Is text message marketing an outdated medium, or is there a place for it in the future of mobile?
According to Chuck Martin, author of The Third Screen: Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile, “SMS is a very big deal.” There are hundreds of thousands of text messages sent every second, and that trajectory is unlikely to cease in the foreseeable future. The open rate for emails is, at best, around 30 per cent, whereas the open rate for text messages is between 90 and 95 per cent. The majority of people who purposely opt-in to message marketing have a vested interest in your business’ products and services. It is vital, however, to establish a factor of trust between marketer and message receiver by inserting into every message an opt-out or unsubscribe option.
Chuck believes that three things are essential to successful SMS marketing: brevity, relevance and effectiveness.
The message must, above all, be valuable. Coupons and deals can be offered by a multitude of small businesses and while they may border on annoying to receive, research conclusively indicates that they still work. In a similar manner, MMS, which allows you to send multi-media items like pictures and videos, is predicted to be even more powerful as a marketing tool for mobile in the coming years. Particularly as a small business, SMS marketing is something you can quickly implement and adapt in a way that big businesses cannot. This article is based on an extract from the Marketing Goes Mobile webinar with Chuck Martin, author of The Third Screen: Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile. Learn more about Chuck Martin, here.
