SMS Marketing Becomes Crucial for Brands as Mobile Usage Continues to Grow

The marketing profession has undergone some tremendous changes over the last few years. One of the biggest developments is the shift towards digital marketing. Many companies have started leveraging social media, PPC and other online marketing tools to increase sales and boost brand exposure. However, not all digital marketing efforts revolve around the Internet. Many customers also are connecting with their favorite brands through their mobile devices.

This means that more companies can take advantage of SMS Marketing. This a growing opportunity as the number of customers with mobile devices continues to rise. Companies spent $3.5 billion on SMS marketing in 2018 and that figure is projected to grow over 20% a year through 2025.

Investing in SMS software can pay huge dividends for your business. Here are some reasons that your business can’t afford to overlook the importance of this novel marketing strategy.

Access to a tremendous base of customers

The overwhelming majority of customers around the United States have some form of cell phone or smartphone. According to Pew Research, a whopping 97% of American consumers have one of these devices. This figure is slightly higher with American adults, as 98% of people over the age of 18 have a mobile device.

Your business can reach these customers by using SMS marketing. This sheer volume of people using smartphones makes SMS marketing an incredibly scalable strategy. You can scale your business more than any other medium, including Google or Facebook ads.

Incredible conversion rates

You probably wouldn’t expect many people to respond to SMS marketing messages. However, they actually convert much better than many other marketing strategies. One analysis found that the conversion rates of SMS texts is around 32%. This is higher than just about any other marketing approach.

Of course, you’re going to need to make sure that your SMS marketing strategy is properly executed. You need to refine your text copy and fine-tune your targeting to make sure customers don’t view your messages as spam. As long as you optimize it properly, you can have access to one of the best converting marketing mediums available.

Focus on region specific targeting

Most companies try to do business with customers in particular regions. If you don’t run a national e-commerce company, then you want to make sure that your marketing messages are only delivered to people in the areas that you are doing business.

One of the big advantages of SMS marketing is that you can easily tailor your messages to the location of the people that you want to view them. For the most part, geographic targeting is more accurate with SMS marketing than most other digital marketing strategies, such as social media advertising. People can easily disguise their true location with VPNs or proxies when they are using online services like Facebook or Google. They can also give fake locations on their social media profiles. This often leads to companies paying to advertise to customers outside their area of business.

Fortunately, they can have better control of the geographic targeting of their messages with SMS marketing. Your messages will be delivered to customers based on the address associated with their cell phone carrier. Since people need to update their billing information whenever they move, the cell phone carrier will have accurate information of the person that holds the plan. This doesn’t mean that it is completely perfect, because there might be other adults on the plan that live in other areas. However, it is still a lot more reliable than many other marketing strategies.

You can collect data to optimize your marketing strategy more easily

Every brand needs to collect as much data on the customers as possible. Customer data gives companies more nuanced insights into the behavior and interests of the people buying the products and services.

This leads to another significant benefit of SMS marketing. You can incorporate shortcodes into the links that you send to customers through SMS, which helps you collect data on them. Of course, you have to make sure that you are in compliance with the GDPR and other data protection regulations. As long as you do this, you will get valuable data that will help you market to your customers more effectively.

Much more immediate responses

When you are running any marketing strategy, you want to get customers to take action as quickly as possible. Some mediums result in quicker customer sponsors than others.

SMS marketing is one of the fastest ways to reach and convert new customers. People have their phones on them almost all the time. They will usually see your message within 15 minutes of receiving it on their smartphone. They will make quick decisions whether or not to read it and click on the links embedded in it.