Marketing Tip of the Week: Marketing Through Text

This isn’t a subject we’ve tackled before, but texting is not only a completely viable marketing option for your business an increasingly more effective one as well. Everyone has a cellphone these days, and most carriers offer unlimited talk and text. Now that it’s largely free for customers to receive your texts, it feels similar to email except that a text appears much more personal and is more likely to be read immediately. Take advantage of your cellphone and use text marketing!

Keep Your Customer Engaged

Marketing is all about keeping your brand top-of-mind with current customers while simultaneously enticing new customers into the fold. Texting allows a new and easy way to accomplish both of those goals.

1. It’s more personal (and should be shorter) than an email. Because a text is often read immediately, it can be used to promote same-day sales or offers with a reasonable expectation of customer action. An email requires a more long-term expectation. The text is the tool you use when you want to promote a short-turnaround offer.
2. Potential customers who may be interested in your products but want to be enticed into the store may subscribe to your text campaign in order to get the deal they want that will help them walk in.

Use Short Code

Have you seen those promotions that say, “Text 11456 for blah, blah, blah”? Companies do that because it’s easier for their customers to remember the shorter number, and the campaign is normally promoted on tv or radio and not in print. And THAT’S because this kind of campaign works best when piggy-backing on a larger more over-arching campaign. It becomes the call to action at the end of your radio or tv commercial spot.

The short code seems like a simple technique, it’s only two numbers shorter after all, but you’d be surprised how much easier it is to remember than a full seven-digit number. And remember, if the text will sign the customer up to a subscription of any kind, let them know up front. You don’t want to lose customers who become angry because they didn’t understand the texts would continue to come in.

So look into keeping your customers engaged and don’t neglect your full range of marketing opportunities by dismissing text marketing.