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Curious about SMS marketing? You should be.
Text messages let you directly connect with your customers where they are already spending time. According to a recent study by SimpleTexting, 83% of mobile users say texting is the top activity on their phones, and 84% of users have opted to receive marketing text messages from businesses.
Email and social media are already marketing table stakes, but SMS marketing is proven to have higher engagement and better ROI than either of those channels. Understanding how to incorporate SMS marketing into your marketing strategy will help you connect with your audience and give you a leg up on your competition.
Let’s examine seven key benefits of SMS marketing and how they help companies like yours build stronger, longer-lasting connections with their audience and customers.
1. SMS marketing has high engagement and open rates
SMS has the highest open rates of any marketing channel. 98% of SMS messages are opened compared to 26.8% for emails and 7.8% for push notifications.
Including branded links in your text marketing messages can further boost these open and engagement rates. Branded links are short links that feature your brand name or an important keyword. Sharing branded links increases link trust and brand visibility, which can increase click-through rates by up to 39%.
2. SMS marketing is super cost-effective
Adding another marketing channel to your campaign strategy is a big decision that will directly impact your company’s bottom line. SMS campaigns are more cost-effective to scale than other types of cost-per-click (CPC) marketing. An SMS click costs between $0.015 and $0.050, compared to $6+ per click for most CPC campaigns.
The ROI for SMS marketing campaigns can be as much as $71 per dollar, which means it’s easier to test out new content and refine your SMS campaigns without weighing the impact on your marketing budget.
3. SMS marketing feels more urgent than other channels
An average response time under 30 minutes makes SMS marketing feel more urgent than other marketing channels. Notifications and push alert infrastructure also increase texters’ sense of urgency. Combine that with the fact that 90% of people respond to SMS within 30 minutes, and it’s easy to see how powerful SMS can be for your business.
One way to tap into this urgency is by including time-sensitive offers in your SMS campaigns. Rebrandly’s link expiration functionality helps you create SMS links with a built-in countdown. If you’re offering sales or one-time offers, this is a great way to ensure your audience understands the urgency and can potentially increase click-through rates.
4. SMS marketing builds trust and brand recognition
Text messages have always been a way for friends and family to communicate directly. That makes SMS a prime channel for relationship-building for your brand as well. You need to build trust and loyalty quickly to make the benefits of SMS marketing work for you.
But SMS is also rife with the potential for spam. That’s why you need branded links for your SMS messages. Easily recognizable custom domains ensure your audience knows who sent the message and won’t worry about potential phishing or smishing concerns. Smishing scams are a method where bad actors use SMS marketing messages to impersonate banks or other companies with sensitive information.
Customizing your links and including relevant slash-tag text ensures that anyone who receives your message can easily recognize the sender without worrying about clicking on a generic short link, keeping your business and your audience safe.
5. SMS marketing has great deliverability
Social media campaigns often get lost in the noise, and email providers frequently market messages as spam. With SMS, you send your messages directly to people’s phones, which significantly improves the chance they will actually be seen and read.
However, a text message that is part of a marketing campaign has to be accepted by the mobile carriers for every recipient’s phone. Generic link shorteners are often flagged as potential spam and may be filtered out automatically. Branded domains don’t have this issue, as they are much more secure and can actually increase your deliverability.
Generic link shorteners also end up on blocklists, significantly decreasing their deliverability and potentially impacting your website domain’s reputation. SMS marketing is only beneficial if messages are delivered, so don’t gamble with your domains and sending infrastructure.
6. SMS marketing presents opportunities for personalization
Text message campaigns are ubiquitous, so your audience can be anywhere worldwide with any mobile device. That provides several personalization and segmentation opportunities, making SMS campaigns easy to target. Personalized text messages engage customers more effectively and boost response rates for your sms marketing campaigns.
Dynamic routing is one way to capitalize on these opportunities using your customer data. Rebrandly allows you to automatically send recipients to different landing pages based on their device type and geolocation, making it easy to optimize their experience at each stage of the journey.
When you combine analytics insights with smarter SMS campaigns, you can create a more seamless experience for your audience. Whether you’re sending transactional SMS messages, promotional messages, or simply keeping customers informed, first-party data is the key to boosting customer engagement.
7. SMS marketing provides actionable insights for your team
Analytics and data are essential to every campaign; the same is true for SMS marketing. Optimizing your SMS campaigns starts by understanding your audience segments and using that data to provide them with relevant content.
With Rebrandly’s robust analytics suite, you can measure engagement at scale and use your data more effectively. Create UTM parameters for each campaign, design custom links for your audience, and learn more about how your potential customers move from prospect to user.
The benefits of SMS marketing are better with link management
An effective SMS marketing strategy is integral to your overall marketing efforts. Understanding how to use SMS marketing to build relationships with your audience is much easier when you have a seamless link management solution to support those campaigns.
Learn more about how Rebrandly can take your SMS strategy to the next level.