SMS content marketing is a great tool for reaching out to your audience in a way that’s not overused by marketers. Your message will be displayed on the most personal device – the mobile phone, which all of us look at dozens of times per day, which means customers will definitely notice your message.
However, due to this very reason you have to pay attention to particular matters which are usually not an issue in other marketing channels and approach to SMS marketing with great care. Below, we will provide useful tips and guidelines to give you a basic overview of how to do SMS content marketing right.
Free SMS Content Marketing Tips for Small Business
1. Pay Attention to Legal Matters
The most important advice to remember is to collect your customer’s data in accordance with the law. Every customer must give their consent to the use of their personal data for SMS marketing purposes.
Sending a personalized text to someone is a sensitive privacy issue and for that reason, you have to do every step in a professional and ethical manner.
There are many ways to increase the total number of customers in an organic way and we will provide tips below. Remember, everything has to be in accordance with your local law. If you’re not sure what the requirements are, find the documentation at your local telecommunications regulators website.
2. Clean and Organize Your Database
Before you do anything with your database, make sure that you have collected and sorted out everything. Protect your database from incorrect numbers and from spammers. This will also reduce the funds you’ll have to spend as you won’t be spending unnecessary resources on non-responsive numbers.
If you’re planning to target people based on their location, make sure the question about their location is mandatory when they are opting-in. This is just one example of cleaning up a database to provide a more personalized marketing experience for your audience.
A great tool for targeting is to use tags as well. You know your business and your customers the best and tags are a great way to sort out your customers based on your own specific criteria.
3. Opting in and out of the database
We will discuss opting-out first because SMS marketing is privacy-sensitive in the eyes of the law. There has to be an option for the customer to opt-out at any point.
Usually customers opt-out by just sending a “STOP” message. Make sure to provide a disclaimer on how to opt-out at the end of your message, same as for “unsubscribe” in the email.
Regarding opt-in, you should provide this option everywhere you can, from your website to your store advertisement. Usually for the opting-in customer has to send a message containing required details to a certain number.
One example would be to send the full name, age and a city to your opt-in number. You can also ask for further details about the user if you want to provide a tailored experience.
How to motivate people to opt-in? The best way is to give out something in exchange. For example, you could send a gift, organize prize games, provide a discount for future purchases, offer special membership options, etc.
4. Targeting and Timing
Timing is crucial when using SMS marketing. You’re connecting with people on a very private device and your message better have some value to offer. Otherwise, people will complain, a bunch of people will opt-out and your campaign will fail.
Your message must provide a really good benefit to the customer and timing has to be perfect. One example would be to send your SMS campaign right before Black Friday, to make sure customers will visit your store instead of the competitor. If you want to provide top-notch content to your SMS receivers, you can use professional writing services.
Targeting has to be planned in advance. Approach these plans as carefully as you would any other part of your marketing strategy. When you’re collecting personal details like name and the city, you have to know which targeting options you’re going to use later on in your campaigns.
If you have stores in multiple cities then, of course, you’re going to ask for the location. If you’re selling fashion products, you might ask for age and gender to offer the right collections.
Lastly, you might use tags and use your own description. For example, you might tag returning customers with #loyal and send your campaign just to this group.
5. Personalize Your Message
This part is really important. Don’t be lazy and do everything you can to personalize your message to the maximum. It might be tempting just to send the same discount offering a message to everyone but don’t do it.
For this very reason, collecting and managing your data is of such high importance. If you collect your data in a proper way and then connect your data with your existing knowledge of the industry you might be amazed by the performance and power of SMS marketing.
For example, you might collect gender data and collect it with existing knowledge of when your female customers are most likely to purchase the product. Maybe it’s during the weekend.
On Friday your team has to send a special discount to loyal members that’s going to be active on Saturday ONLY. This way you’re rewarding your loyal customers and you’re putting a sense of urgency on your campaign. If there is no sense of urgency they will just forget about it.
There are hundreds of examples like these that can help increase customer engagement with your SMS marketing messages.
Conclusion
SMS is a wonderful way to promote your brand, and it’s especially interesting because it’s very underused by brands, so it could allow you to stand out from your competition. Just make sure you’re aware of your local SMS marketing laws (privacy and GDPR), that you have clear and straightforward opt-in and opt-out procedures and that you get targeting and timing right.
In reaching out to your audience in this new age of marketing, don’t underestimate the value of SMS marketing. It goes a long way than normal social media campaigns.
If you have other tips to excel in SMS content marketing you’d like to share with us, please drop them below. Thanks for coming around.
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