SMS Marketing, or text messaging marketing, is one of the largest untapped markets for businesses. According to a recent study, 81 percent of Americans text regularly, and over 6 billion texts are sent every day. 

There are more than 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide. Yet, many businesses aren’t utilizing the power of SMS marketing. One study suggests only 39 percent of businesses are using some form of SMS marketing. 

SMS marketing is a powerful tool for any business seeking a stronger connection with their customers or spreading their brand outreach. What are some secrets you may not know that SMS platforms can help you with? 

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How Does SMS Marketing Help Your Business?

SMS Marketing is adding tremendous value to businesses. The four biggest ways SMS Marketing helps businesses is by:

• Increasing traffic to websites or stores
• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing customer engagement
• Increasing click-throughs and offer redemptions. 

What do all of these things have in common? The potential to increase revenue. 

The more traffic to your website, the more brand awareness, the more your customers are engaged with your brand, the more revenue for your business. 

Why is SMS Marketing Effective?

SMS Marketing is extremely effective for many reasons. First, you already know that 81 percent of Americans text regularly, and there are over 6 billion texts sent every day. 

But how long do you think the average person looks at their phone daily? The answer: 5 to 6 hours. 

How many times a day does the average American pick up or look at their cell phone? The answer: about 150 (or more) times. 

Text messages are one of the most powerful ways to grab your customer’s attention. Studies show that text messages are read 99 percent of the time; 97 percent are read within the first 15 minutes, and 90 percent are read in the first five minutes. 

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Contrast This With Emails

Email campaigns were once considered one of the most effective ways to market your product to customers. However, a recent survey shows people only open between 28 and 33 percent of the emails they receive. 

People are 3.5 times more likely to open a text message than an e-mail. 

The Effect of SMS Marketing

SMS Marketing is highly effective in both reaching and engaging your customer base. For example, SMS Marketing allows your brand to create targeted ads to engage your customer. 

SMS Marketing Services create filter-specific ads that tailor messages to your target audience. This means you can craft your messages and send them to customers from a specific demographic or location - or both. 

Community’s Location Filter feature does exactly this. Community connects your business directly with customers and followers from any demographic or location that’s relevant to your business. 

For example, Community’s Location Filter gives you the option to send texts to customers whose birthdays are today, or all your customers over 25, or by gender identity. 

Precise and pointed messaging can connect you to your customer in a deeper way that encourages engagement. 

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SMS Marketing Fuels Customer Engagement

Engaging your customer is one of the most effective ways to build brand recognition and loyalty.

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The ‘20 Percenters’

One market study shows that engaging the top 20 percent of your customers can lead to 80 percent of your sales. The study points out that this doesn’t necessarily mean all of your sales come from those 20 percent of customers. 

Rather, the combination of those “20 percenters” purchasing your product and promoting it to friends and family or through social media leads to 80 percent of your sales. 

You have to identify who your 20 Percenters are. Determining this is based on your business and how you measure your customer base. For example, a 20 Percenter for you could be the group of customers who bought the top 20 percent of your product. 

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Engaging Your “20 Percenters”

However you measure your 20 Percenters, the next critical question all businesses should ask themselves is, “how are you engaging your ‘20 percenters’?” 

One easy and very effective way is through SMS Marketing. Once you have identified your 20 percent group, SMS Marketing platforms can help your business identify these customers and create targeted SMS campaigns to engage them. 

Community takes this even further by giving you the power to connect to your identified target audiences all from one convenient place - and your followers can even text you back. 

This interaction targets your top customers directly while simultaneously empowering them to interact with you. This powerful tool helps to build brand recognition and loyalty. 

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Different Forms of Customer Engagement and How They Can Skyrocket the Power of Your Brand

Engagement comes in all forms. One powerful form is feedback. SMS Marketing is a great way to learn about your customers. 

Research shows that, on average, 31 percent of consumers will respond to a survey via SMS, with the average response time for users being just over five minutes. Another survey suggests that 70 percent of Americans prefer to receive mobile offers from their favorite businesses via text message. 

SMS Marketing campaigns can send these surveys to customers via text to gauge their customer experience. This provides invaluable data to your business, giving you the power of knowledge of your customer and how you can improve your business by improving their customer experience. 

Another powerful form of engagement is keeping the customer “in the loop.” Informing customers about upcoming sales or events via text message could be a great way not only to increase sales for the event itself but to keep your customer engaged. 

You can take this one step further by providing exclusive offers or sales events to particular customers - say, maybe your 20 percenters - giving them the self-empowerment feeling of exclusivity. See how Odd Sox uses Community to reach their customers.

Community helps in both of these engagement areas by creating exclusive campaigns and experiences by connecting you directly with your followers via text messaging. This gives you the power to target text campaigns according to your filters, reaching your targeted customers directly. 

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Tapping Into The Untapped Potential of SMS Marketing

We know that millions of people turn to their cell phones, spend hours on them daily, and pick them up around 150+ times per day. With over 7 billion cell phones worldwide, and over 6 billion texts sent every day, only 39 percent of businesses utilize text message marketing. This makes text marketing the largest untapped potential for your business.

Community breaks into this untapped market giving your business the powerful tools it needs to reach out directly to your customers. With the Location Filter, Community also lets you reach out directly to your target audience, expanding your brand awareness and loyalty. 

Plus, Community allows your brand followers to reach back out directly to you, giving you invaluable feedback. With Community, you can offer area or demographic-specific opportunities to customers — creating exclusivity and raising brand loyalty. 

For more information, check out what else Community has to offer. 

SOURCES:

US Texting Statistics | Local Project

The 6 SMS Secrets and Best Practices the Competition Won't Tell You About | Open Market

Text Messaging Statistics 2020: Results & Facts about the Newest Marketing Channel | Postscript.io

Time spent on average on a smartphone in the US 2021 | Statista

SMS marketing vs. email marketing: who wins the battle for effectiveness? | Redeye.com 

Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics for 2021 | Campaignmonitor.com

​​Three Tactics To Increase Customer Loyalty And Engagement | Forbes

How This Entrepreneur Proved SMS Marketing Could Be Marketing's 'Next Big Thing' | Inc.com