SMS marketing aims at sending promotional or transactional messages and campaigns by SMS. These messages can be used to send offers (such as seasonal sales or flash sales), to invite contacts to an event or to send alerts and notifications for transactional purposes (order tracking, appointment alerts…).

When is it worth it to send business SMS?

There are many reasons why you should use SMS marketing, but here are some examples of use cases that we usually see with our customers:

Seasonal ales or limited time promotions

If you want to generate traffic to your e-commerce website or attract more visitors to your store, promotions are a good way to do so and text messaging is the perfect channel to let them know. Because of the immediacy of its reception and with an average opening time of 3 minutes after reception, you can be sure that your recipient will know about your promotion.

Transactional notifications

Transactional SMS is very useful to give information to your customers: order confirmations, delivery notifications. Thanks to connectors and especially to API, it is very easy to connect your tools to an SMS marketing software.

Event organization

You are organizing an event and you want to make sure that your guests have not forgotten it and have the right address? A last minute modification or a cancellation?

Use the SMS to spread the message to your guests. Even better, if you have used a Mailify form to collect the list of your guests, you will only need a few clicks to set up this SMS.

Appointment reminders

In order to make the most of your team’s time and avoid missed appointments, send SMS reminders so that your customers remember the appointment. Don’t hesitate to schedule an SMS the day before and 1 hour before the start of the appointment to minimize no-shows.

What should you know before sending SMS marketing campaigns?

Some rules required by law and telephone operators must be followed when sending your SMS. Indeed, you have to respect specific days and hours of sending, integrate an “SMS Stop” to allow the recipients to unsubscribe, as well as the respect of the opt-in process regulated by the GDPR.

Respect the legal sending days and hours

Due to the instantaneous nature of the SMS channel, recipients consult them almost immediately. This represents many marketing advantages but it is also important to consider the experience of your customers and prospects by avoiding sending your SMS at inconvenient times. In order to protect the consumer, SMS marketing cannot be sent between 8pm and 8am on weekdays as well as on Sundays and public holidays.

Comply with the GDPR

As for any communication, the GDPR makes it mandatory for you to inform anyone who uses your services about the use that will be made of their personal data. So make sure that your customers and prospects are “opt-in”, which means that they have given their consent for you to use their phone numbers to contact them.

Indeed, SMS marketing is a powerful channel with an opening rate close to 95% but it can be seen as intrusive by a recipient if he/she has not given his/her consent beforehand to receive it.

Unsubscription and Stop SMS

As you have to include an unsubscribe link in an email, you have to include a STOP mention in your marketing SMS. Your contacts can thus freely ask to unsubscribe by sending an SMS to the short number that has been generated for your campaign. Note that it is not mandatory on informative SMS.

You must be clearly identified

In order to avoid being considered as an unwanted text message, you need to clearly identify the sender of your SMS. For this, you can personalize the sender by naming your company directly.

Is it useful to send SMS when you already send emails?

In order to reach your customers and prospects through the right channel, at the right time, it is important to combine marketing channels when interacting with them. SMS and emails are two very complementary channels and have the advantage of being completely automated so that you can focus on other marketing levers. It is common and recommended to use email to include very detailed information and SMS for urgent and punctual information as a reminder of your already sent emails.

Why is SMS Marketing so effective?

The SMS channel is very effective because of the very intensive and growing use of smartphones: more than 77% of Europeans own one. SMS is therefore an excellent way to reach them directly with a very high rate of engagement. Indeed, 90% of SMS are read within 3 minutes. This ensures that your information will be delivered to as many people as possible.

You now have a better vision of the benefits of SMS marketing in a marketing strategy. In summary, the 2 main advantages are its instantaneousness and its very high engagement rate.

If you already use email in your marketing, try to include SMS in your strategy. With Mailify, you can create a scenario of automated campaigns alternating email and SMS.