Do you think text messaging is an effective medium for businesses to promote their products?
A UK retailer, Marks & Spencer (Food Section), uses SMS to send out its online offers – the “dine-in-for-two” meal with free wine. They always send the SMS right when busy commuters will be leaving work for home. Almost all consumers have their cell phone within arms reach 14 hours per day.
What is smart about this is – that it is timed, simple and relevant.
SMS can be a powerful retention powerhouse given that it's done right.
Marketers have easy access to phone numbers. With Bulk SMS options, they can reach a large user base with 1 generic template. But more often than not, these non-personalized and irrelevant texts drown customer’s inboxes and do more harm than good.
Store owners who have an online store should consider SMS marketing as a medium to re-target their buyers and send them online.
Here are some use cases to try with your store visitors:
- Upsell using personalized recommendations based on purchase history
- New product and trend alerts
- Content newsletters
- Contest or store event announcements to segmented audiences – eg. book reviews for people who bought books from your store, parenting workshops for people who shopped in kids categories
Here is what not to try, or to use very minimally:
- Blast store-wide sale alerts to all customers
SMS Marketing can help you tap into emerging markets – like tier 2 cities with lower internet usage
“Indian E-commerce is highly mobilized”. When it comes to India – one must understand that its – “mobile-first” India has the highest commerce sales happening on mobile and is relentlessly on the rise; Mobile is where nearly 80% of web traffic in India is. India has seen seven-fold growth over the last year 2016-17. To be able to personalize SMS content will help capitalize on this lucrative user base.
SMS Marketing can help you explore new business models
Use SMS for B2B marketing to reach your distributors who are usually on the move. Or, to send supply shortfall alerts to your suppliers automatically.
Customer response
- According to Text Marketer, 65% of marketers say that text messaging is an effective promotional medium. They published examples of many campaigns in the UK that happened during Black Friday, which resulted in increased footfall to the stores.
According to tothe 2016 Webpower report, the click rates on SMS are between 20-25%, compared to 2% on email, in China.
Our verdict: Use SMS as a supplement to email when:
- You have more mobile numbers of more of your customer base than email
- For time-bound time promotions – when you do not overdo the urgency
- To drive customers to a nearby location
- You do not want them to miss personalized messages or product recommendations
To know more about how text messaging can do more for your business, talk to us!
We are more than an e-commerce marketing assistant driven by machine learning and deep analytics.
We assist marketing professionals to reach out to their users in the most efficient manner, with the right content. We enable content that is 1-1 relevant to the users, or real-time trends tailored to different user segments.
We combine all the sources of user data — direct entries, user actions on the website or a mobile app, third party user lists, marketing campaign responses — to create near real-time segmentation and one-to-one personalization based on their profile.
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