Ever wondered how much impact has mass SMS had in the last few years? How much success a business can achieve in a single campaign, and to an extent, even beat social media marketing?
What if you combine both?
Results are guaranteed!
However, to fully understand the benefits of SMS against other online techniques, it’s important to make comparisons of SMS and social media. This way, you can easily find ways to maximize its benefits, including higher ROI without breaking the bank.
Market reach
There’s probably as many social media users as mobile phone owners worldwide. If we go by the official stats, you can see that social media wins:
- Smartphone users: 2.32 billion (2017) to 2.87 billion (2020)
- Social media: 2.46 billion (2017) to 3.02 billion (2020)
However, the number of users is just one part of the metrics and it only gives you a view of how much market share you may want to dominate.
Customer engagement
Mobile phone users worldwide check their phones a minimum of 150 times a day, 86% of whom check their phones within 60 minutes of waking up.
On the other hand, 46% of Twitter users only login on their account once a day and a typical social media user spends 20 minutes of their day on Facebook.
So, mass SMS obviously wins in terms of degree of engagement. No wonder 50% of paying customers actually prefer to receive and read business alerts via SMS, and some would even take action when offered with deals on their mobile phones.
Open rates
Another real measure of success to any marketing campaign is your open rates – how many people have actually opened and read your posts or text messages.
Let’s take a closer look at how these two perform by open rates.
The State of SMS reported that the average response rate for a text message marketing is 32%, which many marketers find surprising especially those who have been used to doing email campaigns but only received 23% response rate across all industries.
Additionally, social media does not seem to give much advantage as well with 62% of SMEs saying that even with using boosted Facebook Ads in their campaigns, they still miss a lot of their targets. So, while social media, which in this case is Facebook, can generate many traffic and impressions, there’s no guarantee that they’d offer any real penetration.
What’s the best thing to do is to use mass SMS marketing as a complement to your other marketing strategies and practices. Because remember, every campaign is different depending on your goals and objectives.
One goal may require the use of social media platforms, while the other might require you to focus on mobile advertising. Whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve this year, SMS offers multiple benefits that can boost your campaign’s success and ultimately, your ROI.