Innovative Ways You Can Use Text Messaging To Reach Your Target Audience

Short message service (SMS) marketing has been around for decades. Businesses all around the world use SMS or text messages to inform their target audience about offers, promotions, events, and new releases. Unlike email marketing, SMS marketing can guarantee a higher viewability rate. Most emails end up in the junk or spam folders and get lost among the dozens of verification, work, and other promotional emails people receive every day. On the other hand, almost everyone has their text messaging notifications on. Even if they don’t open the text message, your audience will hear the notification sound and take a look at the screen out of curiosity, reading your name and at least the first few sentences of your promotion. To ensure that your SMS marketing strategy is effective, take a look at these innovative ways in which you can use text messaging to reach your target audience.

Send Surveys

Any business can struggle to collect valuable information about its audience. However, if you combine text messaging and surveys, this may be your key to interesting marketing and collecting feedback. Create a small, fun, multiple-choice survey that incorporates information that you want to deliver and collects general feedback from your audience. For instance, you can ask them if they have heard about your new pop-up shop and then follow it up by whether they would be interested in going, to which they can reply by choosing yes or no. You can list two of your featured products/ services and ask them which ones they are most excited about trying out. You can then inform them about a sale or promotion that you have on these items.

This way, you will collect information about the effectiveness of your other promotional efforts. If they’ve heard about the event elsewhere, then you have succeeded- if not, then you may need to revisit that marketing plan. You will also find more about which products and services your audience are most interested in, and whether people would be willing to participate in the kind of event you’re hosting. Not only that, but your text message will have informed some and reminded others of your event, and marketed your new promotion or offer. Unlike questionnaires, these surveys are faster to reply to. They can also be completed anywhere at any time.

Interactive Messaging

If you want to relieve some of the pressure off your support and customer care team, you should consider using interactive messaging to reach your target audience. Two-way messaging improves communication and customer-business relationships. It is highly convenient for the customers as it doesn’t require them to log into specialized portals or call the customer care line. If needed, you can automate some responses and use segmentation to ensure timely and effective communication. You can also integrate and manage all your SMS sending through specialized software. It is a great way to ensure customer satisfaction, attain their loyalty, and improve your retention rate. Text messaging can also be easily monitored, allowing you to track and measure ROI. Furthermore, two-way text messages can help you understand more about your customers’ needs and preferences and learn when your target audience is most responsive.

Personalized Touch

Adding a personalized touch to your text messaging can be an awesome way to connect with your target audience. Although customers understand that these messages are not actually handcrafted for each person, they appreciate the gesture. You can also send location- and time-based texts. For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, you can send your dine-in offers around the time that people are leaving work. Similarly, a shop can notify customers at the mall about their new collection. Segmenting your audience can help you reach out to them as individuals rather than a group. In other words, music apps should avoid notifying pop fans about new hip-hop music releases, and should instead focus on updating them about their favorite pop artists.

Some may assume that SMS marketing is outdated; however, any promotional method can be easily deemed ineffective if you use it incorrectly. Text messages can help you reach your target audience, provided that you use them strategically. Text messaging can be used creatively to interact with your target audience. There are endless tactics that can be extremely effective when paired with audience demographics. Segmentation based on interests, geolocation messaging, time optimization, fun and informative surveys, and two-way messaging can benefit your business in many ways. These strategies make text message marketing highly convenient for your customers, promoting customer loyalty and brand awareness.

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