Tag: bulk sms

The Essential Rules of Bulk SMS Marketing

Bulk SMS Marketing is the most cost-effective method to promote your brand yet businesses tend to keep it on the sideline. However, with the correct strategies, SMS marketing can become your most potent tool.

Following are seven best SMS marketing practices to leverage your campaign:

  • Know Your Customer: The first and foremost rule of marketing strictly applies when you execute a bulk SMS campaign. Be aware of your customers’ age, gender, location, and preferences because without such details you would know nothing of their interests.
  • Work on your Database: Hence, things will be more comfortable with a well-maintained database with every customer’s purchase and demographic details. It also helps keep a track on those who have opted out of your list so that you do not keep sending messages to them.
  • Call-to-action: To the ones on your list, do not just drop a random promotional SMS without any call-to-action. Include links, buttons and offer discounts from time to time. One of the quickest ways to gain traction is by asking them to share the message for points and discounts. You may also ask them for feedback to boost a two-way interaction.
  • Recognize your Regular Clients: Some customers frequently avail your service, give you detailed feedback and refer your brand to friends and family. Watch out for such clients and invest extra time and resources into them. It is evident that they are quite fond of your brand, send them in-depth polls and messages of acknowledgment. A customer’s referral is the best kind of promotion.
  • Make the Most of Online Channels: SMS Marketing can work beautifully alongside digital marketing and social media platforms. Include an option for mobile subscription across your website and social media pages. As you send emailers, do not forget to attach an SMS opt-in button.
  • Create a Sense of Urgency but Don’t Overdo It: Words like “limited” and “last chance” make a distinct At the same time, choose the right frequency for your messages. Do not send them at any random hour and avoid posting the same marketing SMSes to clients.
  • A Reliable Bulk SMS Portal: Rather than recruiting an entire team of SMS marketing experts, choose a Bulk SMS Portal that can support your campaigns. With Kirusa Konnect’s bulk SMS marketing service, you can send hundreds of messages to your audience and keep track of delivery and ROI at the same time.

SMS Marketing is an integral and irreplaceable part of your campaigns. Combine the prowess of bulk SMS with online channels to supercharge your brand presence.

Remembering the Do’s and Don’ts of SMS Marketing

We may have the best practices and tools for SMS Marketing at our disposal, but without remembering the following do’s and don’ts, we could go wrong.

  • Don’t bombard your customer’s inbox: SMS is a ubiquitous medium and has 98 percent higher open rate compared to other channels. But that does not mean that one has to keep sending messages to stay in customer’s mind space. Your visibility doesn’t depend on how frequently you drop an SMS to the customer, but what is it that you are delivering. If there is nothing useful to convey, choose a staggered time plan for delivery.
  • Don’t miss your CTA or Call-to-action: A call-to-action is vital across all forms of media. After you are done conveying a message or presenting your content, what is that you would have the audience do? Don’t leave them confused after delivering a marketing message, do ask them to take the next step!
  • Avoid regular sales pitches: If you always attempt to promote a new product, most people would stop opening your SMS. Add a personal touch to your message because they are real people seeking genuine solutions to their problems.
  • Avoid abbreviations and slangs: Not everyone can recognize short forms and slangs. Your customers may belong to various demographic categories and your smart attempt to make the most of limited space could fall flat. Avoid using abbreviations as much as you can and remember that SMS marketing, like all other fields, demands its code of professionalism.
  • Highlight the value offering: Begin your messages with words like DISCOUNT, SPECIAL OFFER, SALE, etc. that would quickly grab the customer’s attention. Find something useful that you can offer to the user.
  • A reliable Bulk SMS solution: Choose a reliable and scalable Bulk SMS Portal to support your campaigns. With Kirusa Konnect’s bulk SMS solution, you can send hundreds of messages to your audience and keep track of delivery and ROI at the same time.

