realized the power of text messaging when it comes to business promotion. It is for this reason they send text message invitations to their customers, business or individuals. It helps them to steer their business to success very easily, effectively and efficiently.
SMS has come a long way since it was hosted in the early 1990s and it is continually growing and evolving. According to Portio Research, the messaging traffic is predicted to reach a staggering 2.2 trillion for A2P segment. That means the constant news and the common belief that the popularity and usefulness of SMS are on the decline is far from reality.
In fact, Short Message Service or simply SMS is important for the businesses for marketing due to several reasons such as:
- It is simplicity
- Its ubiquitous nature
- Its ability to be sent across any device and in any network
- Its ability to be delivered at the right address, or the mobile number to be more precise and much more.
In fact, industry experts believe that such success and effectiveness has not been achieved by any other messaging platform to date and in this modern age. Therefore, it is quite natural that SMS messaging is becoming the most popular medium for businesses to bridge the gap between the offline and online world of consumers.
Enterprise messaging solution
The rise of the enterprise messaging solution that involves SMS primarily offers a lot of opportunity to the businesses helping them to reach to a wider consumer base more easily. Typically, it can be used to connect with the customers and build a relationship with them at all stages of their buying journey, prior, during and after the sale.
This is even facilitated more by the exponential growth, convenience and use of smartphones which is why the modern age businesses are focusing more on responsive designs. In addition to that, they are also focused on different other aspects of their consumers to ensure that they provide them with the best experience. A few of these aspects include:
- Their feedback
- Survey reports
- The reward points
- Tracking the purchase patterns
- Making special offers on birthdays and anniversaries
- Sending general information about the business and the product
- Sending discounts, reward, coupons, gift cards, and referrals.
SMS texting has helped the business owners to make their marketing practices more personalized to render them the most unique customer experience.
Validate transformation idea
It can be used by the business owners for different purposes apart from the obvious ones. They can improve their sales operation and even validate the idea of an expected transformation. Recent research showed that:
- More than 95% of the retailers consider mobile to be the most important part of their business marketing strategy
- About 30% of marketers use SMS as their marketing tool and
- Roughly 26% of the retailers have reaped the benefits of an increased customer base.
Almost all top brands of today invest in SMS simply due to the fact that this is the only medium wherein a message is read three minutes of it receipt. It is not surprising that a report suggests that a top beverage brand in the US invested more than 70% of their mobile marketing budget on SMS marketing only.
However promising as it may seem, using SMS for business marketing purpose need some care and caution. This is important to make sure that the SMS does not end up as spam. For this, you will have to craft a well-planned and immaculate SMS marketing strategy and have a professional team look after the entire project right from the start to its finish.
It is important to ensure that:
- You deliver an engaging and customized message to deliver the right message to the right person
- List the privileges that you want to offer to your consumers clearly
- Make sure that it does not spam the inbox with sheer repetitiveness and
- Ensure that it is delivered at the right time.
This will help you to establish an instant connect with your customers. Therefore, make sure that you lay down your marketing strategies clearly so that you can create the best SMS to engage with your customers. This will eventually ensure that you do not only add brand value but at the same time channelize all of the available resources towards the right medium.
Furthermore, if you want to make the most of out of the mobile SMS marketing you must make sure that you tap both rural and urban customers. For this, you must ensure that this single online opening point is used to understand different aspects of your target as well as non-targeted customers such as:
- Their preferences
- Buying patterns
- Behaviors
- Purchasing decisions and even
- Their Buying journey.
This will help you to be on par with all those other businesses that are exploring several mobile messaging platforms in order to create more valuable and exciting services. One such service is the Location Based Service or LBS marketing alerts. This attracts shoppers to stores while visiting malls and marketplaces.
Therefore, SMS is the only way to stay updated and abreast with new innovations in business marketing.
