Text Marketing

text marketing

Text marketing is a marketing campaign that uses text messages to deliver advertisements or promotions to users. The medium used is through an online website via a text message marketing platform. Text services allow businesses to send messages in bulk to their customers at relatively low costs.

Even though the process of setting up and using text message marketing is fairly easy, companies that have the available funds may pay other businesses to provide the entire service including creating the messages and sending them via an online website on behalf of the company. Businesses benefit from this method of marketing by being able to directly contact their clients on their mobile phones. To add to that, it is considered much more environmentally friendly as compared to handing out flyers which uses a lot of paper thus leading to the cutting down of trees and deforestation. Also, customers prefer texting much more than emails or mail. A study in the UK found that 81% of the consumers who received a text opened it.

However, marketing via text also has its drawbacks. Even though it is a permission-based method of marketing, 47% of adults have complained of receiving spam or unwanted text messages. The strictness of permission-based texting varies from country to country e.g. in the united states consumers must opt-in to receive any promotional offers. Services of sending promotional updates or discounts are usually an opt-in service, which means a business cannot send any content to an individual’s mobile device unless requested by the individual who owns the mobile phone. However, interference is inevitable, and it affects the relevance and appropriateness of messages as well as causing information overload.

One interesting fact about text messages is that they have a 160 character word limit. While this is seen as a constraint by some, because of course many times it may not be enough to present all the necessary information, it can also be seen as an upside. 160 characters means that the message is short and to the point. Secondly, most people will not bother to read such long messages thus rendering the text as ineffective. They are more likely to skim through a short message and prefer to receive similar messages. If a business wants to send a text with more information, they can always add a URL at the end of the text which consumers can click on if they are interested.

To make sure text messages are effective, a business needs to keep the main objective in mind and state it clearly in their messages. Not only can text marketing be used for marketing purposes, but they can also be used to create brand awareness, educate subscribers, increase website traffic and so many more purposes. It is so far the most effective method of reaching customers, and businesses need to stay updated on such trends because research shows that mobile users are 5 times more likely to abandon a site if it is not optimized for mobile. Hence, if businesses are not upgraded to such methods, they risk losing consumers and at the end of the day, profit.

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