Market With Text Messages
- ARTICLES |
Mobile internet access is one of the biggest changes that's happening as a result of the massive growth in smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry, but it's not the only one. 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.
Text messaging has been around for a long time, but until the widespread growth of smartphones many people didn't use it. Trying to tap out a message on a regular number keypad wasn't the easiest thing to do. But since most smartphones have a keyboard built in - whether a physical one or an onscreen style - it has become much easier.
As a result, far more people are using this technology and it has become an alternative to email for marketing purposes.
You've probably seen messages like "Text 'ENTER' to 12345 to enter our contest." When someone enters the contest, they're actually opting in to receive text messages from that company, sports team or whomever is running the contest.
Much like email, there are autoresponder style text services that will respond instantly with a text message. From that point on, you can send text messages to those people until they opt out.
Those text messages can be whatever you want, but in most cases they will be promotions of some sort. But there are a couple of big advantages of text messaging 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. So they are more likely to see your message than they are when they process email.
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.
Compare this to email where people may not see your message for a day or two (or more) if they don't keep on top of their email all the time.
If you're building an email list for your business, you should consider doing the same with cell phone numbers. This will give you an additional way to reach your customers at a relatively low cost.
Resource:
onlinetextingservice.com
Text messaging has been around for a long time, but until the widespread growth of smartphones many people didn't use it. Trying to tap out a message on a regular number keypad wasn't the easiest thing to do. But since most smartphones have a keyboard built in - whether a physical one or an onscreen style - it has become much easier.
As a result, far more people are using this technology and it has become an alternative to email for marketing purposes.
You've probably seen messages like "Text 'ENTER' to 12345 to enter our contest." When someone enters the contest, they're actually opting in to receive text messages from that company, sports team or whomever is running the contest.
Much like email, there are autoresponder style text services that will respond instantly with a text message. From that point on, you can send text messages to those people until they opt out.
Those text messages can be whatever you want, but in most cases they will be promotions of some sort. But there are a couple of big advantages of text messaging 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. So they are more likely to see your message than they are when they process email.
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.
Compare this to email where people may not see your message for a day or two (or more) if they don't keep on top of their email all the time.
If you're building an email list for your business, you should consider doing the same with cell phone numbers. This will give you an additional way to reach your customers at a relatively low cost.
Resource:
onlinetextingservice.com