Text Message Advertising: effective marketing for small businesses

In today’s day and age, businesses rely on technology to boost their customer base. When it comes to small businesses text message advertising can easily be labeled as one of the easiest and most effective ways to garner a massive clientele. In addition to being a convenient and least time consuming way of advertising, it is also a highly efficient method to reach customers and communicate with them. Before highlighting the various features of text message advertising, it is first important to understand what this mode of advertising actually is.

What is text message advertising?

Text advertising, or SMS marketing, is essentially a permission-based system of sending out text messages on a mass-scale to inform the maximum amount of people about promotional offers, deals, events, and other important news. It is a simple way that proves highly fruitful, particularly for small businesses that don’t have a lot of funds to invest into expensive marketing agencies to advertise their content for them.

A strict permission-based texting system, coupled with stringent compliance rules, makes text message advertising extremely safe, not only for the customers, but also for businesses. These compliance rules are in play for the very purpose of protection, and the customers that are targeted are genuinely interested subscribers, who themselves opt to stay updated via texts.

Text to join

When the customers themselves subscribe to a particular business’ automated promotional system by texting a keyword to a short code, it solidifies the reliability of the whole permission-based texting system. Once they send this text-to-join, subscribers are usually sent an automatic text response which can be customized.  If a customer no longer wants to be a part of your texting campaign they can unsubscribe at any point in time by replying the word stop to the text they received. Such a system fulfills the core purpose of permission-based marketing, which is not only that of forging a vast clientele or boosting customer outreach, but in fact to establish customer loyalty to the particular product or service.

Character Count

Another helpful feature of this kind of advertising is that, in every text used for advertising, there is a 160-character limit that businesses cannot surpass without an extra cost. While this may be perceived as an obstacle by small businesses that want to communicate as much information as they can to their clients, in actuality, it proves to be a highly effective way of drawing attention. For small businesses that are looking for opportunities to boost their customer outreach, solely producing informative texts and sending it out to customers is not enough. It is, in fact, imperative, that these texts are short and creative and inform the customers about the message that you want to communicate in a concise, quick and interesting manner, before subscribers lose interest in the text and stop reading your messages altogether for lack of time in their busy schedules.

Conclusion

To further emphasize the efficiency and viability of text message advertising, statistical data clearly portrays how big a role text messages play in today’s globalized world. On average, 99 percent of text messages are viewed by consumers, out of which about 90 percent are read within the first three minutes of opening, and an average response time is usually just around 15 minutes. These response rates, when compared to other modes of advertising, fare well and therefore make this system a reliable and speedy way that should be utilized by businesses to connect with the maximum amount of customers that they can reach.