The world is always changing. As consumer behaviors fluctuate, demand shifts, interests change, and technology evolves, the needs of a marketing department must adapt. Adapting to the use of technology for marketing campaigns and initiatives isn’t always as straightforward as it would seem. Sometimes, you can jump right into using a new technology to your advantage, like when you’re buying stocks or looking for cheap car insurance online. Other times you need to leverage existing resources to accomplish your goals. In today’s world, everyone is constantly connected and you’re going to be competing for attention spans

What Is Text Message Marketing?

Marketing via text message isn’t a new concept. It’s been around for quite some time. It’s interactive, engaging, and makes communication—be it marketing, promotions, feedback, or otherwise— between a company and its customers much simpler than ever before. Text message marketing allows you to send promotions, alerts or information about new products directly to customers. Whether it’s through push notifications, sms, or mms, these messages can reach audiences quicker. Instead of trying to leverage an email newsletter or marketing email, which can only reach a small portion of an audience, texting cuts directly through the static to reach the pockets of customers everywhere. After all, those people have a phone and can see a message whether they’re working, commuting, or just kicking back at home. Text message marketing often utilizes A specialized program that allows bulk text messages to be sent to a specific set of contacts (such as a mailing or loyalty list) quickly and efficiently.

How It Works

Text message marketing works quite simply. Marketers set up a list, define the type of content they want to send, and carefully curate the contacts to which they are going to send the information. Then you can choose a time to send the text (late afternoon is highly recommended). Marketers can also create and manage your contacts, groups, and messages all in one place. Bulk texting tools make it easy to personalize messages and track the results, including open rates and engagement. After that you just need to schedule your messages and send them off to the appropriate tagged and filtered contacts. It’s also possible to send recurring messages, auto responses, and opt-out/opt-in confirmations to your customers through SMS or MMS. That’s it. Utilizing this method, you can tailor your messages to particular recipients or groups of recipients to run any campaign or promotion effectively.

Features

For something is comprehensive as text message marketing to work at its best, it needs to be feature rich. Feature rich and comprehensive messaging programs offer adaptability, flexibility, and usability for the entire organization. Here are just a few of the features to look for in a mass texting tool:

• Importing contacts on a mass scale
• Using both SMS and MMS to craft engaging content
• Utilize quick and easy templates
• Send messages to landlines
• Send messages at specific dates or times
• Create messaging groups
• Include URLs and links in your messages
• Add filters and tags to messages, to route them appropriately
• The ability to send bulk texts

With these capabilities at hand, it’s easy to conveniently send marketing messages that matter to your customers.

Best Practices

As with any marketing campaign, there are some best practices to follow when using text message marketing. Ask customers to opt in first. Don’t just automatically add them to a list when they provide their information to you. With that in mind, offer respect for their privacy and don’t be intrusive. You’ll also want to provide some kind of value for opting into your messaging. If somebody signs up for a messaging service, they need to have incentive to keep it. Otherwise they’ll just opt out. Speaking of opting out, you need to offer the ability to unsubscribe. No one wants to lose subscribers or people from their mailing list, but it’s something that must be done. Without offering the option to unsubscribe, you’re not being fully transparent and that will make customers weary of joining your service. If you follow a few best practices, craft compelling content, and interact with your customers, your text message marketing campaigns can help you derive success from your marketing endeavors.

Conclusion

The ability to send text messages in large quantities at a low cost makes mass texting software an attractive option for businesses. It might not be a one size fits all tool for every bit of marketing or promotion you have to do, but it is incredibly effective for reaching a wide audience quickly and in real time. This can facilitate upcoming promotions, and form customers of new products, provide guest services, and help answer burning questions your customers might have. Ultimately, text message marketing is a valuable tool that will take your marketing to an entirely new level while simultaneously helping you achieve success through its set of comprehensive features and tools.Images: Canva