How to Apply SMS Marketing Into Your Business

These days SMS Marketing is being used by many businesses to add an extra to the bow of their marketing plan. SMS Marketing has a huge number of advocates who believe that it is the absolute best way to engage with your customers. There are, however, detractors who do not believe in the effectiveness of SMS marketing and argue that it has little effect on your return on investment. If you are considering applying SMS marketing into your business then you must understand the fundamentals of how it works and the arguments of the sides. To help you, this article will explain the steps you need to take in order to effectively implement SMS marketing.

SMS marketing is fundamentally very easy to understand. Businesses send out a text message to customers offering a special price on a product, promoting a hot new deal, or giving some useful information. This kind of marketing was popularized in the first decade of this century and those of us who had a phone during the 2000s will remember receiving SMS marketing text messages every day. This is done through the use of SMS API technology. The folks at Messente told us that API stands for application program interface and SMS APIs enable you to integrate SMS messages into your communications. One example of this being used to give information is the text message that you receive that tells you when your Uber has arrived. This text is sent out by an SMS API immediately upon the driver's arrival. Whilst this is no doubt useful, during the 2000s, many of the SMS marketing texts that were sent to us were entirely unrequested and were not useful at all. These days, however, that has totally changed as a great number of rules have been introduced.

If you were around in the 2000s, you may or may not have noticed that you no longer receive marketing messages by text, and that is because, during those years, SMS marketing was totally unregulated. Nowadays however, SMS marketing is strictly regulated and it is only permitted if a customer has given their permission to be sent promotional text messages. If you intend to implement SMS marketing into your business, it is very important that you are aware of these rules and take the necessary steps to ensure that you don't incur any penalties because they can be very harsh. Currently in the USA, if you are found to have been in breach of the SMS marketing guidelines then you will be charged $500 for each text message that is deemed to have broken the rules. SMS marketing campaigns usually send out hundreds and thousands of texts so it is not a situation that you want to put yourself or your business in.

The main benefit of SMS marketing is that it is such an effective way to reach out to customers. SMS is the single most popular form of communication so there is a huge potential audience for your SMS marketing campaign to reach out to. Furthermore, text messages have a significantly higher open rate than any other form of communication like emails or letters. Almost 100% of text messages are opened and almost 50% are responded to. Unlike email inboxes, SMS inboxes have no filter which identifies spam, so customers are guaranteed to receive and, in almost all cases, read any text message that you send to them. Everybody knows how to use SMS so it is a great way to communicate with your customers. If you want to apply SMS marketing into your business, identify the best texts to send in order to maximize the potential of your SMS marketing campaign. Some people believe that the regulations that have been placed on SMS marketing mean that it is impossible to reach out to customers, but champions of SMS marketing counter that the regulations actually give SMS a legitimacy that email marketing doesn't have. We are so used to receiving spam emails that we often regard most of our emails as spam and won't even open them. As SMS marketing texts are not sent out arbitrarily like this, customers are far more likely to take them seriously.

There are some fantastic benefits that are totally exclusive to SMS marketing. If you are planning to apply SMS marketing strategies into your business then it is very important that you understand exactly how it works, what the regulations are, and what benefits you should expect. Follow this guide and you will be able to utilize SMS marketing effectively.