If you haven’t yet added a Text Message Marketing program to your suite of digital marketing solutions, now is the time to do so. Between tapping into new audiences, efficiently delivering critical messages, and earning incremental revenue, SMS can do so much to contribute towards your business goals and objectives. Recently, Forrester concluded from their study, ‘The Total Economic Impact of Listrak,’ that:

“Customer-obsessed B2C marketers understand that their traditional marketing and advertising campaigns must evolve to address today’s empowered customer who expects contextually relevant experiences.”

SMS is the ideal channel to evolve in such a way, extending your reach with new strategies to drive growth. Whether you’ve been considering launching a program, briefly tried in the past, or haven’t taken any action yet, it should be on your immediate prioritization list (especially before Q4 and key retail holidays).

Connect With New Contacts and Reconnect With Loyal Customers

Since Text Message Marketing requires express written consent and explicit opt-in, the channel brings a strong audience from the start with some of the highest engagement rates in digital marketing. You can expect clicks and conversions since your subscribers are expecting (and wanting) to hear from you via SMS. This provides perfect opportunities to connect with your best customers, re-engage lapsing contacts, and introduce new subscribers to your business, among other use cases.

Positioning SMS opt-in across your customer journey and triggering automated outreach by recent activity provide even more points of connection, and with a lower overall cost of ownership by coordinating with your email program in a unified platform. Adding text messages to any existing strategies you already have in place casts a wider net to reach your customers and prospects in new ways.

Build, Schedule, and Send Critical Messages Efficiently

Text Messages are much shorter and more simplistic in nature than emails, and therefore take far less time to build, schedule, and send. A standard text without any imagery offers just 160 unique characters to share your call to action (CTA) and link back to your site, so there’s very little additional lift needed to add SMS to your campaign plans. Forrester found that “having a single provider for cross-channel campaigns significantly reduced the required effort for campaign teams,” eliminating duplicative tasks and integrating performance data together. So while adding Text Message Marketing to your suite of solutions does create more steps, they are less labor intensive and can be streamlined through cross-channel orchestration.

Listrak has additional tools to send texts even more efficiently, like the AI Assistant that writes message copy. Simply paste in a link from your website for your call to action along with any other instructions you have, and within seconds you’ll have multiple options for AI-generated messaging. The AI Assistant can even choose imagery for you from your link if you’d like to send an MMS campaign!

Increase ROI And Marketing Engagement

One of the biggest considerations before adding another channel or solution to your digital marketing stack is the cost and return. The good news: SMS yields some of the highest ROI among digital channels. As mentioned, consent to opt-in must be explicit, so the subscribers who receive your messaging are more inclined to click and engage from the start than those of other channels (where you can get away with sending messages through implied consent). While there are costs unique to SMS like charges from the mobile carriers, those are going to ebb and flow with your messaging volume and can be strategically managed with segmentation strategies.

Oftentimes marketers feel like they must rely on incentives and other discounts to make the most of their text messages, but a consistent frequency promoting products, content, and loyalty still produces a high return. Coupons and promotions have a place in SMS strategy but are not required for every message. Incentives are far from the only way to make an impact in the channel. 

SMS overall earned an average $0.20 revenue per message KPI compared to $0.06 revenue per message for email. Not only that, but texts within automated campaigns, like Shopping Cart Abandonment and Welcome Series, earned as high as 15x larger average revenue per message results than broadcast text messages in 2022. Strategically crafting your SMS program to send more automations and target your most engaged contacts will help maximize your ROI potential.

Stay Competitive in Your Respective Market

The acceleration of Text Message Marketing across retail verticals has created larger gaps and opportunities for your competitors to get ahead if you’re not messaging your customers in this channel. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more retailers have implemented SMS programs to connect with their customers in a new way (for all the reasons we’ve outlined here), and it has become a consumer expectation. Gone are the days of concern that SMS is only effective for a younger demographic or specific verticals – it’s truly a channel for all. Consumers are willing to make a value-based transaction of providing their phone number for opt-in if it means they’ll receive exclusive perks and updates from you. Don’t let your competition reach them first!

Implementing a Text Message Marketing program alongside email, push notifications, and other digital channels is vital for driving sustained growth. Aligning it with email, in particular, in a unified platform can take strategies to the next level. Consider your own customer journey and how contacts engage with you today – SMS can help fill in gaps and optimize existing touchpoints so you’re ready to meet your customers at every step. Don’t leave revenue on the table or allow your competition to beat you to the purchase finish line. For more information on getting started with SMS, or to optimize your existing program, reach out to your Listrak Account Manager.