by Rupert Adam It’s no secret that we love email, we even have it in our name, but did you know we have recently started to really fal...
by Rupert Adam
SMS is generally a more expensive solution in comparison to email, so it’s important that you have a sound strategy for how you are going to use it within your business. Arguably SMS will not work for every business, I mean would you really want to be contacted by your local corner shop via SMS to let you know that a new delivery of milk has been made? I know I certainly wouldn’t.
Another key part of using SMS is gaining your customer’s explicit permission to contact them this way as you don’t want to be getting on their wrong side. Be aware that having them provide you with their mobile number does not permit you to send them SMS marketing. The best practice for this is to make it very clear when requesting their details and provide an SMS opt-in tick box.
As I look through my own texts it’s clear that most businesses follow the same kind of suit with SMS messaging by sending reminders. Reminders for appointments, offers, and reminders that I need to collect my kids from school, wait, no that last one is from my wife! It’s clear that the SMS trend is being heavily used as a reminder tool.
If I look deeper into these SMS messages most of them, especially the appointments, are also confirmed via email either the day or day before I get an SMS message. SMS is generally the final reminder sent to recipients as 98% of the time it will be opened* and read.
SMS campaigns need to be highly targeted and very relevant to the recipient. You are using a channel that is predominantly used by friends and family to communicate with each other, so keep this in mind, don’t just send out messages to your whole database.
Retailers could use SMS in a number of ways; alerting of a new store opening near them, a relevant sale or even an SMS on the day of delivery to say you hope they like their new purchase and maybe include an offer code for their next one.
The reminder model works really well for the travel business, using it to remind your travelers of key travel information or to book insurance, hire cars, excursions, etc.
Finance, Insurance and Service/MOT businesses can also send renewal reminders to their customers along with pre and post-sale information.
There are countless options available to you and these are just a few ideas of how you can use SMS. Take time to look at your whole process and decide which areas would benefit from SMS the most and how it will work. Looking specifically at the customer journey you will be able to identify where SMS will be a useful resource and where it will not.
To find out how easy it is to start an SMS campaign, check out our new feature here.
It’s no secret that we love email, we even have it in
our name, but did you know we have recently started to really fall for
SMS campaigns too? Read on to find out how you can use an SMS campaign
within your business to support your email marketing.
After adding the SMS functionality into Maxemail
and with our latest update improving the way it handles replies, this
week I thought I would look at different ways that you can use an SMS
campaign within your business and how you can support that with your
emails.SMS is generally a more expensive solution in comparison to email, so it’s important that you have a sound strategy for how you are going to use it within your business. Arguably SMS will not work for every business, I mean would you really want to be contacted by your local corner shop via SMS to let you know that a new delivery of milk has been made? I know I certainly wouldn’t.
Another key part of using SMS is gaining your customer’s explicit permission to contact them this way as you don’t want to be getting on their wrong side. Be aware that having them provide you with their mobile number does not permit you to send them SMS marketing. The best practice for this is to make it very clear when requesting their details and provide an SMS opt-in tick box.
What types of campaigns could you be running?
As I look through my own texts it’s clear that most businesses follow the same kind of suit with SMS messaging by sending reminders. Reminders for appointments, offers, and reminders that I need to collect my kids from school, wait, no that last one is from my wife! It’s clear that the SMS trend is being heavily used as a reminder tool.
If I look deeper into these SMS messages most of them, especially the appointments, are also confirmed via email either the day or day before I get an SMS message. SMS is generally the final reminder sent to recipients as 98% of the time it will be opened* and read.
SMS campaigns need to be highly targeted and very relevant to the recipient. You are using a channel that is predominantly used by friends and family to communicate with each other, so keep this in mind, don’t just send out messages to your whole database.
Retailers could use SMS in a number of ways; alerting of a new store opening near them, a relevant sale or even an SMS on the day of delivery to say you hope they like their new purchase and maybe include an offer code for their next one.
The reminder model works really well for the travel business, using it to remind your travelers of key travel information or to book insurance, hire cars, excursions, etc.
Finance, Insurance and Service/MOT businesses can also send renewal reminders to their customers along with pre and post-sale information.
There are countless options available to you and these are just a few ideas of how you can use SMS. Take time to look at your whole process and decide which areas would benefit from SMS the most and how it will work. Looking specifically at the customer journey you will be able to identify where SMS will be a useful resource and where it will not.
To find out how easy it is to start an SMS campaign, check out our new feature here.
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