Why SMS Marketing is the Future of Commerce

If you’ve been hearing about the bright future of chat commerce, you might be wondering, “Why SMS marketing? What makes text message marketing so impactful?” 

SMS marketing is growing in popularity across a variety of industries. It’s highly effective (texts have a 98% open rate), simple, trackable and cost-effective. Moreover, brands in just about every industry can use it to share deals with customers, send reminders or even automate customer service tasks. 

The breakdown below explores the importance of SMS marketing for today’s and tomorrow’s businesses. Whether you’re toying with the idea of text message marketing or getting ready to launch your first campaign, we’re here to help you envision the potential impact of an SMS strategy for your brand. 

The Increasing Importance of Mobile in the World of Commerce

Text message marketing is only increasing in importance in the world of customer engagement. A 2020 study discovered that:

• 85% of consumers prefer to receive text messages over emails or phone calls.
• 55% of consumers simply ignore marketing emails (perhaps due to inbox overload)
• 68% of businesses already use some form of chat or messaging to reach their customers

By the time of the study, 79% of consumers had already used SMS for shopping online, clicking a promotional link, redeeming a discount code or checking out a new product. 

Simply put, it’s critical that businesses invest in mobile messaging to meet their customer base where they already are: on their phones. 

SMS Marketing Is Highly Effective

If you’re looking for peak return on investment (ROI), high open rates and quick responses, SMS marketing is the digital channel for you. The study referenced above also notes three critical engagement statistics about text messaging:

1. Text messages feature a 98% open rate (compared to email’s 20% open rate)
2. Consumers respond to 45% of text messages (but only 6% of emails)
3. The average SMS response time is 90 seconds (while the average for email is 90 minutes)

Effective marketing channels successfully reach customers, engage them and facilitate conversion—SMS marketing accomplishes all three. 

SMS Marketing Is Easy to Use and Track

If you’re unfamiliar with the basics of SMS marketing, it might sound complex. But with today’s powerful text message marketing platforms, it’s simpler than ever to launch a campaign and monitor its progress. 

Today’s SMS marketing campaigns feature so much more than simple text messages. Sophisticated automation features make it easy to incorporate:

• Drip campaigns
• Auto-replies and two-way SMS
• Mass group texting
• Scheduled messages
• Personalized texts
• Birthday and holiday greetings
• Payment links
• Surveys, polls and other customer data collection
• Two-factor authentication for your app or mobile site
• Automated appointment scheduling and reminders

Plus, text message campaigns are highly trackable and personalized to each recipient. One particularly useful feature of SMS marketing platforms is link tracking. This monitors a specific link to record how many people click it across all communication platforms, not just SMS. Brands can use this data to adjust and continually improve their targeted campaigns across multiple channels at once, optimizing link performance for peak customer engagement. 

SMS Marketing Is Cost-Effective

Even if customers opened your marketing emails at the same rates they open text messages, email marketing costs can rack up fast. SMS marketing has the potential to be significantly more cost-effective than email:

1. Messages are short – Since the SMS format demands brevity, marketers can spend less time crafting SMS messages than they would writing emails. 
2. Automation simplifies communications – Since many SMS marketing platforms simplify the automation process, time-sensitive campaigns and personalized messages are simpler than ever to manage. 
3. Low cost + high open rates = higher ROI – Text messages take less time to write than email (especially for businesses leveraging automation), and the open rates vastly eclipse those of email, resulting in increased ROI. 

SMS marketing could be particularly useful for your brand if you’re looking to optimize costs without sacrificing campaign quality or customer engagement. 

SMS Marketing is Scalable

One of the best advantages of text message marketing is its scalability. If you’re new to digital marketing (or just SMS marketing), you don’t have to immediately jump into the deep end with sophisticated automation or advanced features. Let’s explore a hypothetical scaling plan for a small auto repair business:

• A mechanic shop decides to implement SMS marketing to increase their new appointment scheduling by 10% in 90 days. 
• After running a simple, 90-day campaign, the shop achieves its goal—their appointment scheduling is up by 12%. To ramp up their efforts, they start sending out personalized appointment reminders, hoping to decrease their no-shows by 20%. 
• Once they reach their second goal, the shop starts sending birthday and holiday messages (with a discount code). Customers like the holiday/birthday discount, so the shop also implements an SMS-based referral program. 

SMS marketing is versatile. Whether you want to start small and progressively scale or launch multiple campaigns at once, text message marketing is a highly customizable approach to client engagement. 

Embrace the Future of Text Message Marketing with Texting Base

Why SMS marketing? When it comes down to it, text message marketing is powerful. Between increased open rates and customizable scalability, SMS marketing is an impactful tool for businesses large and small, new or veteran. 

If you’re looking for an all-in-one SMS marketing platform, partner with Texting Base. Our user-friendly engine makes business texting simple, impactful and cost-effective. 

Join over 13,000 businesses already using text message marketing by signing up for a free trial of Texting Base today. 

Sources: 

TechJury. 35+ Must-Know SMS Marketing Statistics in 2023. https://techjury.net/blog/sms-marketing-statistics/#gref 

PC Magazine. Businesses, Take Note: Your Customers Prefer Texts. https://www.pcmag.com/news/businesses-take-note-your-customers-prefer-texts