From an efficiency standpoint, SMS marketing naturally seems like an obvious channel for brands to leverage. When you look at the statistics side-by-side with email marketing, SMS has a lot going for it. In terms of open rates, emails garner an average of 20%, whereas SMS offers are opened at a rate of 98%. This makes sense given that so many of the often hundreds of emails we receive on a daily basis are spam and get deleted before they opened. It also makes sense given that text messaging is our most commonly used form of regular, instant communication. So when you see a text message pop up, you are highly likely to at least open it. Additionally, a text message usually gets a response within 90 seconds (and 90% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes of being received), whereas it takes people an average of 90 minutes to respond to an email. But what about return on investment?
Given that SMS marketing has become so much more popular and widely used by brands in recent years, the hypothesis is that in the near future, SMS marketing may come up against some of the same roadblocks that email marketing has had. These challenges include the high spam rate, which goes hand-in-hand with the changing psychology around people coming to expect that a great deal of the texts they receive in a day will be marketing messages, and therefore disregarded as spam before opening. But before that happens, brands using SMS marketing can mitigate future challenges as much as possible and get the most ROI out of their current SMS methods.
There are some key contributors to ROI in SMS marketing. Be timely and relevant - SMS ads are particularly useful with real-time deals and coupons, flash sales, etc., so utilizing this channel well for these initiatives will pay off. Keep it short and well-communicated - SMS messages should be communicated in 160 characters or less and should be written in plain, conversational English (using all caps and emojis is never a good idea, if people see that in an email it’s a first indication of spam, so the same holds true for a text from an unknown number). Make the click-through as frictionless as possible for recipients, which can easily be done with a call-to-action button or direct link. Finally, and most importantly, know your audience - do the due diligence necessary to home in on your target demographics, particularly for just-in-time deals, for which SMS as a channel is particularly effective.
All in all, companies should develop a strategy that incorporates both SMS and email marketing, as both can be highly effective for different reasons and at different times. The timing is paramount, and just as important is getting permission to send a text message. Your audience may completely abandon you if you send them a text ad without their permission. If used with the right methodology, SMS can be just as effective as (if not more so) and yield comparable ROI to email marketing.
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