Sending text messages to your customers can be incredibly effective for driving sales and building stronger customer relationships. But you have to be careful with how and why you reach out.
Text message is a deeply personal channel, presenting a high-risk, high-reward opportunity for marketers. At best, texts can immediately boost your sales and earn you loyal shoppers. At worst, your text messages could actively deter people from shopping with you.
To help you learn how to use SMS bulk marketing to your advantage and build a thriving text subscriber list, let’s explore the benefits of SMS marketing, tips to improve your strategy, and examples of the types of messages you should be sending.
What is bulk SMS marketing?
Bulk SMS marketing involves your brand sending text messages to a large group of your customers at one time. Text messages can address a handful of needs for your customers, such as alerting them to sales, encouraging them to review their recent purchases, and addressing customer support needs.
Remember that you cannot text customers until they give you explicit permission to do so, meaning that you’ll need to use your existing channels to encourage your customers to sign up.
Is it actually effective?
Compared to the other ways your brand can reach out to your customers, like email and social media, marketing bulk SMS messages can be considerably more effective and timely.
Almost 50 percent of consumers want to hear from your brand through SMS compared to email, apps, and direct mail. Plus, 95 percent of SMS messages are opened within just three minutes of being delivered. Bulk SMS advertising messages have an average 19 percent click-through rate, meaning that text messages are incredibly effective for driving traffic to your site.
The key is to balance how you use text alongside your other customer communication channels—you wouldn’t want to hear the same exact message from a brand through email, text, and social media, would you?
5 tips to make your bulk SMS strategy better
Text messages are a powerful addition to your outreach channels, but SMS is a deeply personal channel and customers will unsubscribe if they hear from you too often or about irrelevant things.
Improve your SMS marketing strategy by following these tips:
Implement the right tools
Your reps shouldn’t hand-type texts to customers and send them out one at a time. You’ll need to find a bulk SMS marketing services provider that can offer tools or solutions to manage your SMS program. At a minimum, you need a tool that allows your reps to type and send messages in bulk, as well as a tool to manage your outreach lists.
Segment your audience
Much like your email marketing, segment your SMS subscribers to approach them with relevant offers based on their needs and history with your brand. Segment your subscribers by their gender, recent shopping history, location, and other key details.
Always give the option to opt out
Your customers need a simple way to opt out of your text messages, or you could find yourself in some serious legal trouble. Clearly explain how customers can opt out of your texts, and consider removing customers from your text list if they haven’t engaged with your messages for more than a year.
Use templates
There is no reason to reinvent the wheel every time you send a bulk SMS advertising message. Create templates for your most common text message types so your team can build campaigns quicker. Store these templates in an internal document, or find an outreach tool that allows you to save and customize your templates.
Keep it short and sweet
Unlike your email marketing, SMS marketing messages need to be concise—160 characters, ideally. Text messages are some of the shortest brand messages you will send, requiring you to have a clear purpose and call to action.
4 great examples of bulk SMS marketing
Even the best marketers can have trouble writing effective SMS copy. Text messages are vastly different than emails and social media posts, so it helps to review different SMS examples to inform your strategy.
Let’s explore just a few of the common marketing texts you can send, with examples from real brands:
Welcome SMS message
When a customer first signs up to receive your text messages, you have an opportunity to make a positive first impression.
This example from Michael Stars quickly greets new subscribers and offers them a 15 percent discount as a welcome gift, which provides immediate value to the customer.
Although the above welcome message from Mansur Gavriel is a bit long, it’s friendly and clearly explains what subscribers will receive through text. One of the best parts? The end of the text provides an email address for questions, offering customers a direct way to reach out for help if they cannot reply to the text message.
Birthday SMS message
Who doesn’t love a discount for their birthday? Birthday SMS messages are an essential part of your strategy because they celebrate your customer on a day that matters to them.
World Market creates a sense of urgency with the above birthday text reminder—your code is expiring soon, so act fast to get 15 percent off. It’s perfectly short and gives the customer the core information.
Jennifer Miller Jewelry also offers its subscribers a birthday discount, and its text includes emojis and is signed with “xo Jen” to add plenty of personality to the message.
Flash sale SMS message
As we mentioned earlier, most text messages are read within just three minutes, making them perfect for time-sensitive messages like flash sale announcements.
Benefit Cosmetics sent the above flash sale message, offering 50 percent off all full-size mascaras. The text is friendly and clearly states how long the sale lasts. Use a unique code specific for text subscribers to track the number of sales made because of your text.
Hint takes its flash sale text one step further by including an image, which reinforces the brand and reiterates the value of the sale—three cases for $36 is just $1 per bottle.
Back-in-stock SMS message
Your customers eagerly await for your products to be available again after they sell out, and text messages are a perfect way to spread the word!
In the above back-in-stock text message example, Chubbies quickly lets its customers know that everywear shorts are back in a personable way.
Parks Project also uses SMS for back-in-stock alerts, except it used the opportunity to reinforce the benefits of its candles at the same time. Consider including similar product details in your texts, if you have the room!
Get more SMS marketing inspiration
Your company’s bulk SMS marketing strategy will evolve with time as you keep engaging your customers through text. Gradually build your SMS subscriber list by leaning on your existing brand channels and by encouraging customers to sign up at the point of purchase.
Test new message types and experiment with your texts to see what resonates best with your shoppers. If you receive a large number of unsubscribes in a short period of time, pause your outreach to assess how you can fix the issue and better reach your buyers.
To help you refine your SMS bulk marketing approach, we’ve collected thousands of SMS messages from popular brands to serve as the foundation for your planning. Try MailCharts for free and get inspired today.
