Tips to Text Message Marketing for Small Businesses in 2022

Communicating with your prospects and customers is getting easier, even for small businesses who traditionally don’t invest much in technology like larger companies. Text message marketing for small businesses is vital because it allows you to reach a larger audience and communicate with customized messages. 

Since its advent, small businesses have utilized emails, with more than 319 billion emails sent to clients daily. However, people have grown weary over time, and emails don’t always work, as people often miss emails or send them straight to their junk folders before ever opening them.

Text messages have become a more effective way of marketing as they have a 98 % open rate compared to 20% for emails, indicating that consumers prefer text messages over email. And why not? They’re easier and faster to consume.

Nowadays, your business must send a text message if you wish to market in real-time. Text message marketing for small businesses facilitates a wider reach than traditional marketing without spending as much on additional labor, publishing, or media purchases. They’re also more likely to get through to their intended audience. With the increasing number of mobile phone users, sending and receiving messages has developed critical marketing practices for businesses.

What Is Text Message Marketing for Small Businesses?

In the United States, the number of people who own smartphones has been steadily rising, with around 97% of people owning a smartphone today. Surprisingly, a survey conducted in 2021 found that over 70% of mobile phone owners spend three to six hours on their devices.

If you’re a small business owner, you might not know where to begin communicating with your customers if you haven’t already. However, everything appears to be a lot easier with these encouraging figures, and, thankfully, it’s easy to implement. Text message marketing can be incorporated into your workflow to help you use and build your business.

Text message marketing is a software platform that enables SMS communication. As a result, text messaging is more than just a quick way to communicate with pals. Small businesses can use it as a mobile marketing tool as well. What are its benefits?

Related: Why You Need a Text Messaging Services for Business

Improves your clients’ experience

Small businesses can benefit from text message marketing’s quickness, accessibility, and capacity to expand their operations. Furthermore, text message marketing for small businesses allows for two-way interactions, which helps to bridge the gap between buyers’ in-person and online buying habits.

It’s okay if not everyone wants to receive text messages from your company. However, are you aware that while 54% of customers like to get promotions by text message, only 11% of firms do so?

You can provide a unique consumer experience and promote brand loyalty to those who subscribe to text message marketing.

Enables your brand to communicate with customers in real-time

When customers receive a text message, they frequently read them rapidly. Actually, on average, individuals in the US check their mobile phones 47 times daily. If you have a great offer that you want your clients to take advantage of right away, emailing them or sending a newsletter may cause them to overlook your offer and not act early enough to get the desired outcomes.

Instead, deliver them a text message with the relevant information, and there’s a better chance they’ll see it and do the action you desire. This is true since nearly three-quarters of Americans say they feel uncomfortable if they can’t use their mobile device.

Improves Personal Customer Interactions

People text to contact their friends and family; therefore, their phones are frequently within arm’s reach. Because texting is so personal, text message marketing for small businesses can include more than one exclusive channel, comparable to a loyalty scheme, to connect with your highly engaged group of clients.

Related: Simplify Your SMS Strategy This Summer – Texting Tips

Tips on How to Text Customers 

Be concise.

Texting is not like emailing. Only short, basic, and clear texts should be sent to contacts. Users are likely to stop reading long messages and opt-out of getting them in the future if you continue to send them.

The best SMS marketing approach should be to attract customers’ attention, express your marketing message, and conclude with a CTA using relatively few words. When notifying clients about mobile discounts, for example, capture their attention with an interesting greeting (always identifying your company), then convey details about the deals before explaining how they may use them. 

Alternatively, only provide the relevant content if you’re sending special offers. If your messages grow too long, subscribers may decide to unsubscribe. You can always provide a link in the text to direct them to a landing page with more information.

 Focus on adding value.

Above all, ensure that whatever you convey through marketing text messages is appropriate, relevant and provides value to the consumer. While most clients will be thrilled to get texts tailored towards events like coupons, promotions, and sneak peeks, they want them tailored to products or services they want. For instance, sending a senior customer a text message about a sale on cutoff shorts is a waste of time but may work perfectly for your younger customers.

Other than special offers, offering relevant information and promos can help customers feel valued and special. Text message advertising must be viewed in the same light as engaging interactions on other social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. These businesses must consider how they may bring value without ever being obtrusive so that their offerings are comparable to those offered by competitors.

Send texts at appropriate business hours.

Avoid bombarding customers with notifications at inconvenient hours. If you send SMS at odd hours, customers may think you’re being invasive and even unethical.

It’s an excellent idea to SMS consumers during regular business hours and to be upfront about what they may anticipate from your service. By doing this, few will be annoyed by your SMS marketing, and fewer individuals will feel compelled to respond “STOP.”

Make your texts unique.

Text message marketing for small businesses can allow you to connect with thousands of users simultaneously. However, it’s also ideal for one-to-one texts with customers, such as appointment and reservation reminders, a notification that a product that was out of stock when they were in the store is now available, or a survey asking for their feedback on a recent experience.

Customer segmentation is the best approach to do this. Segmentation makes it easy to customize your message to each individual based on their tastes, characteristics, and other customer-specific data.

Provide a way to unsubscribe.

Some individuals will choose to withdraw from your text message promotional campaign, no matter how effective. That’s why you should always provide a means for your text message customers to opt out of receiving your messages. In fact, you have to do so by law. Some text message platforms build this into the process and track responses so you don’t have to worry about it.

Even though it is the last thing you would like to think about is your consumers opting out of your campaign, making it simple for them to do so will encourage them to sign up for your SMS right away. “Text STOP to cancel” is the simplest way to accomplish this. That way, you can be sure that you’re only contacting folks interested in hearing from you.

Be consistent.

Based on the preceding point, some companies take text message advertising to its logical conclusion. To avoid spamming their clients, they fail to send text messages frequently enough; instead, they text them irregularly with no set timetable or regularity.

The downside to this approach is that most subscribers will forget why they joined the campaign in the first place, or they will feel bored entirely. Find an excellent medium and develop a consistent messaging plan that keeps customers engaged without irritating them.

Sending too many SMS is not a good idea.

Delivering too many texts to your clients is one of the most common blunders. People will begin to believe you are harassing them if they receive many notifications from your business each day. Aim to send anywhere from two to six communications monthly.

Add fun elements.

Text message marketing for small businesses can be entertaining and engaging for your customers. Sales, limited-time deals, or witty coupon codes with humorous phrases and puns are all possibilities. As long as it’s appropriate, everything goes.

Apart from having funny text contents, remember that you’ll need to recall important details about the event or business.

Related: Business SMS Basics: How to Get Short Codes for Text Messaging

What to Look for in an SMS Messaging Platform

When looking for an easy-to-use SMS marketing platform, look for one that offers mass and one-to-one texting capabilities, as well as fast implementation and easy administrator controls. Of course, you don’t want to spend a fortune to implement text message marketing. Find a platform that offers enterprise-level features at a low cost and high deliverability rates so you know your messages make it to their intended recipients.

In practice, a system that provides a chance for text message marketing for small businesses is the instrument that will allow you to communicate with your customers quickly. This platform makes it simple to create and send messages to customers.

Get Started with Text Message Marketing

If you want to start and grow your business with effective customer communications, reach out to Truedialog. We are committed to assisting you in starting, running, and developing your small business texting capabilities.