Text Marketing Benefits and Best Practices
Text marketing is a great way to maintain your customer base. Here is how TextP2P can help you reach out to your customers.
What Is Text Marketing
Text marketing is as simple as it sounds. It encompasses any marketing campaign you create that is sent out via text.
It is a great way to promote sales and products. It also a valuable tool for keeping your customers up-to-date on all the latest and greatest from your company.
How Does Text Marketing Help Me?
One of the first things people do in the morning is check their phone, and they will continue to check it throughout the day. Text messages have a 98% open rate, which is much higher than that of e-mail. If you have something you want to promote to your customers, this is the best way to ensure they see it.
How Effective Is Text Marketing?
According to Forbes, 64% of consumers want more text interaction when it comes to products and services they use regularly. 77% of customers like to receive coupons and learn about new deals through text. Around 50% of customers want to receive text alerts and news that keep them up-to-date on businesses they frequent. And 31% of customers feel this is an easier way to receive this information than visiting your website or app.
The fact is, your frequent customers are likely invested in what is new with your company. They want to be informed on sales and new offerings. Text marketing is one of the best ways to ensure that they are made aware.
What Kind Of Businesses Is Text Marketing Best For?
The way text marketing can be useful in your business can be very different from how another business would use it. Here are some specifics:
- Online Stores and Retailers: These businesses often use text marketing to reach their customers to inform them on new deals and limited time sales. Many stores also offer loyalty programs, where customers receive points for shopping regularly at said store. Customers can then use texts to redeem these points.
- Restaurants: Some restaurants allow customers to set up reservations through text. Text marketing can also be used to send out coupons to customers or provide information about new offerings and specials.
- Appointment-Based Businesses: Businesses belonging to hair stylists, spas, and even medical practicioners can use text to send out reminders for appointments and check-ups.
- Gyms: These businesses often use text to keep their members coming back by sending out announcements, information and answering questions.
- Real Estate: Real estate agents often use text marketing through use of keywords. Wherever they choose to list a new property, they can attach a keyword allowing potential buyers to text them for more information.
- Home Service Providers: Plumbers, housekeepers, landscapers, electricians and many other businesses can use text marketing to stay ahead.
These are just a few ways different industries can use text marketing to improve their buisinesses. The list is as endless as the possibilities.
What Are Some Additional Benefits Of Text Marketing?
You may be asking yourself, “What makes text marketing better than other forms of marketing?” There are several areas where text marketing really shines, but one that many business-owners can appreciate is that it is cheap. All it takes to start your text marketing campaign is buying a subscription to a service like TextP2P. That is much less expensive than seeking other venues to take up ad-space. Given the price, you are almost guaranteed to exceed your return on investment.
Another huge perk to text marketing is that it is instantaneous. When you add text into your marketing strategy, you have no need to worry as much about how long it is going to take for your advertisement to start making it worth your while. E-mail marketing has this benefit too, but given that text has a much higher open rate, it is clear to see which is superior in this aspect.
Text marketing offers a unique kind of flexibility that cannot be found in other forms of marketing. It can be used to compliment your other marketing campaigns with a more personal touch. And if a customer no longer wants to receive these messages, they can opt out at any time.
How Is Text Better Than Email?
There are a few areas where text is superior to email. They each have the benefit of being an instant method of getting your message to consumers. However, texts enjoy a 98% open rate, while email only has a mere 20%. Even when the intention is to have your customers see your message as soon as possible, text has the edge here. Most people read the texts they receive within 3 minutes of receiving it. If an email is even opened, it is usually nowhere near as quickly. This is not to say that email marketing is without its uses, however. In an ideal marketing strategy, you would use text and email in concordance with each other. For more information click here to see our blog about it.
How To Tell Your Text Marketing Campaign Is Working.
Success in a text marketing campaign can be easier to measure than you might think. There are plenty of areas where you can see the progress you are making. Below are some examples:
- Size of Your Lists: Having a large list of numbers is a good metric to show you how much value an average customer is bringing to your buisiness. You do not necessarily need all of your customers belonging to your list, as there is bound to be inactive or unresponsive users. However, having a large list size provides a wide sample size to test out your ad campaigns. You can use this informatin to figure out how much each customer on your list has actually spent at your business. From here, you can actually put together the lifetime value each customer has.
- List Growth: We just saw the importance of having a large list, so it is equally valuable to moniter the growth rate of said list. The time period that you use to demonstrate growth over is up to you, whether it be weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Keeping a constant growth rate here is a good indicator for how many new customers you are acquiring as a whole, and it helps to keep those customers. If you find that you are facing a reduction in your growth rate, there are two areas you should look to improve. You should either begin investing more in bringing in new customers to add to the list, or look into why you may be losing older customers from your list.
