What is SMS marketing?
Short message service (SMS) marketing is a form of marketing that businesses can use to send marketing messages and promotions to customers via text messages. SMS marketing is the same thing as text message marketing, and is usually used for sending campaigns or transactional messages in order to communicate important information — usually information that’s time-sensitive, updates, or any alerts.
Advantages of SMS marketing
Because SMS marketing messages are delivered directly to the recipient’s phone, actively show up on the screen, and typically alert the recipient to their arrival, their open/view rate is incredibly high — 99% overall and 97% within 15 minutes. Those numbers are far better than for any other channel. That’s the biggest advantage to doing SMS marketing: your message will be seen. And sometimes, that’s half the battle. Not only will it get seen, though, but it will get seen quickly. This is especially an advantage for campaigns where timing matters, such as reaching people when they’re in a particular location, or you want to alert them to a special flash sale. It’s also a great alternative to the phone for customer service if you tell people they can reply directly to your texts in order to get help from an actual person.
How do shortcodes work with SMS marketing?
A shortcode is a 5- or 6-digit number that can send SMS marketing messages at high volumes. They started as a way for brands to allow recipients to more easily identify them, but now they’re the most reliable form of SMS marketing. Despite their reliability and speed for sending SMS marketing campaigns, shortcodes can be costly to get started with and take weeks to provision through cell carriers.
SMS marketing with MessageGears
Because MessageGears connects directly to your data wherever it lives, you can use any data you’ve collected in order to personalize SMS marketing campaigns to your recipients. MessageGears supports global SMS, including unique shortcodes and country codes for whichever locations you want to send to. You can easily preview what the message will look like and pull in dynamically personalized images, along with sending a test to any number you’d like in order to see how it will look on various phones. And with inbound SMS marketing messages, 2-way messaging can send event trigger responses at scale.
Learn how MessageGears can easily enable you to activate dynamic audiences via SMS. We also have SMS marketing tips and tricks to offer.
