Surveys say that SMS marketing is still a highly effective way to reach your customers and boost your profits. With all the new advances in mobile technology that can engage your customers, a simple 160-character text message still does the trick best. Amazingly, lots of businesses haven’t caught on to this easy, cost-effective marketing method.
Any type of business can use text message marketing and text keywords to boost sales. Here are some of the best practices on how to market effectively with text messages.
Not Too Much, Not Too Little
If you send too many promotional messages, it feels like spam and they’ll tune you out. If you don’t send enough, your customers forget about you. You have to strike the perfect balance so that you stay on their radar, your offers are timely, and you don’t drive them crazy with six messages a day.
What’s the perfect balance? It all depends on your market and the offers you’re making. In other words, there’s no easy answer. However, you can discover this perfect balance by experimenting. If your SMS provider allows you to, segment your list and send identical messages at different frequencies. This is called split-testing and the response from your market will show you how much is just enough.
Experiment with Times of Day
A recent study says that 97% of text message recipients open the message within the first 15 minutes. The rest open within the next hour. People don’t bother with yesterday’s text messages. Since you’re marketing straight to their phones, the time element is critical. There are good times and bad times. This goes for times of day as well as days of the week.
Again, the right time all depends on your market and their preferences, and the best way to discover it is to experiment. Send messages at different times of day and segment your list if you can to test it. You’ll see a pattern and you can use this data to make the most of your messages.
As for the best time of the day to text, as long as marketers are active between the peak usage hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. they’ll get more interest than they would by posting at any other time. If you’re posting links, however, aim for sometime between 1 and 3 p.m., as this is the time frame in which your’re likely to get the most clicks.
Set Yourself Apart
Chances are, your customers are signed up on several lists where they’re getting SMS messages from several companies. You can really enhance your mobile marketing campaign by offering something unique the others aren’t giving them. This takes some creativity, but an easy way to get ideas is to sign up for a few of your competitors’ lists. See what types of offers they’re sending and figure out a way to make yours different. You don’t need to one-up them; just make yours stand out by filling a gap in the market.
Know Your Market
In one important way, text message marketing is no different from any other kind of marketing. You’ve got to know your customers and the kind of deals they want. No matter how you fine-tune your marketing strategy, it’s the strength of your offers that’s going to get them to pay attention.
If you offer exactly what your customers are looking for, your text message marketing campaign can convert at 50% or higher. Study the demographics of your target market and figure out what they’re looking for. Then, give the people what they want!