Text message marketing is a way of reaching customers through the medium of SMS. Using a web-based program, you can send bulk texts to subscribing customers or consumers who opt in for the same. You can also set up campaigns where coupons are sent automatically over time, engage customers in polls and questionnaires, or even run a sweepstakes contest.
However, you must be wondering what more can be done with a single medium, right? There’s a lot more in store than it seems, continue reading to know. Here are some additional things you can do with SMS Marketing:
- Coupons: Send your loyal consumers or customers exclusive deals. Uniquely generated coupon codes that you send across to your consumers prevent non-subscribers from taking advantage of your deal.
- Drip campaigns: Automated messages can be sent depending on how long your customers have subscribed for the same. In the context of coupons, for example, you may send a 10% off coupon right after signing up, a 20% coupon after 3 weeks and a 50% off coupon after 2 months of your consumer’s subscribing. This runs automatically as soon as a customer signs up, so you don’t need to keep sending individual messages.
- Poll: By texting different keywords your customers can now cast a vote only with the use of SMS. Most services let you run polls where you collect responses over a period time and graph them from your online dashboard. Sounds cool, right?
- Groups: You can also divide customers into groups depending on which keyword they respond to, how they voted in a poll, based on their area code and more. Segmenting your customers lets you send more targeted promotions and coupons, which is more personal and they will relate to it too.
- Send Photos and Videos: Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) Marketing is a fairly new development in which you can send photos and videos to customers. This is especially useful if you want to send a flyer or restaurant menu to a customer.
- Location-based Marketing: Send different messages to clients depending on their location. For example: If a customer is around your restaurant, you can send them a text informing them about the dish of the day or discounts available at your restaurant.
Always remember, Customers should be able to opt out at any time. Fortunately most (if not all) text marketing services are setup this way by default. You will, however, have to remind customers the opt out phrase – i.e. “Reply STOP to opt out of messages”
