SMS promotions are an amazing form of marketing that can do everything from generating instantaneous sales to improving your branding. However, since customer engagement is at the heart of this form of marketing, you have to take special care in how you present your brand when doing promotions. On top of this, you also need to know which strategies are the most effective. This being the case, let’s go over how to use text messaging promotions as an effective marketing method.
1. Limited Time Offers
Scarcity is an extra powerful psychological motivator when using SMS marketing. This is because people usually check their texts as soon as they get them because texting is such a major form of communication these days. Building a strategy around this fact, you can create limited-time offers that expire in just a few hours to really ramp up the fear of loss and generate instant sales. This is an excellent strategy for selling physical products and service-based businesses like restaurants, automotive maintenance, and lawn care using bulk text SMS services.
One thing you need to keep in mind when using this strategy is to consider how often you’re using it. Use it too often, and your subs will become jaded and stop reading your messages. However, if you use it too infrequently, you won’t be able to create the powerful fear of loss that you want and you’ll find your limited-time promotions falling flat as a result. It may take some testing before you find the sweet spot for this kind of strategy.
2. Generating Backend Sales
Customers who have bought from you once will be much more likely to buy from you again. This means that marketing to this segment of your audience is much more profitable since you’ll be spending less money marketing to them. Knowing this fact, you should immediately segment your sub-list into customers and non-customers so that you can market more aggressively to the buyers. Just don’t get too aggressive or you will increase your unsub rate as a result.
Something else to consider is that when you’re marketing on the backend, you already have data on what your customers want. For example, if you run a novelty store and a lot of your subs are people who bought dog-related products, you can create a segment for them and pitch offers for other dog items they may like. This kind of hyper-focused marketing tends to produce very high conversion rates and a high ROI.
3. Loyalty Program Reminders
If you have a loyalty program that rewards customers for reaching certain milestones, you can use SMS marketing to give them a friendly reminder every now and again to encourage them to do business with you again. For example, if you run a retail store that gives out a free item every time a customer buys 10 of that item, then you should be sending reminders to your subs of their progress towards that goal. This is much more effective than the old-fashioned punch ticket method since everything is done digitally.
4. Useful and Engaging Content
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about SMS promotions is that you can’t just send offers out all day, every day. Yes, this is the strategy used for the old email “churn and burn” method, but SMS is different. This is because texting is seen as a more personal form of communication and should be treated as such. In between offers, send your subs links to content that they will either find useful or entertaining. This will increase their engagement with your texts and ensure that they stick around to read your marketing offers when you drop them. Also, thanks to the tools offered by SMS platforms, you can set up entire sequences of content to be linked to via text months in advance so that the entire process is basically on autopilot.
Effective SMS Marketing
Remember, it takes data to understand which SMS promotions are the most effective. You will need to have a good understanding of your target audience as well as when they are most receptive to your promotions. The good news is that SMS platforms give you all the tools you need to achieve this. You can segment your audience, review the data, and develop auto-pilot campaigns that produce continuous income. If you’re not using an SMS platform, then now is the time to get started.
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