Grow Your Business with SMS Text Marketing

SMS Text Marketing  is still fairly new which means plenty of opportunity in marketing. While mobile internet access is the biggest change that’s a result of the growth of iPhones and other smartphones, it’s not the only thing that’s changing. Text messaging is also becoming much more widely used. In this article, we’re going to look at how you can use text, or SMS messaging to reach your customers.

While text messaging has been around for well over a decade, the number of people using it has really exploded since smartphones have become so common. Having to use the number pad to tap out your messages made texting difficult for many people. But the keyboards that are part of all smartphones have made the process so much easier.

This means that a lot more people use text messaging and it has become a way for marketers to communicate with their customers.

Using SMS Text Marketing to Get Optins

You have probably seen promotions that say something like “Text the word ‘enter’ to 51515 to enter to win.” When someone sends that text, the end result is they get added to an opt-in list, much like they would if they sign up for an email list.

Just as with email, you can have an autoresponder that goes out immediately after the text is received. From that point on, you can send text messages to those people until they opt out.

You can send whatever you want in the text message (within the limits of length of course) but usually you’ll send a promotion of some type. Text messaging has a couple of big advantages over email:

1. It has a much higher open rate. Because most people have their phones with them at all times, and the phone notifies them when a text comes in, they typically read it right away.

2. There’s virtually no “noise” in people’s text inboxes. No spam, nowhere near as many promotions and just less texts in general. This means that sending an SMS text marketing message will typically be more reliable than an email for getting read. The open rate of SMS text marketing campaigns will usually get a much higher open rate than traditional email does.

Because text messages tend to get read right away, you can send time-sensitive promotions and expect that many of the people who receive them will read them almost instantly.

Near Instant Results with SMS Text Marketing

Compare that to sending it through email, where it might not even get read until the deadline has passed.

If you’re building an email list for your business, you should consider doing the same with cell phone numbers. This will give you yet another way to reach your customers at a relatively low cost.

The key thing with SMS text marketing is of course to be ethical, people will soon get turned off to good offers if they are bombarded with message after message, so use it wisely.

Mobile Marketing 2011 and Beyond

Marketing on the internet is evolving like anything else technology-related. People are moving to mobile internet use quicker than ever, and your online marketing and mobile marketing in particular needs to evolve with it. In this article, we’re going to look at a few of the differences that you need to be aware of.

The way people use your company’s website is probably the biggest change. More and more people are using mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad to browse the web, and this presents some unique problems from a marketer’s perspective.

These latest devices are perfectly capable of browsing most websites, but that’s not to say they make it easy. When a standard layout is viewed on a small screen like you find on most mobile devices, everything is so small that it’s very difficult to read, and nearly impossible to click on links.

Savvy Mobile Marketing Includes This…

It will be both easier to read and easier to navigate when you offer your visitors a version of your website that’s been optimized for mobile devices. You don’t need to worry about creating a separate site or anything, though. The web server that runs your site can identify the type of device when a visitor arrives, and it will display the appropriate version of the site.

In most cases, the mobile version of your website should focus on different things. The main things people are looking for when browsing on mobile devices are contact information (phone, email, etc.) and other information like your business address or hours of operation. It’s important to make sure this information is found easily on your home page, or within one click from it.

Mobile Marketing and Customer Contact

Another change that mobile marketing brings is how you contact your customers. Yes, they probably still use email on these devices but sms text marketing can be even more effective in many cases. Not only do you still get access to your customers, they also tend to read text messages faster and more consistently.

You should also set up profiles on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, because many mobile users access these sites. This lets you engage your customers in yet another place. The more options you provide, the better, since not everybody wants to communicate in the same way. So do enable mobile marketing strategies it’s definitely the way forward for the future.