If you’re thinking about using the text message marketing strategy to advance your business, then you sure are on the right track. Text message marketing is thought to be a traditional and even outdated marketing or customer outreach strategy. However, the truth is that it’s still a great business marketing asset, even in this modern digital era. In fact, if you’re looking to improve your company’s customer support, you can take full advantage of being able to talk and reply via text message using 2-way SMS platforms.
Using a text messaging campaign for your business allows you to reach out to new and existing clients, customers, or consumers wherever and whenever. Since people of all ages, socioeconomic classes, and social statuses make use of phone numbers, they’re able to receive text messages. With text message systems and tools like bulk messaging, you can create more awareness about your business, give promos, and increase sales.
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What is Text Message Marketing?
Text message marketing, or SMS marketing, is a way of sending SMS messages to consumers using an SMS marketing platform. Most companies are now turning to SMS marketing to communicate with their staff and their clients. Well, why not? One of the major advantages of text marketing is low cost and of course, the high ROI that it offers.
There are different kinds of SMS marketing that you can choose from, including autoresponder, text blast, text link delivery, etc.
How to Use Business Text Messaging as Part of Your Sales Funnel
1. Choose the Right Message Platform to Get Started
You first need to find a text message platform that’s suitable for your business type and your customer target—there are many of these out there that you can choose from. They have different features that will meet the needs of all types of businesses. Make sure that you do some research before choosing one and make sure that the features are something that you will actually use for your business.
It’s crucial to choose a messaging platform or software that offers features that will be beneficial to you and your business. The variation in the cost of diverse text message software and platforms could also play a part in determining the one you’d choose. The payment options usually range from pay-as-you-go, subscription-based payment system, a monthly payment, and all-at-once payment system.
When it comes to sending texts for your business, you can expect to get more responses from your text recipients if you use top-notch text messaging software like Drop Cowboy.
2. Create Your Customer Message Recipient List
Of course, your text marketing campaign’s aim would be defeated if you don’t have phone numbers of potential, new, and existing clients and customers to send the text messages to. This is why you need to make a recipient list containing phone numbers you want to send texts to. Some use software apps and special services to guess phone numbers of large numbers of people of diverse ages, groups, classes, and social statuses.
Number finder websites also contain phone numbers of people, but you’d most likely need to pay for special services to get specific details about the numbers. Some also use reverse phone lookup and phone number directory services to get millions of numbers. A reverse search website should also provide you with the names of all people registered in their database, along with their phone numbers, addresses, and other relevant information.
This means you’d be able to filter out the numbers and only send messages to those of your target outreach. You can also reach out to SIM card providers to get large scale phone numbers of their users. You’d most likely need to get a license and also pay some money to get access to this because SIM card providers treat their customers’ data with uttermost care to avoid privacy breach.
Using technical services, you can glean your target audience’s phone numbers from social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Additionally, people can personally sign up on your site by inputting their number and other details. These methods can offer you accurate results and help you get millions of phone numbers without much stress.
3. Create Quality Content
For a business owner who wants to make a better impression on customers, it’s important to know how to create a quality business text message for your customers. By doing this, you’re actually building rapport with your customers, and they will become loyal customers. That’s why you have to make sure that your messages are well written and informative so that they can easily capture the consumer’s attention.
Your potential customers will be more likely to go with a company that they feel they can trust, and your text message format could be the determinant of whether your business would seem reputable or not. Imagine sending an error-filled text to customers—they’d see the text as spam. This is why you should hire professional text content creators if you don’t know how to write promotional texts.
You should also ensure that you provide all the information that they need about your business, particularly your products and services in the text. It should also contain your active contact address so that they can easily contact you.
You can also offer them the option to unsubscribe from your text list if they don’t want to keep receiving your messages. Likewise, you can include an option to keep sending them promotional text messages. This’d make your text and even business seem more credible. Why? Spammers and scammers won’t provide unsubscribing options.
The content needs to be clear about what the text message is about as well. In other words, you need to make sure that the business text isn’t written in a way that will distract people from the main point of the message.
You should also ensure that the text message isn’t unnecessarily long with fluffy information. This is because people won’t read it. In fact, sending long texts is the easiest way to get your potential clients and customers to keep deleting the messages without reading them. You need to make sure that everyone who opens your text can see the value offered in the text straight up.
