It is now almost impossible to live without a smartphone. Most of us spend hours with one of these gadgets on our hands, not just to talk to people, but for all our daily tasks.
Brands, who carefully study the behavior of their consumers, know that if they want to reach them, they will need to find a way to contact them on their smartphones. We are always checking the notifications on the screen, to see if we received a new message.
So the magic question would be: what would be the best way to strengthen the bonds between companies and users?
The answer lies in email marketing, which is becoming more popular. Its great reach and ROI are reflected in its high capturing power.
SMS marketing or text message marketing is a toll that could allow companies to establish contact with their target audience, instantly with minimal cost. According to the Content Marketing Institute, it is estimated that 90% of SMS messages are read in the first 3 minutes after they have been received.
· The rules of the game
It is impossible to create a marketing strategy without previously setting clear goals, because without goals, it is not possible to analyze the results and see if what we are doing is working, or if we need to change our course.
To do that, you will always have to ask the following question: what do I want to achieve?
The range of answers is very wide and will depend a lot on your needs, as well as on your users. Do you want to increase your database? Create a closer relationship with your target audience? Increase your sales?
Once we set our goal, we will have to revise our databases
to extract the subscriber’s phone number. You need to have the mobile number of your contacts to work with SMS marketing, but you also need to make sure that these customers accepted to receive your messages.
Before creating an SMS marketing strategy, it is worth reviewing your local legislation to ensure that you can send this type of campaign. Some countries have laws to limit the commercial use of text messages or don’t allow these campaigns on weekends or holidays (for example, in France, you can’t send commercial messages on Sundays, holidays or after 10 pm).
You should always respect your local law, but mainly the privacy of your users, acting with ethics and courtesy.
Time is money and having an updated database is a must.
You should also include opt-out options on all messages that you send because if a subscriber doesn’t want to receive your messages, you should respect that choice.
Remember that sending messages without consent, be it in email marketing, in SMS marketing, in push notifications or through any other channel is spam anywhere in the world.
As the last guideline, don’t forget that these types of messages are sent from numbers that users will not recognize, so it is necessary to include the company name in the SMS, or the user probably will ignore your message.
· Apply the same strategy used in email marketing
Before you start working, you should keep in mind that there are two types of SMS messages in marketing: campaigns and transactional.
Campaigns are sent to contact lists, and their goal is to inform users about promotions or new products. Transactional messages, on the other hand, are customized, used to update the a customer about a particular event or behavior, such as orders, security tokens, or update customers about the status of a delivery.
For effective communication and to achieve the proposed goals, it is vital to work with SMS marketing and email marketing together, to take advantage of the best these two strategies can offer.
Therefore, when developing a Cross-Channel strategy, by using both techniques, we can work seamlessly, offering promotions and valuable information to our customers and subscribers.
In other words, we should take advantage of the SMS campaigns to try to sell, using email marketing to send content.
Although it may seem that these two methods can’t work together, it is possible to work with SMS and email marketing correctly. We can use SMS to send urgent messages, which the user will read in a short time. On the other hand, we can use email marketing to send more extensive newsletters, with much more content.
· How can I maximize the open rates?
The common factor of any digital marketing strategy is to send a message to a group of people and that this message is clearly understood. That is, the goal is always to explain something.
The open rates of emails are lower than for SMS campaigns. Therefore, it is always a good option to send SMS messages to users who are not interacting with the emails, trying to maintain some form of contact with them.
These are some binomial formulas in which both the email and SMS can help improve engagement and therefore the open rate:
- Loyalty, you can send messages to the most active users of your email marketing campaigns, to strengthen ties with hem.
- You could send text messages to users who opened your last newsletter, to reinforce the message with additional information or a promotion
- Increase the effectiveness of a traditional SMS email campaign to improve conversion rate
The growth of real-time communication is forcing marketers to seek out alternatives to adapt their strategy to new trends, as users are more connected and interested in instant information.
In summary, for a secure delivery of the message we want to send to our users, SMS and Email marketing should be combined, for creating an efficient marketing strategy.
Just to be clear, you should send an email campaign, to segment the users who didn’t open the messages and send them an SMS campaign.
If they don’t interact with any of the campaigns, it’s because they are not interested in the brand.