SMS Marketing: A Must For Brands!

Remember the Nokia 3210 days when all we had were SMS messages? Looking back, we’ve come a long way. But step in today’s digital marketing world, SMS marketing is seen as a little alien to businesses.

According to our State of Customer Experience survey, only 32% of marketers currently use SMS for their customer reach, compared to 95% using email and websites.

Focusing your investments on your strengths is usually the way to go with your ROI. But what if you saw a golden opportunity that could help you outshine your competitors? Hear us out. Compared to email, SMS is a saturated market and a personal channel for customers. Used correctly, it helps you undercut the competition and increases the chances of capturing your customers’ attention.

To be effective, you need to use it with caution! It’s all about balance by setting expectations on the types of communications your customers receive.

Why SMS marketing?

1 in 3 consumers check their text notifications within 1 minute of receiving a text. Compare this to being drowned by thousands of emails in your inbox; you can already see the potential here. It’s an untapped channel with huge business opportunities. In fact, 70% of consumers opted in to receive texts from businesses in 2022! But there are other benefits your businesses can reap:

1. Reach customers faster

60% of consumers check and answer texts within 1-5 minutes of receiving the message. SMS is excellent for creating urgency in time-sensitive campaigns like cart abandonment, as it’s an easy way to get your message in front of someone quickly. Pair this with a whopping 98% read rate, and this engagement rate is what email marketers dream of.

2. Opportunity to build customer loyalty

SMS is an intimate channel, meaning that how you communicate needs to be personal and relevant to the recipient. By doing so, you can build a stronger relationship with your customers, increasing loyalty over time.

3. Increase response rates

SMS messages have a significantly higher response rate of 45% than email rates of 1-5%. Incorporating SMS into your marketing strategy can increase engagement and response rates, which leads to a more successful campaign overall.

SIX WAYS TO USE SMS MARKETING

When it comes to SMS marketing, there are six main types of communications you can use to engage with your customers:

HOW TO ACTIVATE SMS MARKETING

ENRICH YOUR CUSTOMER PROFILES WITH SMS

Enhance the same data capture methods you use to collect email addresses for mobile numbers and add them to your customer profiles. Capturing both helps extend your cross-channel orchestration and deliver relevant marketing communications on the right channel for an omnichannel experience. Examples of tactics can be:

• Trigger pop-ups for visitors to capture mobile numbers for SMS special offers
• Prompt shoppers at checkout to opt-in to email and mobile data
• Use QR codes on physical receipts to direct customers to landing pages for data-capturing
• Capture emails and mobile numbers for customers using in-store WiFi
• Put QR codes on packaging or delivery packaging

From there, you can enrich your customer profiles to get a 360-degree view of your customer’s journey and interactions to help build long-lasting relationships with them.

NOTE: It’s crucial to obtain permissions and make it clear to customers what they’re opting into, as SMS data capture often centers around email.

INTEGRATED CHANNEL ACTIVITY

Connect different marketing channels using your enriched customer insights to create seamless and integrated experiences. SMS doesn’t need to play as a lead channel. It can support your other channels to enhance the customer experience across your marketing for the long term rather than a single one-off campaign.

For instance, if a user signs up for a promotion or makes a transaction, you can create customized flows for them. You can send them a targeted SMS follow-up if they receive an email but don’t engage with it. If you want to go a step further, use advanced segmentation to divide users into different journeys across email, SMS, mobile push, or in-app messaging based on their behavior and preferences.

SMS INSIGHTS

SMS is usually limited in capturing data such as delivery rates but has no insights into click engagement. But using links with UTM parameters for tracking and analytics helps you to draw insights into the customer journey.

You can do this using Mapp Intelligence to help you gather all the data to get a breakdown of user journeys, including those through SMS channels. You can analyze engagement rates across your website, the rise in sessions, conversion rates, and product affinities. This way, you can understand the conversion potential SMS brings as a channel.

With these insights, you can test and learn while iterating what types of flows work best. So, don’t underestimate the value of SMS insights for improving your marketing strategies.

SMS MARKETING BEST PRACTICES

Here are some of the best practices we swear by:

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Mapp x Fresh Relevance SMS Integration

Mapp Marketing Cloud is a powerful customer experience platform that generates actionable insights for brands to better engage with their customers and deliver effective cross-channel marketing campaigns.

We’ve partnered with Fresh Relevance, a truly versatile personalization platform that helps commerce-driven businesses deliver revenue-boosting experiences across websites, apps, emails, SMS, and ads.

Together, we enable marketers to activate their insights and orchestrate exceptional cross-channel personalization. Our enhanced integration aims to make cross-channel orchestration even more seamless for marketers, from triggering on-site pop-ups, building out triggered campaigns, and now activating SMS marketing as part of a true omnichannel experience that boosts customer engagement.

Contact us to find out more about our email and SMS capabilities

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