SMS Marketing: What It Is + Top Tips & Tools

SMS marketing is an effective way to meet your target audience exactly where they are—their smartphones. With short snippets of text messages, SMS marketing can be a great way to engage customers and boost sales.

Throughout this article, we’re going to dive deeper into what a successful SMS marketing strategy looks like, plus some top tips and tools for making it work for your business.

Key Takeaways

SMS marketing is a great method for communicating directly and effectively with your audience.
With SMS marketing, you’re getting access to a faster, higher engaging, and less saturated form of marketing.
To maximize results, be sure to require opt-ins, send short and sweet messages, identify your company with each communication, and optimize your timing.

What Is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing is a promotional strategy that uses text messaging to communicate with current and potential customers. Due to the nature of texting, SMS marketing tends to focus more on short promotional messages like discounts, sales, product launches, and low stock alerts.

Benefits of SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is a newer strategy so it comes with a lot of benefits that not many companies are taking advantage of yet. If you’re considering creating an SMS marketing strategy, these perks might be just the thing to sway you.

It’s Less Saturated

Of all the types of digital marketing—social media, content, email, etc.—SMS marketing is one of the lesser used tactics. This can give you an edge because customers aren’t inundated with marketing texts the way they are with marketing emails or social media posts.

So if someone in your target audience opts in for SMS communication, you can be sure that they’re probably actually reading your text, and not just sending it to the trash because their inbox is overflowing with messages from brands.

You Have Faster Open Rates

People tend to open text messages they receive faster than new emails. In fact, 90% of people open new texts within the first three minutes. This means you can watch your results come in much more quickly with SMS messages than with emails, getting a sense of how your texts are performing almost instantly.

Get Better Engagement

Not only do you see faster results, but you see better results. Text messages have a 98% open rate, 5x the open rate of marketing emails. Most businesses see an SMS click-through rate between 21-35%, meaning people are also interacting with their texts.

Plus, the opt-out rate is just 1-2%, meaning people tend to stick around with text message marketing more than via other channels.

Create an Omnichannel Strategy

SMS marketing can be a huge part of a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. Let people hear from your business in their preferred channels, and make it easy for them to shop via mobile by sending promotional messages straight to their smartphones.

Personalize Your Communication

Texting is a much more personal form of communication. But more than that, you can make it even more personal by using their name, segmenting people based on their behavior with your business, and bringing a really personalized approach to your strategy.

It’s Cost-Effective

SMS marketing is a cost-effective way to promote your business and its products or services. You just need an SMS marketing platform and some copy—no need for additional visuals or assets, making this a quick and easy strategy to get up and running.

Top SMS Marketing Tips & Best Practices

To make the most out of your SMS marketing strategy, you need to implement some best practices. These tips can boost your results and help your SMS communications perform even better.

Only Send Messages to Customers Who Opt In

Just like with email marketing, you must receive an actual opt-in or consent from a customer to start sending them text message communication. Your business must comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) if you or your customers are in the United States, or whatever SMS regulations are available in your audience’s country/ies.

This doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Ask for people to opt into your text message communications the same way you would ask them to sign up to receive your email newsletter.

Take a look at this example from Crate and Barrel’s website to see what we mean:

Source

Entice People to Opt In

Want to boost your SMS subscribers? Give them an offer they can’t refuse. Many businesses use pop-ups on their website to ask people to opt-in to their email and/or text communications by offering a discount code.

Here’s an example from soda brand Poppi:

Source

A 15% off discount isn’t a bad deal for simply handing over your email address and phone number. And it’s just on the customer’s first order. So you’re likely generating a new customer at the same time you’re getting them to opt into marketing communications. Win-win, right?

Send Short Text Messages

The maximum character count for SMS messages is 160 characters, so your texts need to be short and sweet, conveying your message in just a quick sentence or two. But more than that, people don’t want to open a text message to a wall of content—unless they’re getting the latest gossip from their friends.

Take a page out of beauty brand NaturAll’s book. Each of their marketing texts is straight to the point, letting customers know exactly what they’re promoting, whether it’s a $9.99 sale or a new product:

Identify Your Company in Your Texts

Not everyone who opts into your SMS messages is going to save your company’s contact information. This means it’s important to identify yourself in each message you send.

Here’s an example from mattress company Casper. The brand includes its company name at the start of every text it sends—a common way for brands to identify themselves right from the jump:

Optimize Your Message Timing

Text message timing is a bit more sensitive than email timing. Most people don’t receive email notifications straight to their phone, whereas texts alert them every time. This means you need to ensure you’re sending your text communication during times you won’t be interrupting your customers.

Many regulations even have parameters in place to ensure companies can’t bother consumers during inopportune times. For example, according to the TCPA, companies cannot send text messages between the hours of 9PM and 8AM in their local time zones.

So you need to keep timing in mind so you’re not sending messages during the wrong time frame. But you also want to optimize your timing to improve the chances that your customers will take action after reading your messages.

If you look back at our example from Casper, you can see that the brand sends its text messages at 12:01PM like clockwork. Try to find a time between 10AM and 5-6PM that seems to work for your brand.

Don’t Text Too Often

If you send too many text messages, you’re going to have an extremely high opt-out rate. Analysis from SMS marketing platform Attentive shows that sending more than 10-15 messages per month can make your opt-out rate skyrocket.

