What is SMS Marketing?

Short message service (SMS) marketing lets businesses use text messages to send promotions to contacts who have opted-in to recieve them. Much like email marketing, SMS marketing is consent-based, which means customers need to sign up for it. The iZigg Mobile marketing platform include tools to:

• Collect contacts
• Send messages
• Engage customers
• Automate responses
• Generate data
• Send promo codes
• Analyze metrics

Who Benefits from SMS Marketing?

Higher SMS marketing conversion rates benefit many different industries. These are just a few of the ways that your online or brick-and-mortar business can benefit from integrating text messages into your marketing plan:

• Building subscriber lists
• Announcing ecommerce promotions
• Increasing training enrollment
• Easier communication with customers
• Customer incentives for marketing
• Bringing in more store traffic
• Recruiting employees
• Segmenting customers effectively
• Marketing real estate listings

SMS Marketing vs Email

The biggest concern for most online businesses is investing too much money in uncertain marketing efforts. When it comes to conversion rates, the boost from SMS marketing offers far more opportunity for returns on any marketing dollars spent, including:

• Mobile users: There are over 5 billion global mobile users, increasing visibility
• Higher open rates: As mentioned above, the open rate for SMS is nearly 100%
• Higher click-through rates: On average, texts average 36% click-through rates
• Communication: Two-way texting helps improve connections with customers
• Credibility: Text marketing requires permission, and users can cancel any time

The higher click through rates (CTRS), wider pools of mobile users, and all of the other advantages mentioned above result in higher ROI from SMS marketing and impressive conversion rates. However, there are a few down sides for businesses using text marketing alone.

SMS Marketing Challenges

Higher conversion rates for SMS marketing only come at a small disadvantage. The two biggest limitations to this marketing channel include content and cost. SMS limits the number of characters in each message. For the greatest impact, your content must be on-target and impactful. Some marketers find it a challenge to pare their messages down to 140-160 characters at first. And even with our flexible pricing plans, ongoing SMS marketing campaigns are more expensive than traditional email marketing. But these challenges are offset by the potential boost to your ROI.

Email Marketing Advantages

Although email marketing conversion rates run average between 3% and 10%, there are still many advantages to email marketing. Compared to other marketing channels, email generates more than 50% of sales overall for businesses. Since most email marketing automation is built around user habits (e.g., time of day), it is not considered obtrusive by contacts. And it is highly cost-effective! Compared to SMS marketing, email is far more affordable because it is not subject to carrier fees. These advantages certainly represent a benefit to businesses over SMS marketing alone.

Email Marketing Challenges

Are you considering adding SMS marketing to your current strategy? A two-pronged approach consisting of both SMS and email marketing will cover all your bases. Although no company can survive without email marketing to drive consistent, recurring business, it has some challenges. Overflowing inboxes cause low CTR and conversion rates for email vs SMS marketing. And spam filters are getting more aggressive; even with personalized to/from lines and headers, not all emails can be seen. Even with these challenges, don’t underestimate the benefits of email marketing. With iZigg Mobile, you can use omnichannel marketing to get the best of both marketing channels

Still Have Questions?

Follow the practices above to improve client engagement and watch satisfaction rates soar! And check out our other articles for more advice on specific industries and use cases.