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If there’s one golden rule of marketing, it’s that you need to reach customers where they are. For example, you see a lot of billboard advertising alongside busy highways, but rarely on back country roads. The reason for this is obvious – hardly anyone is driving on the back roads, so building a billboard doesn’t make any sense.
As far as reaching people where they are, it’s tough to beat a text message. Some people can go weeks without checking their email. Some people hardly ever watch TV. But almost everyone these days is carrying a smartphone. And while nobody likes spam calls, a friendly text is less intrusive.
But there’s a lot more to text-based marketing than merely being able to reach potential customers. When used correctly, text messaging can make your customers feel like they have a more personal relationship. That’s because they’re interacting with you on the same platform they use to talk to their friends and families.
Over the years, the text based marketing community has reaped a number of benefits from SMS marketing. Here, we’ll be discussing just some of these benefits. When we’re through, you should have a good understanding of how test based marketing can help you grow your business. Let’s begin!
Texting is Urgent and Immediate
One major benefit of sms marketing for ecommerce is that people tend to answer text messages quickly. In fact, 95 percent of text messages are read within 15 minutes of being delivered. And with click-through rates of 45 to 50 percent, you’re looking not just at rapid delivery, but also a rapid response. This combination makes for an easy way to get fast results, as opposed to other marketing methods that can take weeks or even months to pay off.
Texting Can Support Other Marketing Channels
While texting is a very effective marketing channel, it’s important to remember that it’s just that – a channel. And just like any other marketing channel, it needs to work as an effective part of a cohesive marketing strategy. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to do this.
For instance, let’s say you’ve sent out an email announcing a sale, or delivering shipping information to your customer. You could then send a follow up text, asking if the customer read your email. In fact, a text of this nature can increase email open rates by anywhere from 20 to 30 percent.
Another good example is integrating text based marketing with your social media strategy. You can include a hashtag in your texts, and encourage people to share. You can also put your short code in your social media material, so people recognize it when they get a text. Because it’s a familiar number, they’ll be more likely to open your text.
Texting Is Great for Market Research
To create a good customer experience, you need to understand what is and isn’t working for your business. This is why so many companies send out surveys to customers following an interaction. SMS surveys have an average response rate of 31 percent, and most responses are sent within five minutes. This is a great way to find out about your customers’ experience at the moment, immediately after they make a purchase. GrubHub is famous for doing this; they send a survey text after every delivery.
Texting Increases Customer Engagement
Customer engagement happens any time a customer takes an active interest in your company. This might be as simple as making a purchase. But it can also include reading marketing material. Basically, an engaged customer is someone who is following your brand and knows what’s going on with your business.
Text messaging drives engagement because it’s familiar and easy to use. Social media, for example, requires people to sign up and create an account, and install a new phone app. And not everybody is on every social network. On the other hand, almost everyone has a phone number, and they use their texting app every day.
Texting Can Provide Top-Tier Analytics
Because texts are immediate and easy to track, you can get a ton of useful information from your SMS marketing campaign. You can follow each individual customer’s experience, and keep track of all your interactions. Based on your experience, you can truly form a unique relationship with each customer.
This trackability has one final benefit. If some customers don’t respond to texts, you can simply stop texting them, and use another marketing channel instead. Not only does this help you better reach those customers, but it also improves your SMS campaign’s ROI by limiting the campaign to those customers who are most likely to respond.
You may also like: Ways To Make Sure That Your Marketing Reaches More
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