Smaller Businesses can use SMS and Text Marketing Effectively

Talking at the WSI Digital Summit today, Jason Palgrave-Jones, Natasha Deaffern and Eduardo Moura of Text Local discussed how small businesses can use SMS marketing effectively.

Text Local support businesses with their messaging needs and work with all sizes of business, from the smaller end of the market to big high street and multi national businesses.

Mention text or SMS marketing and most people immediately associate it with the poor spam practices, but when used properly text marketing can be a key part of your marketing strategy; a cost effective and efficient way of getting your messages to your customers.

Why SMS? There’s one device that people just can’t do without. Did you know?

91% of the world’s population own a smartphone
The average number of times a person checks their phone each day is 150
On average 99.9% of text messages are read (way higher than email!)
81% of mobile users say they are happy to receive text message campaigns from you!

So, what information exactly do people want to receive via text?

Reminders – 55% of people asked said they appreciate a reminder about important information like appointments
Order confirmations – 41% of people asked like to receive booking and order confirmations
Offers – 37% of people asked want to receive offers via text message

So, if you take that first statistic of 91% of the world’s population having a smart phone, that’s a huge opportunity. It’s anticipated that 16 billion vouchers, transport and event tickets will be delivered annually to mobile phones by 2018.

To bring the figures to life the team gave a few details of case studies.

Business to Consumer Case Study: Alerts and Text Reminders

Game, the high street and online retailer wanted a way of communicating with customers about game releases in a more time and cost effective way than their current method, which was mainly by telephone.

Game now use text messages to inform customers of game releases, updates reminders and also order confirmations.

The result? There has been a noticeable increase in the number of customers that come into stores during game release periods and customers have been very positive about the text services.

Business to Business Case study: API Integration

Create data Systems developed ‘Salon Precision’ a cloud based salon management software. Their challenge was that text capabilities needed to be integrated as part of the software.

Using Textlocal’s API gateway text messaging platform capabilities were integrated into ‘Salon Precision’ allowing text message appointment reminders to be sent as an auto response to the system bookings. This has resulted in fewer missed appointments and increased sales.

Papa John’s Pizza enlisted the help of Text Local to help them get their offers and promotions oout in a timely and highly targeted way. Using data from their ordering systems, Papp John’s were able to get time critical, geographically targeted messages about offers to their customers. This resulted in a 31% growth in sales in just 3 days.

Another example is SBS Insurance Services who wanted to increase the rates of customer feedback surveys. Using the Textlocal forms and surveys tool via the Get Survey Results Gateway, SBS are able to sort the results straight into their CRM software. They now have a 17% click through rate on their mobile surveys which is much higher than they have achieved with direct mail or email.

The team went on to do a practical demonstration of the system to show businesses in the room just how easy it is to create, manage, send and measure text messaging campaigns.

So whether you’re a business to business provider or a business to consumer business, there will be an element of your business where text marketing can help. Whether it’s appointment reminders, offers and promotions or event bookings, text marketing is an efficient cost effective way of making sure your message gets read.

Want some great ideas to make the most of your SMS campaigns? Check out our Free guide “Can You Outsmart the Competition with Mobile Messaging”