Text Message Marketing
How to Use SMS Text Marketing
to Grow Your Business
Has text message marketing ever crossed your mind as a viable way to grow your business? There are many ways to stay in touch with your clients and prospects to keep them coming back and buying from you on a regular basis. You may call them on the phone, send them a letter or postcard, or use one of my favorite methods - email marketing. Now, there is a new kid on the block that you should take a look at also.
SMS (Text Message Marketing Service) is growing in popularity every year and quickly becoming a great way to get the word out about your products or services.
It is similar to permission based email marketing in many ways because it allows you to build an opt-in list of subscribers who want to receive messages such as special marketing offers from you. It works really well with retail businesses who use messages to drive traffic into their stores.
What is so great about it? To start with, almost 3 out of 4 adults in the U.S. send and receive text messages according to a Pew Research Center study. Use among teenagers is even higher still.
When you use text message marketing, your list receives the message almost instantly and is usually read within minutes. According to a study by Opus Research, 97% of all SMS messages are read and 83% of those are done so within the hour! Compare that to email messages which some people might only check once or twice a week and you are looking at some remarkable numbers.
In addition to being quick and effective, SMS text marketing is also relatively inexpensive compared to marketing methods such as direct mail, often costing as little as $.10 per message sent to your subscribers.
Here are some important points to help you get started if you are thinking about testing the waters with text message marketing.
1. Consider your goals and determine what kind of marketing offers you will make via SMS text marketing. For many retail or service businesses, ask people to sign up to receive special sale notices or coupons from you, offering an extra incentive to get them to sign up to your list.
2. Find companies that offer SMS text marketing services and test a few of them out to see how well you like their service, support and the website interface you will be using. Some of the better companies are boomtext.com and textmarks.com, but you can find many more with a quick “sms marketing service” search on Google.
3. Once you have a general plan and a service provider to deliver your messages to your clients and prospects, now is the time to consider how you will get people signed up to receive your text message marketing notices.
Use flyers and business cards to ask visitors to visit your store or website and sign up for your list. Offering them a free gift such as a special report or a free item coupon if that will work for your kind of business.
Most SMS services also make it easy to place a signup box on your website where customers enter their phone number to begin receiving messages from you.
4. When you begin sending out to your prospect/client list, be respectful of their time and do not contact them too frequently. Remember, they are already paying their mobile phone company to receive and send texts on their phone. Once a week is a good frequency, but as with all things test and see what works best in your particular market.
These are some good ideas to try out text message marketing and see how it works for growing your business. What action will you take towards that goal? Please share this article using the buttons below or the top right of this page and be sure to sign up for my informative and free newsletter above on the right there. Thank you.
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