If you have a small to medium sized business, you may think that effective SMS marketing campaigns are outside of your budget. SMS is actually a very cost effective and responsive medium, complete with a beneficial ROI (Return on Investment). There are only a few basic procedures required In order to achieve this, and subsequently have a worthwhile campaign.
The first SMS marketing route is to promote your new service/product to your existing customer mobile lists that you have previously gathered.
- Gathered List: If you wish to announce your offer to your existing customers, often as not, you have their details garnered from a previous promotion or from a point of sale database or a spreadsheet. These numbers have to have an opted into status (meaning your customers have agreed to receive further SMS from your business). And you must include an opt out facility within the message. Once you have this list, you can upload them to any web service, type your SMS marketing message and schedule the intended time of your broadcast.
The next SMS Marketing route is to gain new customers while also building an opt-in mobile list.
- Gather List: In order to market this correctly, you need to build a customer mobile list. There are many ways that this can be done, the following summarizes an outline of just one method.
- Create a marketing campaign where a person enters a SMS based competition for a prize (possibly a m-coupon). So you advertise (online/print medium) a mobile number to text to, along with your business or promoted name as the keyword, which acts as the response item, (enforces brand recognition).
- Once this is received to your list, an acknowledgement text message is generally sent back to the mobile sender, often with a query regarding if the person wishes to receive further information from your business. If they text back a confirmation such as “y”, then they get added to your subscriber list.
- Now you have built a customer list to text your marketing SMS out to. But always include an opt-out service.
Using Text Messages/SMS/Mobile Marketing in Business 