SMS and Text Marketing for small businesses – sounds like an archaic era where we’ve landed on planet earth in the year 2000, where everyone is using their stylish flip phones to send texts! Except, it is nothing like that.
In fact, in the digital retail landscape, they present an excellent channel for engagement, customer onboarding, and pushing more sales. Besides a terrific open-rate of 95%+, SMS and text hold an untapped reservoir of immense value for e-commerce brands. We will explore them all in this blog.
If you haven’t considered this channel to power-up your brand, this is a quick guide to get you started.
Here are the ABCs of text message marketing for small businesses.
As per a study by Twilio, SMS has been ranked as the #1 channel of choice by the customers to engage with their favorite brands. This insight came after surveying 6000 customers across Asia, Europe, and North America – showing that 9/10 customers prefer text to talk to a business.
Moreover, more than 5 billion people use text messaging for communication worldwide – representing 65% of the total world population. That means a majority of your customers, if not all, are readily available for communication via SMS.
Wait, but why is text marketing such a promising proposition for e-commerce?
Text message marketing, despite its simplicity, has highly effective reach and penetration when it comes to influencing a targeted audience. Some of the qualities that make it a fruitful avenue for e-commerce brands are:
High Engagement Rates
Unlike email, calls, or other forms of outreach, SMS, and text marketing for small businesses showcase engagement metrics to be significantly on the higher side. Text campaigns register up to 98% open-rates, 90% of which are opened within the first 3 minutes. Moreover, the text-only structure of this channel makes it friendly, simple, and conversational.
Broader Audience Reach
Text messaging is universal – thanks to the cellular network carriers across the globe. Unlike other marketing and digital campaigns limited by either devices, platforms, geography, or total app-users, SMS readily reaches your intended audience.
Efficient & Mobile-Friendly
Text messaging is real-time, less cumbersome than composing an email, and much faster than making a phone call and talking to someone. This is the reason businesses see a reduction of 10-17% in phone calls if they have a personalized text-marketing campaign in place. This reduces significant support-staff overhead for small businesses.
In addition to being efficient, text-messaging is also mobile-friendly. You don’t have to optimize any graphics, aspect ratios, platform conversions, etc., for your campaigns. Simply draft the message and deploy!
Brand Trust
Brands that offer quick ways for customers to connect with them on the fly are perceived as more trustworthy and accountable. If a customer can reach your business in real-time, and you resolve their query instantly – kudos to your customer experience rating!
Alright! Now tell me how to get started with Text Message Marketing for my business?
Adding SMS as a major marketing channel for your e-commerce business begins with the identification of your end objective.
There are 3 types of text messages you can send to your customers;
- Broadcast messages
- Personalized text messages for a given context
- 2-way conversations
You might want to promote an offer, onboard new customers, or simply enhance your customer experience through a survey. Locking an objective will help you decide what kind of SMS marketing campaign needs to be deployed.
Identifying Success Metrics
Once your marketing objective is frozen, you’ll need to identify the success metrics to measure how impactful your SMS marketing campaign is. Success metrics can include – onboard ‘X’ customers through text marketing, or resolve ‘Y’ customer support queries, or recover ‘Z’ cart sales via the SMS channel.
Selecting the Right SMS Marketing Tool
Once your marketing objectives and KPIs for ROI are set, it is time to find a tool that can make your endeavor a successful one. You can rely on AI-based marketing automation tools like Wigzo to execute your SMS marketing initiatives flawlessly.
Wigzo’s SMS marketing not only allows automation but also personalized communication for each of your customers. It is an easy-to-use mass text-marketing software that triggers contextual SMS communication as per the customer’s actions. You can also run broadcast messages – or use the patented Double-Tap SMS Opt-in technology “Magic Link” to build a vast subscribers list in a short time. Once the Magic Link is placed on a relevant channel (SMS, Instagram, etc.), the user taps it once, and a pre-populated pop-up appears in the user’s text messaging app. With the second tap, the user can consent to opt-in, and the information is sent back to the marketer.
SMS marketing automation by Wigzo allows e-tailers to register 99% open-rates, 35%+ CTR, and up to 20x the ROI on spend. To help you make the most of your SMS marketing budget with the Wigzo platform, here is an in-depth e-commerce SMS marketing guide for your reference. In here, you’ll discover various strategies and KPIs to get maximum return on your text marketing campaigns throughout the year.
Okay! Are there any last-minute tips before I launch an SMS campaign?
There are a couple of things you must pay attention to make your text/SMS marketing campaign a success. They are;
- Check the GDPR compliance for your business location. Different countries have different laws when it comes to taking customer consent for opt-ins. Usually, opt-in consent is required for broadcasts and personalized event-based texts. Wigzo takes care of this too!
- Keep a check on the frequency of broadcast texts you send out. Too many frequent texts can plummet your subscribers’ list count. The best strategy is always to test, deploy, analyze, improve, and re-deploy.
- Brevity is the soul of wit. Successful SMS marketing campaigns have anywhere between 160-320 characters. You can even use templates to speed things up. Also, do test different versions of your text-copy before sending out the actual campaign.
- Stay engaging and conversational. Hey! You are talking to a beloved customer, and emojis and informal tone are appreciated in such context.
Wrapping Up
SMS and text marketing can become a core driver to spike up seasonal sales, grow your subscribers’ list, and supercharge your customer support. Using it with a smart tool like Wigzo, which offers you consolidated CRM and Analytics over a single dashboard, can be one of the best investments for your e-tail brand.
Go ahead and take Wigzo for a FREE spin and see how it will add value to your profit targets.
More power to your brand! 🙂
