What is SMS marketing?
SMS Marketing is sending promotional campaigns or transactional messages for marketing purposes using text messages (SMS). These messages are mostly meant to communicate time-sensitive offers, updates, and alerts to people who have consented to receive these messages from your business.
Why is SMS marketing important?
SMS Marketing allows you to reach a large number of people all at the same time. Text Messaging is an instant marketing tool, getting your message into the hands of the right audience, when you want it. Customers keep their mobile phones on hand, making it easy to communicate your message to them.
SMS marketing used for?
SMS can be used in a number of different ways. I will share with you some of the most common use cases to give you a better idea of what you can do with SMS and how it might help your business.
Let’s say I am a big brand for eg. Max Fashion. I have a new sale coming up and my target audience are women age group of 18 to 35. Hence I want to reach out to each woman in India who falls out under my target audience irrespective of which digital platform she is on.
To achieve this target, I send out bulk SMSs to certain network providers say Airtel. My SMS would include details like 50% sale is going out on max fashion. The network providers I have tied up with would send this SMS to all the users registered in their database and that is how as a brand I would promote my sale among all women irrespective of whether they use internet or not.
So along with display advertising and other things which cover my online target audience, I will also reach out to potential customers online via SMS Marketing. The second thing I can do as a brand in SMS marketing is that I can make Missed Call Campaign.
Also Read: Introduction to Mobile Media Marketing
For eg., I want to organize a student fair and my website has a database of say 1M users. Now to see whom among these users would be interested to attend the fair I would send bulk SMSs and add a missed call number in there along with a few other details about the fair. Every time a user gives a missed call on that number on the backend number and other details of that user get recorded along with the fact that he/she has agreed to be a part of the fair.
After this my team would call the users who showed interest in the fair and would try to convert these leads into customers who would actually come to my fair.
Just like this, there are quite a few ways in which brands can use SMS Marketing. But like every other medium, it has some rules and restrictions too. For eg., the Character Limit. Just like a tweet would be of 140 characters max, a SMS would have character limits too. But never the less, due to its audience reach and popularity, brands invest in SMS Marketing along with other online marketing strategies.
Author: Ankita Mundhra