Marketing strategies are constantly evolving. First, it was cold-calling. Then, it was mass emailing. Now, SMS marketing is making waves as one of the preferred ways to advertise to your leads and customers. But is it effective? Absolutely.

What Is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing involves sending text messages to your leads and customers. You can use them for just about any kind of marketing campaign, including product releases, restocks, sales, and promotions. Broader uses of business texting include customer service, business notifications, order updates, and lead nurturing from successful CTAs.

Why You Should Add SMS to Your Marketing Strategy

In an age where getting the attention of customers is more challenging than ever, business SMS offers a unique opportunity to engage contacts in an intimate form of communication. Texting is often used between friends, close acquaintances, and colleagues, making the average text message more important than an email. Plus, they’re less likely to get marked as spam than emails and are less invasive than calling – something younger people want to avoid whenever possible.

Unlike emails, texts are delivered directly to a phone’s messaging app, often with a notification sound to help get your leads or customers to read the message. As a result, texts have up to a 98% read rate, which means you’re more likely to have your marketing campaigns read through SMS marketing than any other channel. This increased engagement helps contribute to the 500% average return on your investment – 5x your money.

Tips for Using Business Texting Effectively

Business texting is an effective form of marketing, but it’s a bit different than other strategies. There are some rules you must follow and some crucial elements to implement if you want the best results.

TCPA Compliance Requirements

Texting as a business requires you to comply with TCPA requirements, which say that if you want to text a contact, you must collect an opt-in and allow them to opt out of your texting list at any time. Opt-ins must be explicitly collected to send them texts, and the purpose of the texts must be provided, such as receiving marketing texts or using them for updates, notifications, or customer support.

Use Targeting and Personalization

72% of consumers will only engage with tailored marketing texts. If you send generic texts that could apply to anyone, they’re less likely to make an impact and achieve the results you want.

Effective SMS marketing requires segmenting your texting lists into different categories so that you can write texts that relate to them more closely. For example, separating customers and leads ensures you’re not thanking a new lead for their purchase or offering a new customer discount to a loyal customer.

Personalization, like adding someone’s name, loyalty status, order history, or location, can also help improve engagement. You can achieve this by using custom fields that automatically insert the contact’s personal information, allowing you to send mass texts.

Fortunately, most business texting applications include these essential features.

Send Your Texts at the Right Time

Did you know 95% of texts are read within three minutes of receipt? Texting gives you more control over the deliverability of your marketing content, allowing you to send them at almost the same time that they’ll be read. You can use this to offer time-sensitive deals like lunch specials around noon, short-term promotions that trigger FOMO, and texts based on popular events like the Super Bowl. It also makes it easy to avoid texting outside of regular hours for contacts in different time zones.

In many cases, your business texting app also lets you schedule texts to be sent at any time, even when you’re not around, to give you even more control.

Let Watt Media Help You Build A Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

There’s no one-size-fits-all marketing type that will work for every business. Each channel, including SMS marketing, will work differently for your business than someone else’s. The best thing you can do is create a diverse, robust, and versatile marketing strategy that covers as many channels as possible.

At Watt Media, we can help you evaluate and refine your existing marketing strategy or build a brand new one that maximizes your marketing budget using the most effective channels for your business.

Contact us today to learn more.

You may have heard that word of mouth is the best type of marketing. That may be true, but in today’s digital world, word of mouth no longer just happens face-to-face. 

Online reviews are the new normal for customers who want to recommend (or discommend) businesses to others. Unlike conventional word of mouth, online reviews give consumers access to testimonials from a broad range of customers, including those that they don’t know personally. Additionally, online review platforms make it easy to see the average customer opinion, generally in the form of stars. 

Continue reading →

Here at WattMedia, we’ve become aware of suspicious and potentially damaging emails that are currently circulating among our clients and other website owners. These emails claim that the recipient has violated the sender’s copyright ownership, presenting a link to click that purportedly presents evidence of the copyrighted images. This link contains malware, which can present a serious security risk for you and your business.  Continue reading →

Why should you write a business plan for an online business? Even if you are not looking for financial investors, it is an essential part of the planning of any successful business venture to lay out a clear business plan.

There are a wide variety of aspects to digital marketing that should be considered as part of your marketing strategy. A business cannot function without customers, and converting new customers is one of the most important and difficult parts of any business.

Google Adwords is a pay-per-click advertising method where you pay for your advertisement to be placed near the top of searches, and you pay for any of those visitors clicking your link. This allows you to target specific search words and geographical locations to ensure that you are reaching your target demographic, allowing your website and service to convert them to a customer.

Continue reading →

 When you think of the largest businesses in the world, you probably assign a product, logo, or even slogan to the business mentally – in other words, their branding. For example, everyone knows the Nike swoosh, the Apple logo, and Google’s G. This is referred to as “brand awareness”, and is a sign that the company has done a great job of establishing their brand by making it memorable, recognizable, and profitable.

Continue reading →

There are many ways building a strong professional network can benefit your business, ranging from opening doors you never knew existed, to receiving quality feedback and advice from successful entrepreneurs. You should always be working on the development of your professional network. If you feel at a standstill or don’t know where to start, these five network boosting tips might be helpful. Continue reading →

A sound marketing strategy can put your small business in the public mind and eye of the community. The labyrinth of marketing may seem intimidating when reviewing your options. Fiscal aspects and optimal results are often factors in deciding which marketing method you will choose, and in this millennial age, we have a plethora of marketing means and tools at our disposal. Continue reading →

Have you heard of Google Apps for Work? This is a cloud-based (online) suite of tools designed specifically for office use and includes online access to a number of important and highly useful apps, including a calendar, email, documents, and many more. Currently, Google Apps for Work is in use by more than 5 million businesses and educational facilities around the world.

Features of Google Apps for Work

In order to convince a business customer to make the switch from their current business app provider, companies like Google have to offer several compelling reasons. After all, making a change like this typically involves some form of learning curve that can affect the company’s ability to service their customers in a timely fashion.  Continue reading →

Starting a business takes a lot of work and is often a huge learning process. It’s normal to make a few mistakes along the way. Sometimes these mistakes can help you improve, or teach you lessons that prevent you from making larger mistakes down the road. Other times, business owners make mistakes that could cripple their business, or at the very least make a mess that takes a lot of work and time to clean up.

To help you avoid common small business mishaps, we’ve put together a list of the top 5 most common and detrimental mistakes small business owners make. Continue reading →