This is different from email marketing, where some industries send daily emails. Instead, you want to max out at 1-2 text messages per week, sometimes going as infrequent as 2-4 texts per month.

Send More Than Just Promotional Messages

Many brands use their SMS strategies just to send out discount/sale alerts, product launches, low stock reminders, and more. However, you should expand your strategy and send out more than just promotional messages.

You can use your SMS marketing communications for:

Promoting events
Sharing details about your loyalty program
Sending people to educational content on your website

Look at this example from baby formula brand Enfamil. The company sends out plenty of promotional messages, while balancing out their communication with educational content, too:

Finish With a Call to Action

What action do you want your text recipients to take? Make it clear by ending your messages with a call to action (CTA). This can be a simple “Shop now,” or “Learn more.”

Take a look at how organic baby brand Snuggle Me adds a call to action at the end of each of its messages, making it easy for the recipient to take the exact desired action:

Ensure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

If you’re using SMS marketing to send people to your website, they’re almost always going to be clicking to your site using their mobile device. If your website isn’t mobile -friendly, you’re essentially losing customers as soon as they click, making your SMS efforts completely obsolete.

If you’re going to use SMS marketing, your website needs to be mobile friendly so customers can click your links, shop around, and check out all via their mobile devices.

Make it Easy to Opt Out

Just like with email, you don’t want your customers to have to jump through hoops to unsubscribe. They’ll get frustrated if they can’t easily figure out how to opt out from receiving texts from your brand.

Take a look back at our example from Snuggle Me. Every single text ends with “Text stop to stop.” Enfamil ends theirs with “Text STOP to cancel.”

Use a similar strategy to make sure your recipients know exactly what to do if they decide they’re not interested in hearing from your business anymore.

7 Easy-to-Use SMS Marketing Tools

If you want to launch your own SMS marketing strategy, you need the right tool to help. These SMS marketing tools are perfect for creating, sending, and analyzing your text campaigns.

Textedly

Textedly is a great SMS marketing platform for businesses looking to send out mass marketing messages, as well as have 1:1 conversations with their customers. Send out your marketing texts while also reaching customers directly to send appointment reminders, ask for reviews, and more.

Pricing: Free for your first 50 text messages. Paid plans start at $26/month for up to 600 monthly messages.

Attentive

Attentive is a great tool for businesses looking to combine their SMS and email strategies as you can send both types of communication using this platform. It also offers RCS messaging, which is a more modern version of messaging that incorporates additional features from platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp.

Pricing: Request a demo to get pricing information.

Twilio

Twilio is a customer engagement software that makes it possible for businesses to connect with their audience via platforms like SMS messaging, email communication, voice chat, and video. This is a great way for your brand to build an omnichannel experience seamlessly through just a single tool.

Pricing: Pricing varies based on the types of communication you want to send out.

SimpleTexting

SimpleTexting is an SMS marketing service that lets you send out mass marketing messages or communicate one-on-one with your customers. If you want to offer text message customer service so your audience can reach you directly via their mobile phones, this is the perfect platform to get started with.

Pricing: Plans start at $39/month for 500 messages/month.

Textmagic

Textmagic is another platform that makes it easy to send both SMS and email communication from one seamless dashboard. Create interconnected campaigns to promote your business and analyze your results in the Textmagic interface.

Pricing: Plans vary based on your usage. For example, for just 500 texts and 500 emails/month, you’ll pay just $37.50/month. It’ll go up from there, based on how many messages you’re sending so you’re never paying for messages you don’t need.

SlickText

SlickText makes it easy to send comprehensive SMS marketing campaigns, letting you put together one-off messages, create automated workflows based on how customers respond to your promotions, and segment out your audience to personalize your messaging.

Pricing: Plans start at $29/month for up to 500 monthly messages.

EZ Texting

EZ Texting is another great SMS marketing platform that enables brands to send mass marketing messages, hold one-on-one conversations, create text automations, and more. With EZ Texting, you can even get access to AI tools that help you compose texts so your brainstorming and content creation process is jumpstarted for you.

Pricing: Plans start at $20/month for up to 500 contacts.

FAQs

What is SMS marketing?

SMS, or short messaging services, refers to using text messages to communicate with leads or customers. Brands can share promotions, news, shipping updates, and more.

Does SMS marketing annoy customers?

If you don’t use them correctly, SMS marketing can definitely backfire and annoy your customers. Make sure to ask permission, make it easy for consumers to opt-out, and only send specific or time-sensitive messages — such as a sale.

Is SMS marketing expensive?

No, it’s often much cheaper than other types of marketing like paid ads because each message usually only costs a few cents each to send.

Why should I use SMS marketing?

SMS marketing is cost-effective, easy to deploy, and incredibly effective because messages are delivered directly to users’ phones.

Is SMS marketing effective?

Yes, when it’s done right. People open texts faster than emails, and they’re way more likely to read them. SMS has higher engagement, lower competition, and quicker results. If your list is opted-in and your timing’s smart, SMS can drive real revenue.

Get Started With SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is a key strategy for communicating with your customers in a quick and easy way. Share sales, discounts, launches, educational content, and more in a digestible format that your audience will receive almost instantly. If you want to implement even more great ways to reach your audience, I’ve also created a full guide to email marketing you won’t want to miss.