What About SMS With Email Marketing?
Short Message Service marketing allows businesses to send messages via text message. These messages increase brand awareness, generate sales and encourage engagement.
This marketing technique is simple yet effective and pairs well with email marketing. One could say that SMS marketing is a reinforcement and an assistant to email marketing.
Obvious Positive for SMS Marketing
We always have our phones in our hands or within short reach. We read 95% of all text messages within 3 minutes (Forbes), businesses, therefore, have a better guarantee that their messages will be received and read almost immediately.
Compared to email marketing's open rate, SMS' open rate is approximately 82% better than SMS marketing also has a better response rate than email marketing, standing at 48%.
The worst part of SMS marketing is timing. Nothing could be worse than waking up from a deep sleep by a promotional text message that a business sends. SMSGlobal recommends sending marketing messages between 10:31 am - 11:29 am and 2:34 pm - 3:27 pm.
Email marketing provides more creativity, personalization and delivery options compared to SMS. With its 160 character limit per message, it makes sending a single text message with all that you wish to share difficult.
The use of slang and abbreviations to try to shorten words and fit everything into your text message won't always be accepted as it and can be easily misunderstood, which would be terrible.
We've already looked at the benefits of email marketing (If you don't do email marketing - that's a red flag), so let's continue with SMS marketing dos and don'ts.
Even though SMS marketing has a better open and response rate than email marketing, it is still easy to go wrong with the way that you use SMS marketing. Our recommendation is to try not to use SMS as your sole or primary marketing tool.
As a new company, making a start with SMS marketing if worded correctly can be used to establish your brand awareness. Introduce yourself to the local or national market via SMS and use it to invite them to visit your location, events, website and signup for your emails.
Don't always use your SMS to sell. Seasonal, holiday greetings and well wishes make for good personable engagement, especially when they don't sound like a robot put it together.
Make Use of SMS marketing tools.
Avoid using your personal cell phone number to send these messages. SMS marketing tools make using this technique easy to do and maintain. With it, you can automate your messages and responses, set exact delivery time, send messages in bulk with ease and track your result.
While most SMS' do not cost the recipients to read them, sending text messages with images - MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) comes with a cost. If it is going to charge customers to receive your messages, especially unsolicited, you will find yourself ruffling many feathers; this is another way that email marketing trumps SMS marketing, because of the creative and personalization limits SMS has.
So if you are using SMS marketing in conjunction with email marketing, summarize your text message with a hyperlink to your website or include CTAs that request email addresses to receive the entirety of your marketing campaign.
Don't send lots of text messages all the time, but if you have weekly or daily deals that have a wide margin of accessibility, choose the best words to keep your messages short, action prompting and to the point, then choose the right time and send your SMS campaigns.
Keep in mind that many mobile users will make use of the option to opt-out of receiving promotional text messages or set a limit to the people who are allowed to contact them via SMS. So your text messages may not always be received or opened or always have the best results.
Now that you have an idea of the ways you can use SMS marketing to your benefit as well as the ways you should avoid using it, let's get back to using SMS with email marketing.
Use SMS campaigns to nurture your email marketing list by encouraging recipients to sign up or subscribe to your email list via links in your text messages.
Follow up promotional emails with your SMS marketing to provide timely reminders for deals and discounts linking back to the email content.
Use the results of SMS marketing to fuel and inspire your email marketing campaign.
Overall, combining SMS and email marketing is a practical move that will positively impact your marketing strategies.