SMS marketing is one of the most direct and effective ways to reach your audience - but only if it's done right.
In this Telerivet article, we walk through practical, real-world examples of how to use SMS marketing to build trust, deliver value, and stay compliant with regulations like the TCPA.
SMS marketing is using text messages to market your products or services.
It’s a simple channel - but it’s a highly effective one.
SMS stands for Short Message Service, and it allows you to send a set number of characters per message that will be received by essentially every mobile phone in the world.
The pool of people who have mobile phones is gigantic, and SMS is a trusted means of communication within the activities of their normal daily life.
Where email open rates might only be around 20% in the aggregate (provided you're following all best practices), the open rates for text messages can be reported as being as high as 98%.
This is a trusted line of access to your customer or prospect - and that makes it incredibly valuable.
There are many ways you can leverage this channel to help with your marketing, and we’ll cover three in this article:
Sending someone a message is easy. With a platform like Telerivet, you can easily send thousands of text messages to your customers and prospects - and you don’t need any special hacks or tricks to get them to open it.
What’s harder in the world of SMS marketing is doing all of this in an effective way that follows best practices, local regulations, and ethical guidelines.
In the United States, the legislation that governs this is the TCPA - the Telephone Consumer Protection Act - and it puts some restrictions in place around how you can use SMS for marketing and sales activity, which we’ll cover in the next section.
The TCPA, or Telephone Consumer Protection Act, is a law in the United States of America that was first put in place in 1991, but it’s regularly updated with new information added to it.
If you are outside of the U.S., then you should check your local regulations that pertain to sales and marketing activity through telecommunications.
Most geographies have some, and in many, they’ll be similar to the TCPA.
Legislation like this is designed to maintain the efficacy of this channel for everyone.
It is designed to protect the consumer from spammy or unethical practices, and it’s going to help produce better results for you and the rest of the market.
Now, the TCPA enforces a number of considerations on your part as the sales or marketing part of the puzzle.
There are eight key things you want to try to keep in mind.
First, you must obtain consent in order to contact someone via SMS.
This is the same as if you’re trying to contact them by phone, but people need to have opted in to your communications.
Those little boxes you see when you sign up for something that say, “Are we allowed to give marketing communications?” - those little boxes that you should be checking - are to opt you in and make it legal for these companies to contact you.
Equally, beyond someone simply not giving you consent directly, there’s also, in America, a national Do Not Call registry - a DNC registry. It’s your responsibility to make sure the people you’re contacting are not on there. You need to do regular checks, and you also need to honor opt-out requests for at least five years.
When it comes to opt-out requests - our third item - you have to honor those opt-out requests whether it comes by phone, text, or email immediately. This is not optional. It’s necessary, and you should provide easy opt-out methods in basically every interaction.
In the world of SMS, you should probably include an opt-out in the first message of each conversation, to be doubly sure.
Fourth, you should respect time-of-day restrictions.
This means do not contact someone in America before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., based on their time zone.
As America is covered by a few different time zones, it’s safer to aim for more in the middle of those time zones - late morning, lunch, and afternoon - so you don’t accidentally spill over the boundaries either way.
Fifth, you should be providing identification.
You should tell them who you are, what company you’re calling from, and give them a way to contact you.
This helps build trust, is good for you, but it’s also good for the consumer.
There are also further restrictions if you are going to use automated calling, so be very careful of that.
You need explicit permission if you’re going to use robocalling to have someone hear about your services.
And make sure you keep logs and records of all your outreach to demonstrate that you complied with the regulations in the past.
The range of use cases for SMS marketing is vast, and we won’t be able to cover all of them today.
However, they’ll roughly fall into a few categories, and below we’ll try and cover three of these broad pots of use cases - and how you can leverage them, and the importance they play in building the system that enables you to run effective SMS marketing.
The classic use case for SMS marketing is to deliver promotions and discounts to your existing audience.
This is not to try to market to a whole new group of people. If a group of people likely have not opted in to receive communications from you, it is unethical and uncool to use this channel to try to hit them with your adverts. That is the textbook definition of spam. Don’t do it.
What is cool, though, is marketing to the entire marketable database you possess - everyone who has opted in to receive your marketing communications, whether they are current users and customers or are lapsed users and customers.
