How to Use SMS Marketing to Drive Traffic and Leads
Did you know that only 15% of American business entities use text messaging as a promotional strategy? Nearly 75% of smartphone users in the United States are open to receiving promotional text messages; this explains the impressive 97% open rate of this digital communications solution. The short message service (SMS) protocol has been around since the mid-1990s, and it can still significantly impact generating leads and driving traffic.
The SMS Promotion Opportunity in the U.S.
There is a great opportunity for American business owners to reach their target audiences through SMS marketing, one of the most overlooked promotional strategies these days. SMS marketing is a cost-effective way to reach a large audience; plus, various market studies show that it is easier to make an impact with this strategy than other techniques, such as social media advertising campaigns. When it comes to boosting website traffic and cultivating prospective leads, a properly crafted and managed SMS campaign can deliver truly actionable results.
With an audience of millions, promotional campaigns that take advantage of text messaging represent a ruefully untapped opportunity for brand managers and business owners in the U.S. The American SMS market is ripe for exploration; all you need is the right platform for automation and a simple editorial calendar to guide your campaigns.
Getting Started With Text Messaging for Marketing
The most common marketing campaigns involving the SMS protocol include:
- Geographic: This lets you target prospects and audiences based on specific geographic areas. This can be a great way to promote events or services that are only available in certain locations. You can also introduce regional products with these campaigns.
- Promotional: With this kind of SMS campaign, the leads you can generate are typically warmer. This strategy is ideal for driving traffic to landing pages or websites.
- Time-based: With proper market research, you can target your messages to people at specific times of day or week. This can be a great way to reach people when they are most likely to be interested.
- Transactional: The national lottery administration launched the first large-scale SMS campaigns in Finland during the 1990s. Everything from order confirmations to shipping updates and appointment reminders can be managed through text messaging.
- Two-way promotions: With the advent of artificial intelligence chatbots that provide API access, this kind of conversational strategy is becoming more popular. You can use this technique to answer questions, provide customer service, collect feedback, and build relationships with prospects as well as customers.
Promotional and transactional SMS campaigns are the most commonly used, but time-based and two-way promotions can be particularly effective for customer retention and lead conversion.
Examples of SMS Campaigns
Say you operate an e-commerce website dedicated to sporting goods and personal fitness equipment. You are sourcing products from Chinese suppliers at great prices, but your visitor traffic stays flat even after you invest in search engine optimization.
For this type of scenario, starting out with a promotional SMS campaign is recommended, and one of the best enticements would be a discount coupon. E-commerce codes tend to be effective in this regard, so you can create one like “SAVE50” for buying products at half-price during a promotional period.
You will need a list of mobile phone numbers to get started with a promotional SMS campaign. Such lists are usually provided by brokers who harvest data through raffles, contests, direct marketing, and partnerships with established businesses such as gyms and nutritional supplement stores.
With an enticing proposition, such as 50% off on all purchases for a limited time, you will likely get lead conversions on the same campaign. You don’t want to stop with a single promotion; be sure to remind new visitors that they can enter their mobile phone numbers if they wish to receive order confirmations and shipping updates so that you can arrange a future transactional campaign.
Overall, leveraging the text messaging advantage to boost web traffic and collect leads is a promotional strategy you should not ignore in 2023. With SMS campaigns, achieving your marketing goals is just a text message away.