- Attrition Rate: The rate at which customers drop from your list of numbers is called “attrition rate”. Controlling your attrition rate can be a matter of trial and error, and you may never have an answer for why some customers chose to drop this service, as it could be any number of reasons. For some it could just be they longer want your service. For others they may have found your texts to be a bit spammy or the deals you offered by this means to be lackluster. Fine-tuning the frequency of your texts, as well as the content of the texts themselves is a process that is necessary to manage attrition.
- Response Rate: This one is key to monitering the success of a text marketing campaign. This metric is where you determine how many of these texts have yielded direct responses from their recipients. If you have included special offers, deals or loyalty points in your texts, this is a measure of how many users have used your offer for a purchase. However, if there was no implicit offer in the text, this can simply be a matter of open rate. Monitering which texts yield the best results can tell you how to structure your texts in the future, so be sure to be keeping track of this factor.
- Click-through Rate: This metric just takes the response rate a step further. This rate is determined by how many customers opened your text, and how many of them responded with your keyword or clicked your link. This is the clearest way for you to see success of your text marketing campaign.
So How Does TextP2P Work?
Well, that is easy! With TextP2P you can send texts to all your customers at once, or create more precise lists at your discretion. You can set these texts to have automated responses to the keywords your customers use, or you can respond individually to give it your personal touch.
You first enable either an existing number from a landline or cell phone or even create a new number or short code to send and receive these texts.
TextP2P also innately integrates to Mailchimp as well as over 3,000 more applications seamlessly through Zapier.com. For more information, click here.
Getting User Consent
Once you are all set up, it is important to remember that you require the consent of your audience to receive these texts. So, the first order of business is sending an opt in message, where the customer can respond to the keyword to opt in or text “STOP” to opt out. There are expressed rules on how consent must be gathered. For more information, click here.
Now that the air has been cleared, and your customer has consented to your texts, beginning your drip campaign or other service is as easy as writing a text!
Text Marketing: Best Practices
Now that you know how text marketing works, we can start talking about how to use it to best benefit both you and your customers.
Try To Be Original
If you are sending your customers the same text offer every week, they may begin seeing it as a bit of a nuisance. And even if you are making a different offer, but with the same format, you may see a drop in the open rate of your texts.
Sending your users a paint-by-the-numbers text is not using text marketing to its full potential. Part of what makes it such a great medium is the ability to provide highly customizable and more personal messages to your customers. Being overly repetitive is only limiting yourself.
Respond To Your Replies
As stated previously, you can have automated replies available for specific keywords that your customers use. This can be incredibly useful when your goal is to inform your customers about what is new with your company.
However, it may also be a good idea to have someone personally respond to some replies that do not use the keyword. Some companies use text as a means of communication with their customer service departments. Personal texts like this can foster a lot of good will between you and the customer.
Avoid Being Perceived As Spam
It can be difficult to avoid seeming spammy when setting up a drip campaign, but it is an essential part of maintaining one. People are very likely to start opting out if your messages register to them as spam. Two ways to avoid this are to be aware of your text frequency and content. If you send messages too often, it can start feeling intrusive to the user. Through trial and error, as well as personal consideration, you have to discern how often to send out these texts. When writing the content of your message, you should ensure it sounds like a human is writing it. Anyone who has received spam messages will automatically be on the look-out for anything that feels too similar to it, so sounding too robotic or even using improper grammar can be seen as red flags.
The point is, you should be thoughtful about each message you send. Always consider whether it is a message you would like to recieve first.
Be Sure To Be Providing Value
Many customers will be reluctant to provide their phone number or consent to texts unless there is something special in it for them. That is where the power of limited time deals, special offers and loyalty programs really start to show. Providing some extra incentive for those who join your list is the best way to get people to do it.
Examples Of Text Marketing Campaigns
Some ideas have already been provided here for how you can use text for your business, but maybe a few specific examples could better help.
Promotional Offers
There is a lot of potential in using text marketing to provide customers with limited time offers that they cannot resist.
Informing them of the possibility of receiving bonus rewards for purchasing a product can provide a great incentive for customers to buy now.
Many consumers love to stay on top of where they can find great deals, sales, and discounts so text allows you to send that information directly to them.
Welcome and Hospitality Messages
Text marketing can be used for something as simple as creating a good first impression. A welcome or check-up text can be a great way to set up some good will with a customer.
You can use this method to provide some valuable information as well as a space for customers to direct any and all questions they may have going forward. This all shows the customer that you care about his or her experience with your company.
SMS Appointment Reminders
Appointment reminders are a perfect way to properly utilize the power of text. Most people simply cannot keep track of everything they have scheduled. Sending out reminder notifications takes a lot of stress off the minds of the customer. It also lowers the chance of a cancelled or missed appointment significantly when a customer has been reminded a few days ahead of time, making this a worthwhile tool for both parties.