This is a way to re-energize your user base and reignite some sales from customers who otherwise may have been considered churn.
It’s also a way to get your happy customers to buy more things! And if they’re happy customers, then you’re not so much selling to them as highlighting the things they already want.
A simple way to run a promotion through SMS marketing is to use a discount as your driver.
This can be as simple as offering a code tied to a particular promotion that could be redeemed at checkout, that provides 10% off their order - for orders over a certain value amount.
This is a way of not just grabbing their attention but offering them value. Users are more likely to appreciate your contact if you are delivering value to them.
If you are following best practices and your customers are within your CRM, and your CRM is hooked up to your SMS sending tool - through what we might call a programmable SMS API - then you should be able to send en masse while at the same time personalizing the texts for different people.
If you are a shop and you sell a series of different categories of products, then you may know which category of products this person has bought most of in the past.
And you can include in your message a description of, or a link to, new products in that category.
Or you can tailor the whole campaign to be specific to their previous buying habits.
How you construct this campaign is up to you.
And this is a simple way to offer someone value, to get into their messages and have them appreciate you reaching out - rather than resent you for disrupting their moments with unwanted messages.
The more you can do to offer value, the more you build trust and win more business.
The processes and methods you follow in building SMS marketing campaigns are critically important, and will unlock serious value.
It's important that we build the systems for compliance and for best practice effectively - and follow them.
The most important part of this is to retrieve opt-ins, to associate opt-ins with your users, and to store the record of opt-ins and the logs of sendings.
Utilizing the messaging command center and contact data platform of products like Telerivet make this easy. Centralize your communications and send across different channels. Unify your logs. Actively seek and register consent when people sign up to your service.
Note, a nice checkbox at the moment of registering will convert a large proportion of your user base.
You can also provide follow-up emails asking for consent - in key moments and at key times.
It can also be useful to provide some kind of incentive to receive your marketing and sales communications.
So that means: create great content.
Maybe create industry reports.
Maybe have an exciting and engaging newsletter.
Give people a reason to consent to your marketing communications.
Personalized recommendations.
Wish lists.
And updates related to them.
There are so many angles you can go at, and which one will be right for you is dependent on your business.
But you have to offer value in your marketing communications, and they have to see that value.
And if they do, then your opt-in rates are going to dramatically increase.
And it also means there are more services around which a customer can opt in.
They can opt in to your overall marketing by signing up for your newsletter on a completely different page to where they registered originally.
Use the options available to you.
Another way you can approach SMS marketing is to kind of do the opposite to example number one.
In example number one, you’re offering a promotion or a discount. You’re trying to give the user something.
The value to the user is obvious and apparent, but equally, they feel like they’re being marketed to or sold to.
This might work great for some people. It might work less well for others. It could feel spammy.
An alternative approach is not to give, but to ask.
If you contact a user saying how much you value them, and that you would appreciate if they will complete a feedback survey for you - not all of your users are going to complete that survey, but many might.
As they complete that survey, there is an opportunity to tell them more about your product, or different options of your products or services.
And there’s also opportunities to make them feel listened to, and to build the trust that they have in you.
And you can do this in a number of ways.
You can send them a text message with a link to complete a survey externally.
This has its advantages, and might enable you to run a more feature-rich and engaging survey.
But equally, the willingness for someone to click on a link and go to an external page is always low in the world of consumer, and some people will be wary of it on the basis that they do not want to fall for a phishing attack.
An effective alternative to this, which you can use Telerivet for, is to send a survey directly within texts themselves.
The first message asks if they want to participate in the survey.
And they respond positively.
And the second message asks the first question.
With Telerivet, you can set it up nice and simple with yes and nos, or you can make it a little more complex and use Telerivet to parse messages and provide the appropriate response.
There are limitations on how complex you can make this to ensure clean, structured data.
But you can create variations on the survey to take people not just through questions but through a decision tree - so two different people might receive different questions depending on their prior answers.
This is an opportunity to either offer them a reward for filling out the survey - which might be a very generous discount - or it might be an opportunity to incept information about new products or services into the questions, or simply to build that trust.
Maybe reach out to them with an email a few weeks later, explaining how you have taken their responses on board and what you’re going to do in response to their requests.
This type of outreach can really make someone feel valued and help create a customer for life.
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