What is SMS marketing and how it differs from mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing and SMS marketing are the two notions each of them has its peculiarities and specifics. First of all, we should distinguish that Mobile marketing is a wider notion, the main specifics of this type of advertisement is that the Ads are delivered or displayed on the mobile phone of the user. SMS marketing is a mechanism of mobile marketing, and it corresponds to sending an SMS text with the advertisement to the phone number of a subscriber. Among the other technologies of mobile marketing, there are MMS-marketing, mobile apps advertisement, voice mail ads, etc.
Below, the SMS-Smart team has prepared a bunch of useful tips for you to make your next SMS marketing campaign more successful, and get the best results for your business. Hope you enjoy it!
What is SMS marketing?
SMS marketing is a new effective way to promote products and services, as well as an effective tool, which can bring significant results if applied correctly, in addition to other marketing channels. The main specifics of this type of advertisement are sending short messages including an advertisement, in bulk to the customers’ headsets.
To obtain the best results from using text marketing and achieve your goals, you need to remember a number of important rules.
The basic recommendations for effective implementation of SMS marketing campaigns can be presented by the following list of rules:
- ask for permission
- make your text message marketing campaign personalized
- text determines the efficiency
Let’s move into detail on these basic rules.
Make Your Ads Campaign Useful and Pleasant for the Recipient
First of all, SMS should not be perceived as aggressive advertising that breaks into the personal space of a person. All advertising messages that come to the personal mobile phone of the subscriber, whether it is e-mail or short message, without his consent, are regarded as spam and are illegal, which contradicts the basic principles of mobile text marketing.
Permitted SMS Marketing Campaign
Many countries have special laws to regulate this aspect and protect the personal data of subscribers. These regulations have recently also been supplemented by the chapters defining the requirements for obtaining, processing, and use of databases, including any information relating to a person. According to the legislation of many countries (for example USA), a text message marketing company is required to get the subscriber’s consent to receive information on a certain topic from a particular sender.
The form of consent expression depends on the situation: it can be the acceptance of the contract offer, for example by sending SMS, or personal signature in the contract with the consent on services, a tick in the personal profile on the website, etc.
Make Clear Opt-out
So, if these conditions are satisfied, the subscriber, having received the message, will understand that the advertisement is carried out with his consent, and will not express any negative attitude. The SMS mailing list should include only those people whose consent to receive this information can be proved. However, over time, the subscriber may cease to be interested in the subject of the text ad.
In this case, the sending company must provide the client with a simple refusal method (opt-out option), which also falls within the scope of the legislation. There is an interesting fact connected with the opt-out option – many SMS subscribers who are aware of the possibility to unsubscribe from SMS at any time do not hurry to do it, hoping that future messages may be of interest to them.
Refer to the Subscriber in the SMS Personally
Once all related laws are observed, it is time to go to the personalization of messages for a particular client when building a mass text marketing strategy. It is necessary to remember the possibility to insert a unique text into each message, even in the case of sending a million SMS.
To begin with, you should refer to a potential client by name. Having received the message starting with the words: “Dear Julia!”- the client is sure to pay attention to it, in contrast to the impersonal “Dear customer!”
Make Your Offer Valuable for the Customer
Wondering what to offer to a specific customer? It is possible by running the up-to-date customer database in a CRM system, integrated with the text marketing software. Besides, very often there is an option to upload a well-structured customer database to the SMS service, including customer’s first mane and last name, unique interests, gender, date of birth or other markers to target. Having this data you can use it to offer a personal discount, special conditions, interesting service or product, etc. for a particular customer.
The SMS campaign can be dedicated to some events: new arrivals, sales offers, a new point of sales launch, etc., or the events connected with a client (birthday, particular date, interests).
Send Text in Particular Time
Messages should come in the daytime. The optimal time for sending the message is from 2 pm to 7 pm according to the time zone of the recipient. All these options are available in the SMS-Smart service, so it is easy to make the client have a feeling of personal contact and a pleasant attitude from the company, and a positive impression of the brand.
SMS Text is a Key – Create Your Unique Text Message
Finally, we approached the text of the message, which largely determines the effectiveness of your SMS campaign.
First of all, the text should be aimed at a certain marketing task, for example, strengthening customer loyalty, increase sales, boost some advertisement campaigns, attract new leads, etc. The first 3-5 words of SMS should “catch” the recipient. Otherwise, there is a possibility that most of the subscribers will not read the message to the end. In general, the message text should be short, simple, and clear to the recipient.
The next important aspect of message marketing is branding. Here it is necessary to pay attention to the emphasis on the brand not only in the SMS text but also to the sender.
There are particular technical requirements and limitations to the Sender ID at most SMS sending services. Sender ID length is limited to Latin text up to 11 characters, or a numerical – up to 16 numbers. If the goal of the SMS text message marketing campaign is to increase brand awareness or loyalty to the brand – the SMS sender must be recognizable, known to the subscribers. Unknown or numerical senders seem suspicious, isn’t it?
Here are the most important aspects of SMS text to pay special attention to:
- call to action
- briefness
- exclusivity
Transparent SMS Includes Call-to-Action
To attract the attention of a potential client to your Ad by SMS, do not rely only on the mentioning of the brand, product or service name in the text of the message. Encourage the recipient of the SMS to a specific action: “Call us now!”, “Visit our store or showroom”, “Subscribe now!”, etc. Thus, the advertising SMS campaign will not only information about the product but also give the consumer a specific guide to action.
Be Laconic while Being Useful
The second rule, which should not be forgotten, while building your text marketing strategy, sounds like a well-known proverb: “Brevity the soul of wit.”
The psychology of content perception is following – long messages are not read to the end, as a rule. Therefore, the essence of the advertising proposal should be clear from the first words. In addition, to make the message easy to read, you should use the script which is native to the reader and avoid abbreviations.
Like in the case of the SMS Sender ID, there are also limitations in the SMS text length. Cyrillic or other non-Latin script SMS is limited to 70 characters, while Latin font SMS allows 160 symbols in single SMS including spaces and punctuation marks. All SMS texts that are longer will be divided into parts and the subscriber will receive several SMS, which reduces the efficiency of perception.
Make Individual Offer in SMS
Finally, advertising SMS text will perform better if it is personalized. To achieve the greatest effectiveness of the advertising campaign, it is desirable to make it clear to the recipient that he is an exclusive offer. To do this, you should remind the subscriber of his VIP status, emphasizing that this proposal is put forward only for this category of customers.
In the SMS-Smart service, we provide an option to set up an SMS template with special markers according to the phone numbers database attributes (first name, last name, occupation, etc.). So, each SMS will be unique and personalized according to the attributes attached to the phone numbers in the database. The final template of the SMS looks like this:
%first_name%! Special offer for you from %from% company. Only on your Birthday %birthday% get 50% discount on %interests%.
You can also set up other parameters according to your database attributes and personalize the SMS marketing campaign to achieve more results.
We also remind you that advertising by SMS should not be spam, that is, illegal distribution of advertising messages, to which the subscriber did not give his consent.
If you need help with setting a bulk SMS campaign at SMS-Smart, feel free to contact our managers – describe your needs, aims of the SMS campaign and they’ll advise you of the best option!
Ready to launch your first SMS campaign? Follow the next steps:
- Create a free SMS-Smart account
- Contact our managers to get 1 EUR on tests.
- Learn how to send bulk SMS at SMS-Smart.
- Advance your SMS marketing performance with the SMS-Smart blog – education section for SMS marketers.