The importance of mobile in marketing strategies continues to grow. 42% of decision makers have been implementing a mobile strategy for less than a year, according to a Forrester survey.
This is a growing lever that marketers are using to build loyalty and re-engagement: mobile is the ultra-personal sphere of the user, a way to create a different, more intimate relationship with them.
Why SMS marketing?
SMS marketing holds an important place in mobile strategies. Not very invasive, it obtains the favors of individuals and is already a lever used by 49% of marketers; another 15% plan to use it next year.
What are the stakes of sms in mobile marketing?
SMS campaigns allow you to target your recipients very precisely. By knowing their age, their CSP, their habits and their attitudes towards digital, you can adapt the message or select the recipients for certain offers.
Reach your target
The read rate on cell phones is estimated at 98%: they are short messages, and when you receive them, they do not drown in a stream like e-mails (whose read rate is around 20%).
Emails can stay in your prospect’s inbox for a whole day while the SMS is read almost immediately. This makes it much more effective for flash sales and short term promotions. Web based Apps like Textitute allow you to do such tasks.
Using personal information (such as the name of the recipient) allows the brand to enter into a much more personal relationship with the mobile’s owner since SMS messages are generally reserved for the private sphere. Indeed, the phone itself enters into a very intimate relationship with its owner.
The use of SMS should be encouraged since it is the only technology really mastered and used by individuals. More fashionable techniques such as the QR code are still little used and are not yet part of the usage.
In addition, SMS enables a more engaged audience to be reached. Contrary to the e-mail address that individuals provide quite easily, subscribing to SMS campaigns is the result of a more thoughtful decision, reserved for brands for which they have a real interest.
There is something more “true”, in the closer sense, in the relationship developed by SMS since it tends to direct users to stores or physical places (store, trade show, stand, event …) while the advertising e-mail may seem colder.
In order to succeed in your SMS campaign, follow these good practices to make sure you make the right decisions and above all to stay within the law.
Sending a Free SMS in the context of marketing campaigns is highly regulated.
Set yourself objectives
The campaign must meet specific business-oriented objectives. What do you expect from your users? What results do you expect from this campaign? For what purpose are you preparing it?
Telephone numbers are less easy to collect than e-mail addresses.
In-store questionnaires, the creation of customer accounts, in exchange for a very qualitative content are examples to collect phone numbers.
However, you must obtain the prospect’s authorization to use his phone number (a checkbox).
For an SMS campaign, you must be very precise: a content unsuitable for the recipient will make him/her flee and risks giving him/her the feeling of being assaulted since, let’s not forget, the phone enters the very private life of its owner.
So build buyer personas to understand the expectations and needs of your target audiences and adapt the message to them.
The issuer (brand or company) must be clearly identifiable. It is best to have the brand name displayed instead of the number, as Sandro and Gerard Darel do.
