Useful SMS Marketing Tips For Small Businesses To Increase Brand Sales

There are lots of ways in which you can achieve the desired results through SMS marketing which is in vogue now in business marketing. There are lots of websites that will tell you about the ways to go ahead with such endeavor or you may even take help of an expert SMS marketing service provider for that matter.

• You will learn about the 160 character limit on SMS messages and how important it is to stick to the 160 character limitas this is ideal and actually the best way to be brief and precise.
• You will also come to know that the result you achieve does not have anything to do with the channel you choose necessarily but it entirely depends on quality of your message and the appeal in your offer.

However, there are a large number of small local businesses that do not have Short Message Service or SMS marketing featuring high on their priority list. The most significant reason for this is the rigid anti-spam laws. These laws typically govern the SMS marketing strategies.

It is important for businesses in America to abide by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act or TCPA. Failure to do so and non-compliance will fetch a fine of anywhere between $500 and $1500 for each of the unsolicited text message sent by you.

This figure can come up to a huge one quite exponentially especially if you have been following bulk sms marketing techniques.

Understand the rules

It is true that the text spam rule is quite strict in this matter but you can stay clear of such violations and make a killing off SMS marketing. All you need is to understand and follow the rules, consider the different beneficial aspects of SMS marketing and implement the best practices to it.

Research and studies have found that SMS marketing is far better than email marketing. They have supported their claims with believable and well researched figures that say:

• The average open rate for emails is anywhere between 20 and 30 percent
• On the other hand the open rate for a SMS was found to be as high as 98 percent approximately
• It was also found that nearly 90 percent of all SMS recipients open thetext messages received within the first three minutes of receiving it and
• The potential return on investment and conversion to sales in SMS marketing is much high and attractive to let it go of.

If you want to make the best of this strategy all you have to do is understandthe rules of SMS marketing before you get started. This will help you to adhere to TCPA regulations.

Follow opt-in users

The most important rule of all that you should remember is that you must send marketing messages only to those recipients who have voluntarily and explicitly opted in to receive your messages.

• As for the email marketers it is allowed for them to send promotional messages to recipients routinely in a PDF file that can be downloaded. Users can also signup for a free trial. This is however not possible with SMS marketing.
• The precise way to do this is to ask the prospects to click a checkbox manually to opt-in for your messages. You may also askthem to personally subscribe by sending a text message along with the relevant keywords back to you.

This will surely make the process of lead acquisition much harder but when you consider quality and other terms you will see that such leads that are gained after much effort are lot more valuable as these leads have a high potential to consequently convert better.

Precision and timing

The next important thing to know is to be very precise with your SMS marketing. You must know that there is a restriction automatically imposed on the text messages that you want to send.

You will essentially have to keep it within the specified 160 characters limit. On the contrary, if you send a lengthy SMS that is more than 160 characters the mobile networks has the right to typically break the long text into smaller sections of 160 characters each. However, this has a lot of issues such as:

• You message may lose the actual meaning
• The messages are re-stitched before these are delivered to your intended recipient and this may not happen seamlessly all the time
• Some networks may not break or merge messages and
• Few other networks can completely refuse to carry such long texts.

The results of such issues can be varied and many such as:

• Your targeted recipient may not receive your messages altogether
• Your messages may even be delivered out of order sometimes.

In both these cases you will not get the desired result as the true essence of your business marketing promotion will not get communicated to your targeted recipient.

Besides the fact that the SMS messages must be short to engage with your communication you must also time it well as proper timing is everything in business SMS marketing. Once again the nature of this medium comes into play which is the recipients open the messages instantly on receiving them. It is important that you reach out to your targeted audience just at the right time when they are about to make a purchasing decision.  For example:

• A pizza chain must send out their offers during lunch hour and
• A salon on the other hand ay schedule their offers after aligning it with the frequency of a particular customer in need for their service.

However, at the same time you may find it a bit difficult as a marketer to create brand awareness and recall through this medium due to the lack of a visual medium. You can still avoid this issue. You may include a phone number at the end of your message or any URL as the CTA. This is because in SMS marketing, there are no anchor links or fancy buttons to include. The only way in which you can get your customer interested to buy is by letting them know how.