92% of adults use their phones even when out shopping. Do you know what this means? Retailers need to focus on retail marketing using digital methods deem convenient for consumers. Now that isn’t an amateur’s job but lucky for you, we are here to help you out with that.
One of the ways to conduct retail marketing through phones is sending out promotional text messages. To do that, companies need to sign up with a web-based SMS marketing platform.
SMS Marketing Campaigns
A web-based platform such as ExpressText is the first step in launching SMS marketing campaigns. ExpressText allows easy contact upload and helps videos to guide you through the process of setting up an account. Once the sign-up process is complete, upload or adds a list of potential and regular opted-in customers that you want to target. Once the numbers have been saved to the group you can now send a text blast to all your customers about new products, updates, and discounts.
Text To Join
Starting a text to join campaign can help you get users to subscribe to promotional texts from your brand.
To start an SMS campaign, ExpressText provides 1 or more keywords (depending on which payment option you choose) along with a shared shortcode for your business. Use these to create a social media post asking your customers to join your SMS service e.g. ‘Send SHOPAHOLIC to 787889’ to receive weekly updates and discount offers on in-store and online items.
One very important aspect of mobile keywords SMS campaign is to make sure your consumers receive messages from your brand willingly. The whole point of a campaign is to seek permission to send text messages. Hence, consumers also have the option to opt out of the service. ExpressText offers an easy opt-out process. Customers can simply reply STOP to be automatically opted out from receiving future text messages.
Monitoring and reporting
Once you gain a foothold on how everything works, we make monitoring easy for you. It is important to track the response rate of your customers and see the effectiveness of your SMS campaign. ExpressText provides graphed delivery reports and real-time report lists to help you estimate the productiveness of your marketing strategy e.g. there are a few numbers that frequently avail coupons and offers which are all based in one location. Target that location and focus your strategy towards retaining these customers by introducing unique offers such as providing free delivery on online purchases.
Scheduling Messages
Timing is the KEY to successful retail marketing. ExpressText offers scheduled messages. This allows you to send pre-scheduled messages at specific hours, days and weeks without having to worry about deadlines. An example of this can be sending out discount offers one day before each public holiday announcing “up to 50% on entire stock!” If the message is scheduled, it will automatically be sent out timely. Just type in the message and select the date and time in the calendar within your ExpressText account and you’re good to go!
Lastly, don’t forget that timing is crucial. Sending out messages too early or too late is just as bad as sending out no message.
Unlimited Groups
Other features that ExpressText provides include unlimited groups, which means you can segment your target audience based on age, gender, location, area code or other demographics and send these subgroups messages accordingly e.g. a brand like Nike can send different promotional messages to men and women with new footwear releases.
Web widget
ExpressText also provides ‘web widget.’ A widget can be coded by a web developer to work with any kind of forms to collect customer data. This means that if customers fill out a form on your webpage or through SMS hyperlinks, the data will be sent directly to your ExpressText account thus making it easier to collect and analyze the information received.
Pricing
The main thing we’re all concerned with; pricing. Luckily for you, SMS retail marketing comes quite cheap. Our payment options begin at $24 up to $149 a month. You can choose based on the size of your business and enjoy a free thirty-day trial!
An SMS service can only be considered effective if it increases a brand’s consumer base and customer loyalty. Here are some tips to help your business achieve those: If you’re a small business owner without the backing of resources, the task of SMS marketing is doable and can bring about positive results if done right. Using a call to action button such as hyperlinks and buttons such as ‘Click here’ to avail offers in order to prompt users to utilize the offer. If there is a long or unclear process of how to redeem an offer, customers are most likely to discard it. Simultaneously, a brand should also make faster web pages because 53%of customers abandon a webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Long gone is the time when traditional methods such as phone calls were used to assist customers. SMS provides a speedy, responsive service to customers that improve loyalty.
Conclusion
Why choose SMS marketing over other methods? There are so many options to choose from i.e. email, social media, etc. However, SMS marketing is currently the number 1 marketing method in the industry nowadays. This is because it creates the highest Return on Investment. With one text costing just around $0.3, it generates more results than any other form of marketing (digital or otherwise). So whether you have a small business or a large establishment, be sure to prioritize SMS in your retail marketing strategy in order to generate high profits and brand awareness.