5 SMS Marketing Use Cases: Ways To Use TextSanity
There are countless ways SMS marketing helps amplify your company’s marketing and transactional needs. From sending promotions about new products to providing reminders and confirmations about appointments, anything you need to communicate is possible through mobile text marketing.
TextSanity helps make communicating via text messages simple and efficient. With our platform, you can accomplish more with less: Less time, fewer people, and less headache. Your company can propel itself into the cutting edge of text marketing for a small investment.
What Is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is simply the use of business texting to send marketing, promotional, and transactional text messages to current and future customers. Whether for business or pleasure, texting is the preferred method of communication for a majority of today’s customers.
This switch in preference from voice communications to text communications is largely thanks to innovations in mobile technologies. From the invention of the smartphone to the widespread availability of mobile cellular service, mobile and cellular technology advancements have dramatically changed how our world consumes media, shops, and communicates.
SMS vs. RCS and iMessage
SMS texting was invented in the late 1980s and implemented in the early 1990s, and it’s the grandfather of the various messaging communication protocols we use today. Short Messaging Service (SMS) is the only universally accepted texting protocol available across all devices, making it a formidable foundation for all others.
For instance, iMessage by Apple uses mobile data or WiFi to send and receive messages, but it only works between two Apple iOS devices. Rich Communication Service (RCS) texting also uses data and WiFi to send and receive messages, this time between devices running Google’s Android software.
These advanced messaging services revert to SMS when a data network is unavailable, or the message is between two incompatible devices. Therefore, whether your customer uses an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy, an SMS or Multimedia Message Service (MMS) will be delivered to their phone as intended.
Why Use Mobile Text Marketing?
The most important reason to use text message marketing is that customers prefer it.
Equally important is the statistical success advantage mobile marketing has over other digital marketing mediums.
It’s important to have a diverse marketing portfolio and online presence, incorporating your eCommerce site and social media into your overall digital marketing strategy. However, mobile text messaging should be the core marketing investment that connects all the others.
For the numbers people out there, here are a few that will both surprise and convince you why text marketing is a smart strategic move:
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Surveys have shown that Americans are extremely attached to our phones:
- It takes 90 seconds for an average cell phone user to answer a text message
- 74% of users become anxious when they leave their phone behind
- 45% of users consider their cell phone their most valuable possession
- 53% of users never go longer than 24 hours without looking at their phone
With these numbers in mind, SMS marketing has an open rate 5-times higher, an engagement rate 8-times higher, and a response time 60-times faster than email marketing.
The lesson these statistics provide shows why your best chance at reaching your target audience and getting engagement is through text message marketing. Consumers always have their phones with them, they almost always open a text, and nearly half of them will engage with it. There is no other marketing tool available to you today to deliver this level of success.
How Do You Use SMS Marketing?
If these statistics surprise you, don’t worry — you’re not alone. They almost seem too good to be true. However, they aren’t.
These statistics from sms marketing use cases and research studies explain why companies of all sizes utilize mobile text marketing to accomplish their marketing goals. From companies as large as Walmart to those on Main Street, mobile marketing yields the greatest Return on Investment (ROI).
Here are a few different uses where you can apply text marketing:
Product Launches
SMS marketing is one of the best tools in your arsenal when rolling out a new product. Customers are always on their phones, so SMS tools allow you to utilize mobile marketing and connect your new product to the core of their lives.
Let’s say you drop a new product. With mobile text messaging, you can promote the new product to customers who have already bought similar products.
Maybe it’s an upgrade, or perhaps it’s an entirely new product. With a mobile marketing platform like TextSanity, you can define your audiences ahead of time to simplify your market targeting. Categorizing customers into defined categories means a couple of clicks will send your promotional message to every customer interested in your promotion.
Branded Content Sharing
SMS is one of the most powerful channels to include in your marketing arsenal. Spice up your texts with engaging, informative content that aligns with your brand and helps establish a consistent marketing presence.
Offering higher visibility and engagement than email or snail mail, you may also integrate SMS into a broader online strategy.
Consider promoting a long-form blog or video content with your text message marketing. This can help guide customers to helpful resources about your brands and product. Additionally, it engages customers with your more holistic marketing strategy, allowing you to leverage all digital content and take advantage of the unique benefits of a robust and multi-channel marketing approach.
UGC and Customer Engagement
One of the most powerful marketing practices, regardless of the medium, is user-generated content (UGC). This type of content features customers directly into your marketing efforts, emphasizing your existing customers’ importance within your brand and signaling to your target audience how you care about customers’ thoughts and experiences with your brand and products.
With SMS, fielding UGC is made simple. Minimally invasive communication through SMS, with its relatively high engagement rate, is more likely to attract substantive responses to your requests for UGC.
text message marketing may include personalized messages targeting specific testimonials or broad polls and surveys designed to capture more wide-reaching feedback. Aside from the specific benefits of implementing UGC in your marketing, this engaging content helps generate a sense of customer involvement and engagement in your brand, which fundamentally improves your brand’s visibility and image.
Two-Way Messaging
Providing excellent customer support and a pleasant customer experience is paramount to sustained growth and success.
While SMS services prominently feature automated channels and mass texting, services like TextSanity also enable you to establish two-way messaging channels which allow customers to communicate directly with your brand in real-time.
Giving your customers the ability to communicate questions, concerns, or complaints via text messaging makes the process simple and easy for them and you. People hate waiting on hold for customer service or speaking to robots for five minutes before getting in the queue for a human customer service rep.
Texting bypasses the hold times. Even if you use a chatbot, which we’ll admit isn’t a human representative, texting gets the customer the help they need in a fraction of the time.
Real-Time Updates
As a visible marketing channel, SMS is ideal for providing real-time updates on your products and services. This often includes everything from appointment and deadline reminders to delivery tracking, ensuring customers stay informed and involved every step of the way.
Why Use TextSanity?
While it’s possible to send a text to your customers from any phone individually, it’s not wise and would be very time-consuming. Not only will this method not be automated, but it’s also nearly impossible to keep up with without hiring additional personnel.
Integrations
Our platform integrates many popular online tools to help simplify data collection and marketing, such as WordPress integration. Our WordPress integration makes collecting and storing customer data simple when connected to your eCommerce site.
Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are a product of your data collection and send automated messages to your selected audience to encourage and promote engagement. Drip campaigns are easy to create and send and significantly increase conversion rates.
Broadcasting
Broadcasting, or mass texting, is different than group messaging. In a group message, all recipients see each other and see the same message. With mass texting, each recipient receives a message independent of the others. You can use broadcasting to send a message to all of your customers or just a few. It’s all up to you, and best of all, it’s easy.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is simple – you can’t afford not to use text marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. Why? Because your competitors use it, and if you don’t, they have a clear marketing advantage over you.
The SMS marketing use cases don’t lie: SMS marketing is a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, and our platform offers affordable solutions to help you elevate your business texting to the next level.
Contact us today, and our team will be available to answer any of your questions and go into greater detail about the various tools TextSanity offers.
