UK businesses, say hello to your campaigns’ new best friend, SMS marketing. Transpond’s latest development unlocks a new campaign medium, helping you reach your audience wherever they are.
Whether you work in a B2C or B2B setting, SMS campaigns can boost site traffic, drive conversions, and even remind forgetful sign-ups about your events. With low costs and a 98% open rate (Sender), it could be the cherry on top of your sophisticated marketing strategy.
What is SMS marketing?
Short Message Service (SMS) is how we send and receive text messages. It’s grown into a popular way for businesses to communicate with their audiences.
As a Transpond user, you can now take advantage of this medium, broadcasting your multichannel campaigns over email, social media, and SMS. But with so many channels to manage and optimize, why should you invest time and effort into SMS?
What are the benefits of SMS campaigns?
- Greater reach: Unlike email and display ads, your campaigns aren’t hindered when your audience closes their laptop for the day – you can still reach them on their phone.
- Better engagement: Not only is your audience more likely to see your message, but they’re more likely to engage with it too. According to Forbes, SMS campaigns have a 98% open rate, towering over channels like email and push notifications.
- Elevate your customer experience (CX): Create a better CX by sharing helpful information and relevant content. A better CX improves loyalty, extends customer lifetime value, and boosts customer referrals.
- Direct and actionable: Save time and effort by drafting brief texts that succinctly deliver your message, a CTA, and even the option to opt out. It’s not only easier for your marketing team, but it’s simple for the recipient to understand and act on.
- Cost-effective: Compared to other avenues, SMS is a low-cost marketing channel. It requires little production and, with higher open and click-through rates, it’s cheaper and easier to drive more conversions.
- Increase brand awareness and recall: SMS not only reinforces brand awareness but also ensures your business remains top-of-mind when your audience is ready to buy.
Sounds good. But what kind of initiatives can SMS marketing help you drive? If you need a little more convincing, or you’re after some inspiration, then look no further.
Explore SMS campaign examples
What do SMS campaigns look like in action? Here are a handful of examples to get you started.
Cut through the noise
We’re all being pelted with emails left, right, and centre. So make your communications count in a unique setting. By sending highly relevant communications via SMS campaigns, you can avoid overwhelming inboxes and get your messages seen.
Enhance your customers’ experience
It doesn’t always have to be about selling. Half the battle is providing a consistent, quality service that keeps your customers coming back.
But enhancing your service doesn’t mean adding more work. You can set up automation workflows in Transpond or your CRM, triggered by web form submissions (e.g., ‘Book a call’ forms) or when a lead is won in your CRM - just two examples. Your workflow would automate an SMS message to the same contact, providing information. This makes the end-user feel valued without digging into your time.
As an example, let’s say you automate SMS campaigns to confirm appointments scheduled online by the customer. They’ll receive a confirmation message confirming you’ve acknowledged their booking.
Similarly, by sending reminder messages, you demonstrate that you’ve not forgotten about your client and have gone out of your way to make sure they make the appointment.
While it might not seem like a big deal, you reduce effort on your customer’s part, and since it’s not an email campaign, they’re more likely to see it.
Share relevant offers
Increase your customers’ lifetime value by reengaging them through SMS. This helps keep your brand top of mind, encouraging your customers to revisit your platform or website to continue exploring your brand and what you offer.
Let’s say you’re a SaaS provider. You could create a campaign promoting add-on products and services at a discounted cost to existing customers. This helps prevent churn, boost MRR, and increase user “stickiness” in-product.
As a B2C retailer, why not take this opportunity to promote similar styles and top trends to your fashion-frenzied customers? Or highlight time-limited sales that resonate with their interests.
Event reminders
Whether you’re a B2C or B2B marketer, event reminders are gold dust. You’ve already put in the time and money to gain your audience’s attention and persuade them to sign up or book an appointment. And chances are they’re busy and/or easily distracted. So why leave their attendance to chance?
SMS campaigns help remind your patients, clients, or sign-ups of their upcoming commitments, reducing no-shows. Depending on your business, attendance can boost revenue and lifetime value, or create more opportunities in your sales pipelines.
Either way, SMS proves a beneficial channel for reaching and reminding your sign-ups and clients to attend.
Any good marketer knows better than to pester their prospective and long-term customers with irrelevant, nagging comms. So how can you use SMS campaigns in a meaningful and respectful way?
Transpond’s top tips for SMS campaigns
Before you get started, we’ve got a couple of top tips to help you make the most of SMS and prevent you from landing in legal trouble.
1. Obtain explicit consent
You must ensure your SMS recipients have clearly opted in to receive marketing messages. This means you can’t send marketing texts to any and all numbers you find. Instead, provide customers and non-converting signups with settings that allow your audience to select which communications they receive.
It’s beneficial to break these down by channel (i.e. email, SMS, postal) and by purpose (e.g. in-stock notifications vs trending styles). This means you can still encourage conversions by informing contacts that their desired product is available, even if they don’t want to receive other marketing messages.
2. Respect quiet hours
Avoid sending SMS campaigns during ‘quiet hours’. Your recipients are likely to be bothered by early-morning and late-night marketing. But it’s not just a matter of preference: quiet hours are enforced via national and local governments, and sending SMS campaigns during this time could land you in trouble.
Find the quiet hours in your region in our guide to compliance in SMS campaigns.
3. Personalize your messages
Use marketing segmentation to create relevant campaigns targeting groups of customers. For instance, if your customer hasn’t purchased from your business or logged into your product in 90 days, you could send a discount code or share helpful product updates to entice them back.
Including their first name is an easy win to engage and warm the recipient. Or be more sophisticated still: use website tracking and usage data to inform your customers’ trends and styles. This enables accurate segmentation so you can share highly relevant offers that tempt customers back to your website or platform.
4. Connect Transpond with your CRM
By integrating your marketing and contact management platforms, you can take advantage of the wealth of data stored against each contact. This makes it even easier to target prospective and existing customers with sophisticated campaigns, as well as store the campaign data in the contact’s record.
Get started with SMS campaigns
Whether you’re still getting to grips with marketing or you’re a seasoned marketer, adopting SMS marketing could help your strategy reach the next level. SMS helps you meet your audience where they are, dial up your customer experience, and get more virtual bums on virtual seats.
So what are you waiting for? Get started with Transpond today to send professional cross-channel campaigns that convert more and keep your customers happy.
Transpond is currently available for use in the United Kingdom.