While we have talked about how strong e-mail is for business and how your business should hyper-focus on email marketing efforts, as the average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 spent, if you are not using SMS as a marketing tool for broadcasting strategies, conversational marketing, and more, you’ll regret you neglected this channel.
SMS has been on the rise for businesses for about two years now and rising rapidly. More and more you, as a consumer, probably notice the growing number of promotional text messaging you get on your phone. Let’s face it, this is by far the #1 tool political campaigns have been targeting its audience with.
According to SMSComparison.com, statistics have shown that 98% of all text messages are opened, and 95% that are opened and responded to within 3 minutes of being delivered.
Additionally, 9 out of 10 consumers would like to communicate with businesses through text message, whether this be through sending alerts, reminders, back and forth communication, etc.
Moreover, 75% of customers would like special offers sent to them via text message, and CTR for these sorts of text messages are much higher (9.18%), compared to other marketing channels such as Facebook (0.90%) and Google Adwords (1.91%).
“It has also been reported that customers are 64% more likely to perceive a business in a positive light when they have directly communicated to. What you’re probably thinking now is, aren’t phone calls the best, most personal way to communicate with customers one on one? To put it quite frankly, phone calls are becoming a thing of the past when it comes to business to consumer communication. If given the option between the two, over 50% of consumers would prefer text messaging for customer support rather than phone calls. What’s more is that US consumers are 5 times more likely to send and receive text messages than phone calls.”
WAYS E-COMMERCE BUSINESSES ARE USING SMS PLATFORMS:
- Customer Service
- Sales
- Shipping Updates
- Product Updates
- Company Announcements
SMS is a currently preferred way for customers to engage and communicate with a brand they are doing business with. However, on the other side of the coin, we’re yet to see at what point consumers behavior will shift with preference as more and more brands adapt to SMS and start filling the consumers phone with promos, etc. Like any other channel, try to optimize it early on before mass saturation happens. For now, it only seems SMS is on the rise and consumers are responding positively.
