"SMS marketing" stands for "short message services" marketing. SMS marketing, commonly referred to by the name text messaging marketing, is a way for businesses to reach out to their customers. Text messages can be sent via shortcodes or a standard number, or even a specific brand number.
SMS differs from email in that messages are much smaller and have a limit on characters of 160 characters and speedier delivery. The text message appears on the phone of your client in a matter of seconds after delivery and is usually delivered with an alert on the phone to let them know that it's been delivered.
SMS marketing can be extremely beneficial for three reasons: increasing brand awareness, increasing consumer engagement and boosting sales.
SMS marketing, an uncommon and under-utilised marketing method, offers E-commerce merchants a unique opportunity to build relations with their consumers or customers.
What Exactly Is Bulk SMS Marketing?
Marketing via mass SMS is the process of sending large numbers of SMS messages in marketing efforts. Bulk SMS marketing is different from SMS marketing in that you can send automated messages for transactions to your customers through SMS.
Delivery confirmation, confirmation of order abandoned cart alerts, as well as various other SMS messages that are similar to those are all examples of the use of transactional SMS for marketing since they are messages that are automated and generated by user behaviour and not sent via mass SMS.
Marketing via SMS in bulk is most often used for promotions. It could be for general sales or messages, for example, Mother's Day flowers or summer gifts.
Bulk SMS is seasonal and, therefore, a good option to advertise Black Friday offers, allowing your company to be noticed by the crowd (which is likely to be confined to advertisements on social media or email).
In order to stay on top of mind with your customers, you can send out bulk SMS that includes important information about your brand or business.
Because of this, mass SMS is one of the main advantages of SMS marketing that we will discuss in detail below.
5 SMS Marketing Concepts
You could have the best techniques around, and yet, without any ideas and no ideas, you're back to the beginning. In reality, there are at least five fantastic scenarios (along with a few SMS marketing examples) that a timely text message could make all the difference.
Check out the top 5 SMS Marketing examples.
1. Offers of welcome
There is no better method to welcome your customers than by sending them an instant text message? Everybody expects a welcome message, but adding immediate SMS messages in the mix could surprise your customers.
If you offer an offer code or link to encourage joining, send the discount coupon or link via SMS, and then follow up with an email in case the SMS was not enough to convince consumers to purchase.
2. Discounts for birthdays
SMS calls for a special celebration, and what better day than the birthday of your client?
Show your customer that you value them with a one-time offer on their birthday.
You can include the offer directly in your SMS messages or make it an incentive to encourage users to open their email to receive a unique birthday gift. Whatever method you choose, make sure to follow up with an email.
3. Time-sensitive special offers
Perhaps you're running a unique offer, and you need to make sure that your customers are able to take part.
To get the best sales and promotions, you should include an urgency factor in your text messages, as shown in the example above. Test a few different methods to determine the most effective strategy for your clients. It's fine as long as you're not sending SMS advertising campaigns each day.
4. Abandonment of the cart
Abandoning carts is an online merchant's most dreadful nightmare. It's easy to see why, as nearly 7 out of 10 carts are being abandoned due to different reasons.
An email to abandon carts is often praised as the best response to this kind of event. It's also great when it's coupled with an SMS.
Learn the strengths and limitations of your channels: SMS is the best choice for immediate communication, whereas email is best suited to information. Send an SMS message to draw your customer's focus, and also include photos of abandoned items in your email follow-up emails to remind them about what they've been missing.
This combo could be extremely beneficial, but limit your messages for abandoned carts to one per transaction. It's crucial to provide the primary message. However, be careful not to be too invasive.
5. Order Confirmation and Shipment Status Updates
Shipping updates and confirmation of orders are two areas in which SMS really shines. Offering your customers the choice of receiving updates gives them the power to make their own decisions.
Your customers can get shipment updates directly on their phones without having to access an email. It's an excellent idea to include a link within the SMS so that they can find out more about tracking.
What Does SMS Marketing Cost?
You've likely realized how vital SMS marketing can be for your entire eCommerce marketing strategy.
Let's get to the most crucial question: how much will it cost you to begin using marketing via SMS? In the majority of cases, it's not the fixed monthly cost in this case. SMS marketing companies, however, will charge SMS credits for texts that are sent to your customers.
What Are SMS Text Marketing Credits?
The majority of SMS marketing companies will cost you upfront to send messages via text because you're being charged for every SMS that you send. This is different from being charged once you've sent the texts to promote your company's products.
In the end, there is a good chance that you'll have to buy SMS credits to use them whenever you want. For instance, you can buy $50 worth of SMS credits this month and use them in the way you think is the most appropriate. If you use all the $50 within those two first weeks, then you'll be able to purchase additional credits for the remaining marketing via SMS.
Another thing to bear in mind when it comes to text message credits is that their cost per SMS is dependent on the country to which you're sending text messages.
There are several SMS marketing options available online.
But, it is vital to stress that SMS marketing is an element of your marketing strategy. Utilising different tools for SMS marketing for your marketing could result in a variety of issues later.
Marketing automation tools such as Omnisend do, however, include SMS marketing as a part of their Omnichannel capabilities. The costs for SMS marketing using Omnisend are determined by the pricing options.
You'll get as much as 60 credits for SMS when you are on either the Standard or Free plan.
If you are on the Pro plan, you will get free SMS/MMS for a period that is equal to the cost of the plan.
With such cost, it's logical to include SMS strategies in the eCommerce marketing strategy.