Improve Your Promotional Message Strategy with SMS Marketing

Gone are the days when companies were forced to pay for expensive marketing campaigns on TV or through the mail. Today, SMS marketing allows your promotional messages and strategies to succeed at a fraction of the cost of traditional media.

Research indicates that texting has an open rate of nearly 98%, and nearly 50% of text notifications result in customer engagement. Short message service (SMS) marketing campaigns help you reach and convert more customers and also provide invaluable data for future promotions.

What is SMS marketing?

SMS marketing utilizes text messaging between a business and its customers or prospects to promote new sales, provide information to customers, receive feedback from customers, and collect data.

Essentially, your business sends SMS text messages to customer phone numbers instead of or in addition to mailing flyers or sending emails. Since you already use texting in your personal life, you know texting is both simple and convenient.

Your customers also know it. Texting is a preferred method of communication worldwide, thanks largely to advancements in mobile technologies. 

Today, texting is used for everything from checkout confirmations to appointment reminders. Surveys and research indicate texting has taken the lead over all other forms of communication, including email or phone calls.

SMS marketing, then, is your way to capitalize on the mobile revolution and use it to your advantage for marketing. It allows you to capture attention more quickly than email marketing and is as pervasive as social media.

Ten ways to improve your promotional message strategy

1. Send messages at the right time
2. Send offers and discounts via text
3. Make opting-out easy
4. Reward customers for referrals
5. Add videos to SMS marketing messages
6. Add PDFs and images to SMS marketing messages
7. Convey your brand voice in SMS messages
8. Send SMS messages at regular times
9. Create a text message keyword campaign
10. Create a SMS drip campaign

Let’s discuss ways you can improve your promotional message strategy with ten useful SMS marketing strategies.

1. Send messages at the right time

Timing is everything in marketing, and SMS business texting is no different. Timing is not just about the cadence or rhythm in which you send promotional text messages; it also involves the time of day and the number of texts you send.

For instance, you should not send messages after 8 p.m. or send too many messages back-to-back. Sending transactional messages after 8 p.m. is annoying, and sending too many messages can have an adverse effect on your customer’s interest in continuing to receive messages from you.

TextSanity offers many tools — such as our broadcast calendar — to help you organize your messaging cadence and timing. The calendar helps you set up campaigns based on your target audience and control the timing of these messages. 

2. Send offers and discounts via text

A tried and true method of increasing engagement with your promotional marketing is through the use of special offers, coupons, discount codes, and loyalty programs. Sending a perfectly timed text to a prospect with a limited-time offer or flash sale will likely lead to increased conversions.

Your customers love good deals. Showing your customers you value them through coupons and discounts is a great way of building customer loyalty.

Our platform’s greatest benefit is the data you are able to collect on your customers. Data allows you to compile customer categories so you tailor your offers and discounts based on customer profiles. This information has enormous potential and power to convert engagements into sales.

3. Make opting-out easy

The TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) is a federal regulatory statute that is designed to protect American consumers and governs your use of SMS marketing. Giving your customers the option to opt-in to receiving messages from you via text is a requirement under TCPA.

Giving your customers an easy way to opt-out of promotional SMS messages is also important. Overcomplicating the opt-out process could lead to a complaint from your customers to the FCC. Aside from being bad publicity, this is also a bad business practice that can cause a loss of trust and a negative customer experience.

4. Reward customers for referrals

Referrals can be an underappreciated but powerful source of leads and conversions. Not only are referrals free marketing; they also indicate that your customers are happy enough about your service and product that they’re willing to put their name on it.

Encourage your customers to send you referrals by rewarding them with referral promos and discounts, such as a free month of a subscription service or 25% off their next purchase. 

5. Add videos to SMS marketing messages

Adding videos to your SMS marketing messages and promotional campaigns is a great way of taking your messages to the next level. Videos create excitement about your message and, as a result, your company. Many companies use SMS marketing, but not all capitalize on the use of creative videos.

TextSanity’s platform gives you the ability to easily attach your videos or links to your messages without being unnecessarily complicated. With TextSanity, add videos up to 5MB. Any bigger, and you’ll need to link to the video.

6. Add PDFs and images to SMS marketing messages

Much like videos, adding PDFs and images to your SMS marketing messages enables your customer’s broader engagement with your business. Suppose you own a restaurant. Adding your menu to your text messages as a PDF is an efficient way of promoting new items or providing your customers with a convenient option for saving your menu to their phones. 

7. Convey your brand voice in SMS messages

Branding for your business cannot be understated. Branding, in essence, gives your company its public and global identity. Companies that are successful with branding capitalize on all of the senses to create their unique image.

Branding can come from a universal scent in your physical locations to the colors you use in your logos.

Branding should also feel organic. Your customers become familiar with your identity without realizing it was intentional, while at the same time being able to identify your company with any of the five senses immediately.

Branding in SMS marketing is just as important as it is on your ecommerce site or in your physical locations. 

8. Send SMS messages at regular times

We mentioned timing earlier, and sending SMS messages at regular times helps develop your cadence and increases your chances of converting leads into sales.

With TextSanity’s software, scheduling your SMS messages is far easier than trying to do it on your iPhone or Android device. Ultimately, this process boils down to automation, which can be difficult to do from your device. With our platform, automation is simple and effective. 

9. Create a text message keyword campaign

Keyword campaigns are the bread and butter of TextSanity’s platform and have an engagement rate of nearly 45%. Keyword campaigns give you the ability to select one or multiple keywords to send to your customers.

These keyword campaigns will usually include a call-to-action (CTA) for the customer to act on. These CTA’s drive consumers to your website or physical location, where they are then presented with a special discount, sale, or new product. 

10. Create a SMS drip campaign

Drip campaigns draw from your customer profiles and are a preset series of messages triggered by a customer’s engagement with the campaign via text.

These types of campaigns are not new, and they can be done with any method of marketing. However, using SMS business texting for drip campaigns can be powerful simply because texting is such an easy and preferred form of communication.

Luckily, our subscription-based platform offers everything you need to get started with text message keywords, drip campaigns, payments, and more.

What to do next

Contact TextSanity today to start promoting your business with SMS texting. Our team is available to answer any of your questions and help guide you through the process of setting up your account, establishing your new text number, and starting your first campaign.