It wasn’t long ago when we associated SMS with casual and instant on-the-go messaging. It is because of this characteristic, people never considered SMS as a serious marketing tool.
This cannot be said of SMS messages any more. They have swiftly become the prime example of brevity, timeliness, and reachability, as well as a cost-effective marketing medium.
Keeping these factors in mind, Zoho Campaigns brings you SMS Campaigns. With this feature, you can now send short messages to your contacts by integrating your account with SMS Gateways like, Twilio, Clickatell, MessageMedia, MessageBird, SMS-Magic, BulkSMS, MiSMS, MSG91, Nexmo and BurstSMS.
With our SMS Campaigns feature, you can reach a larger group of people all at once by sending bulk SMS messages. Properly creating a list and segmenting it is required for you to get connected with your contacts immediately.
SMS Campaigns allows you to send messages with up to 160 characters and include links or emojis to make your content more dynamic and less monotonous. If you have longer content, you can extend your message to a max of 500 characters and send it in batches of 160 characters each. This will keep your content intact and stabilize your deliverability rate.
These campaigns can be created quite seamlessly with Zoho Campaigns thanks to the single page campaigns creator. This convenient setup will allow you to select an SMS Gateway, create your content, select the lists, and send the campaigns all on one page, saving you time.
How to measure SMS Campaigns’ effectiveness
Every SMS campaign’s performance will be reflected in its statistics. You can access SMS Campaigns and check reports in the following ways:
Sent SMS
This feature lets you take a close look at how your campaign has performed over a desired period of time.
Campaign activity
As the name suggests, campaign activity allows you to monitor the engagement rate of the receivers. You can check click rates, open rates, and other metrics to determine what should be changed and should remain the same in your approach.
Campaign performance
With this you can evaluate your campaign’s performance on a monthly, yearly, and quarterly basis. This will help you better project how your campaign will perform in the short term as well as over the long run.
Compare campaigns
You can also compare two to five campaigns and check which ones perform better than the others. This will help you settle with a more effective pattern for the rest of your SMS campaigns.
How SMS Campaigns can benefit you
So let’s take a closer look at the SMS Campaigns feature and learn how strategically using it in your marketing methods or associating it with your email campaigns can help you achieve more in your marketing.
Concision and immediacy
The character limit in SMS Campaigns allows you to create short messages, perfect for people running out of time to read your emails yet wanting to stay updated. With the character limit restricted, you can now easily craft compact messages citing important points and sifting out redundant content.
The concise nature of SMS messages lends to immediacy as most people read the messages as soon as they receive them. As an email marketer, you can induce a sense of urgency with your words and wait for the contacts to react.
Customer engagement
Their short nature means SMS Campaigns work well as reminders to inactive contacts about an old blog, updates on your latest developments, and more.
You can also achieve quick and easy engagement by offering details on important dates—such as deadlines to subscription plans—and links to readable, downloadable, and landing pages in your SMS messages. You can also promote relevant coupons via SMS messages. Adding emoticons to your content gives your brand personality, while sending coupons encourages contacts to interact with your messages as they redeem them.
Reachability
Unlike some other marketing mediums, SMS messages only need minimum connectivity, making it the most accessible method of electronic communication. This, combined with innumerable people using mobiles, makes SMS one of the most effective ways to promote your brand.
SMS Campaigns also don’t have the shortcoming of potentially being driven to an unintended folder and marked as spam—they always land in the right message inbox. This makes it a rather direct way of marketing.
Cost
The cost of sending SMS messages is comparatively lower than most of the other mediums of marketing. As a small business or startup owner, SMS Campaigns is a great way to cut down your expenses.
Incorporating SMS Campaigns alongside email campaigns in your marketing efforts
SMS Campaigns aren’t meant to replace your email marketing efforts—instead they’re meant to complement them. Let’s look at why and how you can do this.
Different messages need different lengths
Email marketing has long been considered the most impactful form of digital marketing. Much of this serious reputation is due to its ability to combine visually-stunning images with however much detail you need to convey your message. While SMS lacks the same weighty reputation, it more than compensates by offering an immediacy and concision.
A great way to leverage the strength of SMS is by using it alongside your email campaigns through reminders and follow-up messages. You can use email to convey more detailed information and use subsequent, simple SMS messages to keep your campaign fresh in people’s minds.
We can see this complementary relationship at play in a welcome series using both. For example, say you send eight messages spanning four weeks. You can divide your series into five emails and three SMS messages. Use emails to introduce your brand and its services to your contacts in detail. After a thorough conversation, you can use brief SMS messages to thank the engaged contacts and remind the inactive ones.
Staying in touch with your contacts
Implementing both SMS and email campaigns in your marketing efforts will grant you a greater ability to reach your contacts, especially with the growing tendency for customers to update their contact information.
This also works well if a person is unable to view an email, in such a case SMS messages bridge the gap and vice versa. Emails always allow the users to update their contact information. You can trigger an SMS message in your workflow for such contacts and stay connected.
Dominance of smartphones
Since smartphones are currently the dominant electronic devices, approaching contacts with an strategy that combines SMS messages and email campaigns means you’re reaching customers right where they’re at and making it easy for them to engage with your brand.
As an email marketer you should know that no email campaign is complete without a responsive email template that’s compatible with different devices. Specifically, it should render properly on smartphones and tablets in addition to laptops and desktops.
SMS campaigns can act as your backup option in situations where you might want to reinforce some important points soon after sending your email campaign. This will also allow you to notify contacts who were unable to access the email properly from their phones.
Wrap-up
SMS Campaigns on the whole can appear to be quite a casual way of communicating, but its evolution has transformed it into a serious marketing tool.
Including SMS campaigns alongside email campaigns will prove complementary and make your marketing methods less monotonous. Both are immersive in their own ways and can be used together for favorable results.
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