What does all SMS marketing include?

Text message marketing is a way to reach customers through SMS. Using a web-based program, you can send bulk text messages to subscribed customers or opt-in consumers. You can also set up campaigns where coupons are sent automatically over time, engage customers in surveys and quizzes, or even run a sweepstakes contest.

However, you must be wondering what else can be done with a single medium, right? There is much more in store than meets the eye, read on to find out. Here are some additional things you can do with SMS Marketing:

• coupons: Send your loyal consumers or customers exclusive offers. The uniquely generated coupon codes that you send to your consumers prevent non-subscribers from taking advantage of your offer.

• Drip Campaigns: Automated messages can be sent based on how long your customers have subscribed to them. In the context of coupons, for example, you can send a 10% discount coupon right after registration, a 20% discount coupon after 3 weeks and a 50% discount coupon after 2 months of subscription of your consumer. This runs automatically as soon as a customer signs up, so you don’t need to keep sending individual messages.

• Poll: By sending text messages with different keywords, your customers can now cast a vote using only SMS. Most services allow you to run surveys where you collect responses over a period of time and graph them from your online dashboard. Sounds great, right?

• Groups: You can also divide customers into groups based on the keyword they respond to, how they voted in a survey, based on their area code, and more. Segmenting your customers allows you to send more targeted promotions and coupons, which is more personal and will also relate to them.

• Send photos and videos: Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) marketing is a fairly new development where you can send photos and videos to customers. This is especially useful if you want to send a brochure or restaurant menu to a customer.

• Location Based Marketing: Send different messages to customers depending on their location. For example: if a customer is near your restaurant, you can send him a text message informing him about the dish of the day or the discounts available in your restaurant.

Always remember that Clients should be able to unsubscribe at any time. Fortunately, most (if not all) text marketing services are set up this way by default. However, you will need to remind customers of the opt-out phrase, i.e. “Reply STOP to stop receiving messages”