Bulk SMS has become increasingly popular among businesses who have caught on to the fact that mobile marketing is here to stay and will likely surpass traditional online marketing in terms of marketing spend.
Bulk SMS companies like SMSpapa.com.au are recording a sharp upward trend in not only customer acquisition but also overall customer spend simply because SMS is still one of the very best ways to reach customers in their back pocket.
While businesses have been re-introducing themselves to text messaging marketing gurus have also been leaping at the chance to use bulk SMS.
Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library fame held a meeting with his team to share with them the exciting results that he has been achieving with bulk SMS to reach his fans. In his own words he said that he was getting 90% engagement rates from his followers and he was amazed that know one was talking about SMS.
Gary V loves bulk SMS so much he recently invested in two bulk SMS companies.
Ashton Kutcher is another high-profile celeb that uses SMS to connect with his audience also.
Once upon a time SMS was considered a tool for spammers and fraudsters and like email there is still that element but for the most part SMS has garnered some major attention from some very high-profile personalities.
In this article I’m going to explain what bulk SMS is and the main 3 benefits of using this inside your business in 2024 and beyond because I can see SMS continuing to become a force in the marketing world.
What Is Bulk SMS?
Bulk SMS is a platform (typically online) that allows you to create an SMS and send this message out to your contacts. It has a lot of the same features as email marketing for example you can segment your lists, create message templates, send auto-replies, personalize messages, etc.
Like email marketing it is an inbound marketing strategy which means people need to opt-in to an SMS list before you can send them bulk SMS campaigns.
3 Reasons Why Most Businesses Should Be Using Bulk SMS
If you are running marketing campaigns you should be using SMS as apart for your marketing mix, period. If you’re not I guarantee you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
1. Open Rates Are Everything
A lot of marketers will disagree with that statement and argue that conversions are everything.
Of course, without conversions you would have to close your business, sales conversions are the lifeblood of any business, with no money flowing through the veins of your business it would wither up and fold.
That said, sales conversions are a process not an event.
What I mean by this is that there are a few steps that must come before a sale can occur and the first major step in this process is the open rate. If you cannot get a person to open your marketing message then you cannot achieve sales conversions.
You can mess up parts after the open and still achieve sales but if you can’t get people to open your message it’s over. This is why smart marketers are always trying to find ways to improve their open rates on emails and click through rates on ads.
They spend an incredible amount of time testing subject lines, headlines, images, copy angles, etc. just to get a few percentage points more in open rates. Now you could spend all of this time doing that or you can just use a marketing channel that does all of this for you so you don’t need to do all of this testing.
By using SMS you can open rates that expert marketers could only dream of.
Expert marketers can get 25-40% open rates on emails, even then it’s not consistent while someone with zero marketing experience can achieve open rates in the 97% range all from just using SMS. The fact is, everyone opens their SMS messages. Let me ask you something, if you see or hear a text message come in, how long does it take you to read that message?
2. Boost Existing Marketing Performance
So, you now know that bulk SMS can help even beginners embarrass seasoned marketing veterans in terms of opening rates. Open rates aren’t just great for text messaging campaigns it’s also great for helping to boost the performance of your existing marketing channels.
For example, if you have an upcoming webinar event where you will be pitching your product or service one of your major barriers to contend with are attendance rates. If you’re sending our email reminders then unless that recipient white lists your company chances are some of those emails are going to find their way into the spam folder.
One of the main reasons for low attendance is forgetting that it was even on.
By using SMS you will virtually guarantee people show up and the more people who show up the more sales will be generated. Bulk SMS reminders can be used for anything, appointments, trade shows, product launches, important company newsletters, etc.
By using the main strength of SMS (i.e. high open rates) and channelling that on to your other marketing activities you will see a noticeable improvement across the board.
3. Bulk SMS Is Not Online
Even though SMS services use an online platform it is not actually an online medium and that’s a really good thing. One of the main issues with online marketing is that campaign performance is eaten away by things like strict ad policies, spam filters, algorithm updates, quality scores, etc.
Each online marketing platform carries with it a bunch of friction points that has a direct impact on the overall performance of your campaign. Online text messaging avoids all of these issues giving you direct access to your customer list.
On top of that, if you are a small business trying to compete with big companies with incredibly deep pockets it’s easy for them to simply outspend you making the online space much more competitive. Bulk SMS services help the little guy because the playing field is equal, big companies can’t drive up the price of an SMS like they can online, every one starts from the same place.
