5 ways your online business can benefit from text message marketing
Text message marketing offers many benefits to online businesses at an affordable cost. In addition to providing highly personalized marketing campaigns that don’t take a lot of time to create and manage, it enables faster and more reliable communication with customers, improving your customer support and ability to gather feedback.
These are the top 5 ways text message marketing can benefit your online business:
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Cost-Effective Communication
Text message marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to communicate with customers. Not only does SMS have a low cost per message you send to each customer, more of the messages you pay for will actually be read and acted on by their recipient, thanks to text message marketing’s high open rates and conversion rates. Focusing on text message marketing can help you reduce expenses in your marketing budget.
Furthermore, text message marketing benefits from staying short and simple so you don’t have to spend lots of time writing lengthy messages, and can avoid the additional costs of creating and sending media content. Unlike social media and email, it only takes a few seconds to create, schedule and send a marketing text message.
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Fast and Reliable
Most text messages are delivered in a matter of seconds, and it usually takes less than 5 minutes for your recipient to open and read them. While email marketing is often filtered out by spam folders or simply ignored due to the backlog of marketing messages filling customers’ inboxes, 98% of text message marketing is opened. Opt-in marketing and less background noise mean your text is not fighting to stand out in a in a crowd of other marketing messages.
Besides this increased visibility, text message marketing allows your messages to arrive even when customers are not connected to the Internet, making it easier to connect with customers on the move. In addition, most people treat SMS notifications with higher priority than other notifications, making them more likely to check a text immediately and leave SMS alerts on even when social media and instant messaging have been turned off to avoid distraction.
Fast message delivery enables you to send limited-time discounts and increase awareness of flash sales with your text marketing. These make it easier for customers to get the best deals, incentivize immediate purchases before time runs out, and reward users for opting into your text message marketing.
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Customer Service
Text message marketing provides many opportunities to improve your customer experience. A text message marketing app keeps all your text conversations with customers in one place, enabling your team to track interactions and co-ordinate their efforts. This means you can use text messaging to create and progress support tickets while ensuring everyone in your customer service team has easy access to the latest updates and messages. For example, tuition service Kumon uses TextMagic SMS service to schedule weekly updates on their progress with every client, improving customer satisfaction and making it easier to rearrange appointment times.
Texting can reduce your call queues and make it easier for busy customers to get in touch in a way that is convenient for them. More than half of consumers would prefer to contact business through SMS over other communication methods.
Text message marketing can also be used to improve the customer experience with instant order confirmation messages, post-purchase follow up texts and service updates. This helps ensure they won’t miss the latest updates on their order, and enables customers to react quickly if you need a response from them. The average mobile user responds to texts in less than 90 seconds.
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Gathering Feedback
Text message marketing is a convenient and effective platform for gathering useful feedback. A simple follow up text to check customers are happy with your service allows you to get feedback immediately after an interaction, while it is still fresh in a customer’s mind.
Keeping it simple is vital for getting the best SMS survey response rates. Text messages asking for easy responses such as multiple-choice or ratings out of 10 are a great way to get fast feedback on specific features and processes from large numbers of customers. For example, scheduling a text asking customers how well their order was packaged on the day of the delivery, and following up a week or two later to check they are satisfied with the purchase once they have had a chance to try it out.
Survey business Solvero found that adopting SMS surveys enabled them to get much higher response rates, making it easier to get enough replies from narrow target demographics.
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Personalized Opt-In Marketing
Customers have to opt-in to receive your text message marketing, which means you are only contacting existing customers and leads you know are interested in your business. This leads to higher conversion rates, and enables you to tailor your marketing messages to different interests.
By tracking how users find your SMS campaign and asking for additional information such as their industry or product needs at the opt-in stage, you can understand why each lead has subscribed. Using this information to only send the most relevant offers and updates means you can personalize messages to appeal to different audiences. For example, if you have updated certain features of your service, personalized messages can help explain how the changes benefit the way different customers use your business.
Conclusion
Text message marketing gives online businesses the ability to contact and gather feedback from a wide audience at a low cost. Its speed and high open rates mean it also offers many benefits to your customer experience in addition to marketing campaigns, while highly personalized messages boost the impact of your promotions and offers.
Text message marketing is a versatile tool, and with the right approach it provides benefits to many areas of any online business.
Photo by nSeika 
