How to Use Text Messages for Small Business Marketing
As an owner of a small or new business, you aim to find your target audience and reach out to them. Small business marketing is one of the most crucial aspects. The number one concern is the limitations of investment, which usually hurdles marketing for small businesses.
While social media and other methods are great, there is one that stands out. Text marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to your audience to boost your business. It is the fastest and most direct way to bring in traffic to generate. Moreover, it helps you connect with your audience personally to keep doing better.
Here is a complete guide on why you should be using text marketing for your small business. Before you begin any marketing, ensure you have all the data. We have a comprehensive guide on how you can know your customer better. Click on the image below to read it and then begin with texting.
Why use text marketing?
Text marketing is the most direct and easy way to reach out to customers. One of the main reasons it works is because it has a whopping open rate of about 95% and that too within the first 90 seconds. In contrast, emails have an open rate of only 18%. Even against traditional methods of advertising, the text seems to work wonders. The reasons are that when you put up an ad anywhere including social media, you wait for your audience to see it, retain it, and then make a decision. The ROI is slow and steady. However, with texting, the people who are remotely interested in your business join in and voluntarily allow you to send promotional messages.
Here are the top reasons why text marketing is the best approach to your small business marketing strategies.
Affordable
As a small business, you probably have a lot of limitations when it comes to finances. However, you cannot kickstart your business without a form of marketing. Text marketing is very affordable. It gets better when you use a service like ExpertTexting. While many services offer annual and monthly plans, ExpertTexting offers you a prepaid service. With this service, you only pay for the credits that you use. Hence, there is no wastage.
More engaging
According to a survey, 82% of people said that they read every single text message that comes their way. This is perhaps because text messages are one of the fastest ways of communication. Moreover, it does not need any application, internet, or anything for that matter. You can communicate with your audience anytime with text marketing.
Another reason why text marketing is more engaging is that it allows customers to engage. Imagine seeing an ad on a billboard. Can you talk to the ad? For queries, you will have to make phone calls or send an email. If you are lucky, you will respond within 48 hours. And that too will go back and forth until you conclude. Text message marketing allows two–way communication (at least ExpertTexting does). With this feature, you can hold one-on-one conversations with your audience instantly. Moreover, you can also create surveys and contests so they can reply to them. Click on the picture below to know about customer engagement marketing in detail.
Bigger outreach
One of the biggest advantages of text marketing is that almost everyone can receive messages. If they have a phone, they can receive messages. This phone can be a smartphone, a feature phone, or even a regular phone with no features at all. Even the simplest cellphones have the option of send and receive messages along with making and answering calls.
While you can only send messages to people that give you prior permission, your outreach radius still increases. Moreover, even when your audience is away, if they have their phone, they can receive the message.
For people that do not open their texts instantly, phones have an inbox for messages. They can open them anytime they are free. Or, they can refer back to your messages whenever they want. You only spend once on the message you send out and it retains on the phone for the audience to see it later.
Tracking
For any part of marketing, the most aspect is tracking the KPIs. Tracking your KPIs allows you to know your ROI and whether your strategy is working or not. Tracking your KPIs is very easy with a service like ExpertTexting. You can find out the growth rate, ROI, people who opt out of receiving messages (which is the same as people losing an interest), and more. Text marketing allows you to get all this with the least effort in comparison to other channels.
Click on the image below to read how you can measure your KPIs.
High intent audience
Imagine you are putting up an ad on social media. You set your demographics and target audience and it reached 100 people. However, out of those 100 people, the sales funnel will thin it down to roughly 20% of people that are still going to be a leader and may not be high intent. You may get only about 5% of revenue-generating people.
On the other hand, when you send a text message ad, you have a better audience. The people who subscribed to your list explicitly permitted you to send promotional messages from you. This means that even if it small, they have an interest in your business. You can easily skip spending money on reaching out to people that do not want to do anything with your business. Moreover, your audience is already high intent towards your brand. All you have to do is to get them to come in. The chances become higher and even the ROI is quicker.
Moreover, you save a lot of money on reaching out to your actual target audience. It may seem a little scary and cumbersome to have to build your audience. Our guide on this can help you. Click on the image below to read it.
Little to no effort
Marketing can be tough and require a lot of hours. Text marketing reduces that immensely. You barely have to make a lot of effort to send out messages. Moreover, you can use ExpertTexting to make it easy and even more convenient. For example, you can manage your audience in segments for group messaging. Moreover, you can also schedule your messages as a recurring or even a one-time campaign.
Even for the receiver, there is no effort involved. Many businesses tend to use instant messaging which generally is free (apart from the money for the internet). Moreover, it is real-time messaging with options to send images, videos, and all kinds of multimedia. All free of cost! However, they lack in one major thing! Not every one of their target audience members is most likely using the same application. Moreover, people that do not use smartphones can not receive them. In the USA alone, 18% of people have regular cellphones instead of smartphones. That is roughly 40 million people.
In-text marketing, the receiver does not have to make any effort of downloading an application. Moreover, they do not have to have an active internet connection all the time. Similarly, there is no need to sign up. All they have to do is subscribe to your list with the keyword, QR code, or signup widget method to begin receiving messages.
Quick
As a young business, you already have hundreds of different things to worry about. You do not need to worry about spending all your time in marketing. Text marketing is one of the quickest ways of marketing. It takes just a few minutes to make and send your campaign to hundred and even thousands of people at once.
Since it is quick, businesses can send text notifications for quick and last-minute promotions. They reach almost instantaneously. Since people read them quickly too, you can benefit from flash sales and even last-minute updates. Moreover, you can enjoy the perks of quick customer service too. Additionally, it works well in emergencies too!
Use ExpertTexting for small business marketing
ExpertTexting is a mass texting service that allows you to send marketing texts for your small business. Here is how you can begin small business marketing with ExpertTexting.
Step 1: Signup to ExpertTexting to begin.
Step 2: Build your list organically. You can do it with the help of social media, or you can put up flyers of your QR code and Keyword around your neighborhood. Also, use your store to put up flyers. You can also add a line to your receipt. The best way to get subscribers is to offer something on subscribing.
Step 3: Now that you have your list, you can segment it into groups and do much more. Just begin sending your campaigns and keep track of all the KPIs. You can always edit your contact groups as per your choice and needs.
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