By Leo Gladys
One of the primary goals of any business is always to grow its business over time. These days, digital marketing is a big part of how you do it. You can’t just wait for people to come to you. You have to go out to your target audience, meet them where they are, and get the right message in front of them at that critical moment in their buyer’s journey.
There are myriad ways to do this, with traditional paid digital advertising and social media outreach being chief among them. But there’s also a powerful opportunity out there that far too many brands often overlook: SMS campaigns. The vast majority of us carry smartphones around with us in our pockets all day and are accustomed to checking them moments after waking up in the morning. What better opportunity to reach someone in a personal, direct, and, most importantly, intimate manner?
Why SMS Campaigns Are More Effective Than Ever
SMS-driven collateral is important because it helps feed into an even larger, more essential idea: customer engagement.
In an era when more competitors are cropping up all the time, you can’t afford to have a massive audience of passive observers who ultimately don’t care that much about your brand in one way or the other. Sure, you helped solve their problem today. But are they motivated to return to you again should the need arise in the future? Not necessarily.
What you need are people who are loyal not just to your products and services but to your business. Customer engagement is how you get there.
According to one recent study, improving customer engagement through extensive personalization can increase the average amount of revenue generated per customer by as much as 166%. Another study indicated that about 70% of customers say it is important for any company they do business with to fully understand their needs.
The Power of the Right SMS API
There’s where SMS API integration, a tool like Mitto (to name just one example of many), and a thoughtful campaign come into play. SMS can be used not just for direct outreach marketing (like informing people that a sale is coming up, for example) but in other ways. It can be used to make the checkout process incredibly simple. You could send someone an SMS message with a link, giving them the option to pay via credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, and more.
Or, you could send people SMS reminders ahead of an upcoming appointment they may have to make sure they don’t miss it. Most people agree that they would love to see more businesses doing this (to the tune of about 83%), but right now, only about 20% of businesses are taking advantage of it.
People want to engage with your business, but they want to do it on their terms. SMS offers the flexibility to make that happen. The more effort you put in, the more loyalty you receive in return. Customers become advocates, and long-term relationships are built. It truly doesn’t get much more straightforward than that.
In the end, SMS communication brings a wide range of benefits that cannot be ignored. It gives people access to the instant information they need, like with SMS reminders. It allows you to personalize your messaging in ways that would have been unthinkable even as recently as a decade ago. It generates superior results compared to alternative forms of communication like email. The list goes on and on.
So if your ultimate goal is to reach as many people as possible where they are, you no longer have to worry about the exact channel that they may or may not be using. Because with the right, finely tuned SMS campaigns, the answer to the question “Where can I reach my prospects?” becomes simple: “Anywhere.”
