The strength of SMS marketing versus the rest

Social media marketing is easy. It’s comfortable. And for the most part – it works. You’ve probably seen growth based on what you’ve posted. Brilliant. But it’s also important to keep in mind that no matter how big your following is, or how much money you’ve put into creating and boosting posts, you do not own your Facebook page or your Instagram account. Snapchat and TikTok? Those too. What’s more is that you do not have any control over what happens to these platforms. So, what will you do the next time Facebook has a global outage? Or the algorithm takes a nosedive? How do you plan on reaching your customers?

This is where email marketing steps in. After all, it’s about having many different ways of connecting with and contacting your customer base. And better still – you own your email list, and no one can take that away from you. But how do you market effectively to overfull inboxes when studies show that the open rate of email is sitting below 15%? Inbox overflow is becoming more common thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Working from home can mean a cluttered inbox of both personal and office mail where important emails get overlooked and performing the simplest of tasks like checking, sorting and responding to mail (in a timely manner) takes that much longer… 90 minutes longer, in fact. Yes - that’s how long it takes, on average, for someone to respond to an email. Is email dead? No, but you cannot use email or social media as standalone marketing strategies – especially when relying on someone else’s network to communicate your message is becoming increasingly complicated.  

There’s a computer in your pocket

You need a new list – a text message list. Studies today show that almost 95% of text messages are read and responded to within the first three minutes. To effectively communicate your message to your customers and build a relationship with your brand, text message marketing is one of the most useful tools in a marketing toolbox. Here’s why…

Did you know that the average person checks their phone 96 times a day? That’s once every 10 minutes. Millennials, on the other hand, check their phones over 150 times a day and 80% look at their messages the moment they wake up. We’re all sending text messages and what’s more is that we’re sending them a lot. During Covid-19, text messages became one of the most important crisis communication tools (so much so that many cybercriminals turned to the medium for phishing scams). Why? Because more people own phones than laptops and mobile adoption is growing exponentially worldwide. But if you don’t own a smartphone, apps that use push notifications are meaningless. (And if you do, it’s pretty easy to hit mute on those notifications.) For feature phone owners, receiving text messages is what these kinds of phones are made for.  

Ultimately, text messages are ubiquitous yet many businesses, globally, still do not use texting as a form of marketing. Email is common and social media is on the rise, but text messages remain an untapped, underutilized and exciting form of real-time marketing. One study showed that companies didn’t understand the business angle, but most would be willing to try using text message marketing if it would drive revenue or improve customer experience.

Fast and efficient retail marketing

Retail, for example, is an industry that relies on regularly sharing information. This could be anything from changing store times to new product launches and flash sales. The ability to engage with new and existing customers, instantly, is incredible. The ability to send personalized, feature-rich messages make text message marketing even better.

It’s easy to miss a mail, recycle a flyer and let a phone call go to voice mail (especially with apps that filter out unknown numbers). And if you aren’t online at the exact right moment, it’s likely that you’ll miss a social media post too. But with text messages, one way or another, you’re probably going to read it whether the message is opened or seen as a preview on your home screen.

Direct communication made easy

From social media to email and everything in-between, consumers are overloaded with adverts and traditional forms of marketing. If anything, they’ve become adept at tuning them out and swiping right to avoid cognitive overload. Emails are deleted, often unread, banner ads are banished with ad blockers and videos (even cat videos) can be skipped after five seconds.

Text message marketing, however, has become an essential platform, a way to communicate directly with customers. With a nearly 100% click-through rate, text message marketing works – it’s a real-time communication and conversion tool. And while it’s important that everyone gets the right message, it doesn’t have to mean they get the same message which is why creating more personalized campaigns that matter to your customers is a no-brainer.

Mobiz is a messaging platform that lets you send hyper-personalized text messages, curated to each customer. Find out how you can use our forward-thinking, all-in-one platform to set your business up for success… via text.