SMS Marketing in Four Easy Steps

Running your own business can seem like the ultimate catch-22. You set up your business to do the thing that you love the most, but running your own business often means you can get stuck with a million and one things to do, and often none of these are the thing you love.

Marketing can be one of these tasks. But love it or loathe it, your business needs it to keep going, and it can be hard to know how to get it right.

We’ve already published guides on social media marketing, and email marketing, and now…we have put together a few top tips on perfecting your SMS marketing campaigns!

It is estimated that 98% of SMS marketing texts get read, and that 83% are opened in three minutes. So, it can be a hugely effective means of spreading your marketing message, and less time consuming than crafting the perfect email.

So, how to get it right?

1. Always Remember: texting is intrusive

One of the reasons marketing texts get read? Because people always have notifications turned on for text messages, which means although they might get read, they might annoy a lot of people.

We’ve all been there, your phone goes off, you expect it to be a message from a friend, but it turns out to be a company telling you that you are entitled to money for that accident you never had. Because a prospect is likely to go to their phone expecting a message from a friend, your text is immediately more annoying to a potential customer than an email, which is likely to unobtrusively go straight into a prospects junk mail.

So how do we get around this and make the most of that high readership?

2. Segment your audience

Segment, Segment, Segment. Segmenting is always the golden rule, and because texts can be seen as so intrusive, it is even more important here. By segmenting your audience you help to ensure that a prospect will actually be happy to get your text and be interested in what you have to offer.

Segmenting your audience is also really easy to do with our customer records, Appointedd automatically records each customer’s details and after each service you can put notes next to each one as to which service they prefer, when they are free, or anything they particularly enjoy. So when you’re planning a marketing campaign it becomes really easy to create lists of different types of customer.

So, once you have segmented you can send out texts to each customer list that you know they will be interested in. It is a good idea to only send texts to your regular customers as they are much more likely to be interested.  

3. Make it special

Think about what kind of marketing text you like to receive? Special offers right?

Personally, I only like receiving marketing texts if they are genuinely giving me a good deal, if I get a text giving me 50% off takeaway pizza for a week only, chances are one night that week I will treat myself to a takeaway pizza.

So, don’t just send out a general announcement, but really treat your customers, they will be much more likely to respond positively to you, especially if your offer has a time limit.

4. Use it infrequently

Use SMS sparingly, and you won’t run the risk of annoying your customers, use it too much and people will unsubscribe. So… thankfully…this just means less work for you!!