How to Establish Customer Loyalty Through SMS Marketing
There’s no shortage of reasons to incorporate SMS marketing into your strategy—boost brand awareness, customer loyalty, and generate leads and sales.
Some years after mobile devices launched, short message service or SMS marketing was introduced and has been around for decades. Although SMS marketing has seen a decline in terms of usage for quite some time, it’s experiencing a swift resurgence in today’s market.
Apart from the ever-increasing costs of more popular digital marketing tactics like pay-per-click advertising, most consumers wish more businesses would communicate with them through SMS.
What is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is one of the simplest and quickest ways to send brand-centric marketing messages, making it an essential part of every company’s multi-channel marketing arsenal. It is a strategy that allows businesses to communicate and send notifications directly to their current customer base and potential clients in the form of text messages.
Indeed, there’s no shortage of ways and reasons to send out SMS marketing messages. There are various SMS prompts, including promotional messages, discount deals, new product launches, and many more to boost engagement, customer loyalty, brand awareness, and even generate leads and increase sales.
How Businesses use SMS Marketing
As email inboxes of customers are usually overflowing with promotional emails, special updates, appointment reminders, and other notifications from brands, it’s hard for businesses to stand out and get their audience to click on their brand’s emails over the rest. Studies have shown that the average open rate for newsletters sent via email is approximately 20% to 30%.
Compare that rate to about 98% for SMS marketing messages. For this, more and more businesses are looking to integrate SMS marketing into their arsenal of marketing tools. This way, even small businesses can get their messages seen by their target audience almost instantaneously.
Benefits of SMS Marketing to Businesses
1. Keep in touch with your customers
While SMS marketing is a great tool to automate and send out promotional texts to your customers, it is also a suitable medium of communication to keep in touch and have an insightful conversation with your clients, as it allows for two-way messaging. You can gather feedback and other comments and use the data to help you and your business improve its products and services.
2. Establish customer loyalty
Like email marketing platforms, SMS tools enable businesses to build rapport with customers by sending personalized messages. Time and again, research has proven that personalization boosts sales by 20% on average, making it an essential tactic in building and maintaining a connection with your audience and, eventually, establishing customer loyalty.
If you’re wondering how to use this to your advantage, here are a couple of ways you can explore:
- Client birthdays and anniversary messages
Spread the cheer—make it a point to greet your customers to build brand affinity. You can go the extra mile and offer a simple birthday treat or a special promo code if you would like. Apart from sending out birthday greetings, you can also choose to send anniversary messages to show your appreciation and remind them of how long they’ve engaged with your brand.
A short but sweet message to thank them can go a long way in establishing loyalty. An added bonus with SMS marketing: your greeting won’t get buried along with the never-ending pile of emails.
If your business is centered on providing services to your clients, your customers would most likely appreciate receiving schedule confirmation and appointment prompts to remind them of their approaching consultation. If needed, you can also help your clients avoid delayed payments and late fees by sending payment and billing prompts.
- Instantaneously deliver messages and real-time results
SMS marketing helps businesses save a lot of time and improve efficiency. With it, you can send out essential and even personalized prompts and messages to hundreds of customers almost instantaneously. With the right platform, you can also track, manage, and analyze data and results in real-time, allowing you to improve your campaigns further and increase their success rate.
Businesses must have a well-rounded marketing strategy using various complementary tools and platforms for a more holistic approach within the marketing mix.
With that, it’s good to note that while SMS marketing is an excellent standalone tool, this medium can easily be integrated into your overall strategic plan as well—it can effectively support other channels like email, social media, and website.
Key Takeaways
While most business owners might initially think that because SMS marketing is essentially the most basic of mediums, it has many outstanding merits. There’s no shortage of reasons not to incorporate SMS marketing into your strategy—it boosts brand awareness, customer loyalty, and leads and sales. Additionally, you can integrate it with other marketing channels to strengthen your campaigns.