SMS

Your marketing strategy in the 21st century is very different from the one that worked in earlier centuries. Today, you have many options for communicating with your customers, consumer choices, diverse media and support opportunities. Your challenge then becomes finding the best way of reaching your target audience and capturing their attention. Your target consumer receives messages right, left and center and you need to consider any opportunity to reach them easily. Text messaging marketing is one medium that you can use to communicate with your customers. Consider the following ideas that text messaging offers to you and your customers and the reason you should integrate it into your marketing strategy:- It is permissive marketing The beauty of text messaging marketing is that it is permission-based. The customer willingly listens to what you are saying. Not to minimize the effectiveness of a billboard, but for comparison purposes only, a billboard is there for everyone to see while a text message arrives at the customers’ handset, and they opt to read it or not. As long as you are not sending a text message every 2 minutes, your customers will always read the updates or whatever messages your send. It is personal A mobile phone is a personal gadget. When someone receives a text message, he or she stops what he or she was doing to read it. It enables you to communicate with your customers individually. You can even personalize the message further by mentioning their name in the text message. The customer will be happy to realize that you know them by name, and this will help them make a purchase decision faster. It is Interactive This century is all about relationships and conversations with your customers. A text message opens up a door for you to interact with your customers without intruding. It has an option of the customer responding immediately or even sharing it with others. As one customer shares a text, they help you interact with their friends. The introduction of Multimedia messaging service (MMS) has made interactions with the customers more exciting. It enhances your relationship. It is immediate Statistics shows that everybody reads a text message within the first 4 minutes of receiving it. When you have urgent information to pass across, a text message is your best bet. For example, if you run a retail store, and you have a special offer on a particular item, you can spread the word fast to thousands of customer by a click. You will receive an immediate response, especially from your target customers. Moreover, I believe that your message was targeted, and thus the turnout will be high. You can track it If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. You can track who responded to your messages and who did not. For example, if you sent a message about a “sale” taking place at your store, you can tell how many people came in. It also helps you handle one of the biggest problems in marketing, measuring the return on investments. In conclusion, the facts that a text message is permissive marketing method, it is personal, interactive, immediate and trackable makes it a necessity in your marketing strategy. Remember that a majority of consumers now owns a mobile device and you should not waste that marketing opportunity.