4. Measure the Impact of Your Text Message Campaign
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness and impact of your SMS marketing campaign, there are many ways to get this information. The best way is to track responses that come from your text message recipients. You will want to collect all the data you can to determine how effective your campaign is. Your sales conversion rate will also nudge you that you’re doing something right.
It’s also effective to conduct a survey to discover how well your campaign is working with regards to driving responses from the recipients. Once you have received all of the replies from the survey, you will then want to sort through the different responses in order to find the most successful ones and those that were least.
By sorting through the replies that you get, you can find out which ones received the most responses and which ones did not. In doing so, you will be able to determine which parts of your campaign were the most effective and which ones did not.
These responses provided will help you figure out what went wrong with your campaign because you can see where the most successful parts of the campaign failed. For example, if you had an interesting offer that you sent out, but the people receiving the messages didn’t seem interested in it, then you might be better off focusing on creating another campaign that offers something more interesting.
From this information, you will be able to determine the areas of your SMS marketing campaign that are working and which ones need some work. By using this information, you will have a much better idea of what you need to be working on to increase the success rates of your marketing campaign. This helps you to ensure that your campaign is more effective and helps you cut down losses.
Advantages of Using Text Message Software for Your Business
1. It’s Very Effective
Using text messages is one of the most effective ways to market your products and services. It’s so effective that many experts recommend that you take advantage of this technology by having one or two people on your team who specialize in this area. These specialists can use their skills and experience to give you an edge over your competitors when it comes to using the text message for your business marketing needs.
For example, you can send your text message to all of your clients quarterly, or you can send it to every single client that has signed up for a product. The text would nudge them about your products and services.
2. It Can Help You Reach a Wider Range of People
Some of the benefits of using text messages for your business marketing efforts include reaching a lot of people. This means that you will have a higher chance of making more people from your target audience aware of your products and services. The number of people who are available to receive your text messages can be greatly increased by making use of an expert team that specializes in this area of marketing. You will find that this will help increase your chances of getting responses from those you wish to market your business to.
3. It’s Inexpensive
One of the best things about using text messages as part of your sales funnel is that they’re very inexpensive. Even if you send out thousands of text messages to your customers each quarter, it’d still be much cheaper than sending out a visual ad.
4. It Can Help You Track and Measure Your Conversions
Another great thing about business text messaging is that it’s more than likely that you’ll be able to track who got and read your texts by the response. By tracking the responses to your texts, you can easily see which parts of your text messages people were most interested in and the type of people interested in your products, services, and texts.
5. It Would Help You Build a Relationship with Your Customers
Using text message software for your business marketing efforts would help you build relationships with your new, potential, and existing customers. When you can gain trust and rapport with those you intend to market to, you will be able to build a good connection with them that can lead to a long-term relationship. When you’re using text messages for your business marketing needs, you can expect to get results in a relatively short period. It’s also important to work with professionals who will give you the best results for your marketing needs.
How to Choose the Right Text Message Software for Your Business
One of the most common mistakes that businesses make when they’re pulling SMS marketing campaigns isn’t choosing the best messaging platform to suit their business. There are several types of businesses, and each business has some specific features that it’d need in a suitable text-messaging platform or software. Here are some things you should know about choosing the right messaging platform:
- The best text messaging platform for you should provide security and privacy for your business as well as your message recipients.
- The right text message software will give you access to all of your customers promptly without hiccups.
- The messaging platform should offer you top-notch value for your money. Meaning that it should be cost-efficient and cost-effective.
- The best platforms are ones that will be able to help you stay competitive while still allowing you to send out a large number of messages per day. Particularly if yours is a large organization, then it’s important to go with a platform that’s going to allow you to send unlimited messages to customers, employees, and anyone else who is connected to the company.
- It’s important that you choose a messaging platform that will give you an idea of how effective your messages are by tracking the amount of text messages being received and sent.
Remember, if you want to increase your chances of success in your SMS marketing campaign, then you will want to ensure that you choose the right messaging platform for your business. You don’t want to go with a platform that will cause you to spend more money than you have to and do more damage than good.
Conclusion
Overall, text messaging is one of the best ways to reach out to your potential customers, and one of the cheapest. Using text message marketing is an excellent move for your business, and you should take advantage of this as much as possible. This can help to increase your profits while also helping you create an enviable rapport with your customers. When you learn how to use business text messaging as part of your sales funnel, you’re likely to save yourself a lot of time and money while gaining higher revenue.