Konnect also has a built-in Do-not-disturb or DND filter that identifies the numbers of those who have unsubscribed from receiving SMS messages. It also offers SMS tagging, a unique feature that piggybanks on the extra space in transactional messages. It allows the user to include promotions and advertisements alongside a transactional message for greater mindshare.

Sign up for a 30-day trial and boost your SMS marketing campaign.

Optimizing your SMS Marketing Campaign

SMS marketing may seem like a “thing” of the past, but you would be making a mistake by believing that. Consider this, SMS has 98% higher open-rates compared to other forms of communication. Therefore, most people open SMSes with more urgency than they would open an email or social media updates.

Shouldn’t you be thinking about ways to boost your SMS marketing campaign then?

  • Segment Your Messages: Always make sure to target your audience based on age, gender, demographics, and other categories. That way, you have better chances of getting the message right and staying relevant. As a rule, integrate an SMS API across all your CRM and communication networks. With a reliable SMS gateway API, you can send out customized messages based on client profile.
  • Prompt your Customer: How do you do that? By keeping track of a buyer’s online purchase history. For example, if somebody has recently bought a table from you, there are likely to respond to an SMS that offers discounts on chairs.
  • Call-to-action: SMSes lose their purpose if they are only making announcements and not nudging the reader. What is the point of promoting a new launch if your customer doesn’t get a 20 percent off on their next order? Include links, coupons, and keywords to send them to your website.
  • Branding: Do not be anonymous while sending out messages. Show your brand’s name as often as possible because it helps customers remember you, and boosts visibility. Kirusa Konnect’s Bulk SMS API allows senders to personalize their ID.
  • Keep Track of your ROI: A cost-effective and measurableSMS marketing tool can draw the best results from your campaign. Kirusa Konnect offers tools to evaluate the ROI of your bulk SMS messaging campaign. With a complete metric of the messages, you can keep track of the number of clicks.

Sign up for a 30-day trial on Konnect, and watch SMS Marketing boost your campaigns.

Five ways Bulk SMS can boost your Business

The Unsung Hero of Marketing, SMS, also happens to be the most potent tool. As a direct channel of communication, SMSes have 98% higher open rates compared to emails or social media marketing. As long as you integrate Bulk SMS marketing with various platforms, the results are going to be optimal through the entire customer lifecycle.

Following are the five ways in which you can use SMS to supercharge your marketing campaign:

  • Optimize your online platforms: Considering that SMSes have higher open rates and are read in less than three minutes, you have more chances of your conversion rates by including URLs within the messages. By making short-codes and keywords a part of your bulk SMS campaign, expect increased traffic website traffic and subscriptions.
  • Use the Whitespace: The two-factor authentication and transactional SMSes that we send to users often have remaining whitespaces that can be utilized to add shorter promotional codes or URLs. It is an excellent opportunity to initiate a clear call-to-action by making sure that they blend well with the transactional message and do not lose their importance. You may even look up quite a few SMS marketing services that enable this.

Kirusa Konnect’s SMS Tagging is a unique service that solves this problem by sending promotional messages alongside transactional SMS. The promotional message is added, or ‘tagged’ in a transactional SMS, ensuring that no new SMS is sent.

  • Enable a two-way Communication: Initiate an SMS campaign that lets you interact with your target audience via text. For example, during elections or a contest, customers can be approached for feedback or given points/discounts for completing a survey. This exercise can highly boost user engagement.
  • Bulk SMS for Social Cause: Another example of Bulk SMS application is the mass dissemination of messages during social initiatives. In 2015, the Ghanaian branch of Vodafone together with Kirusa launched the ‘Ebola Public Health Project.

The initiative shared free content via SMS on the Ebola Outbreak to all Vodafone subscribers for free and ran on the Konnect platform.

Therefore, Bulk SMSes can also enable you to create a dialogue on various channels by promoting such initiatives and boost your visibility.

  • Offer Incentives: Offering personalized promotions and discounts is a great way to boost customer engagement and initiate CTA or Call-to-action. Be original and stay true to your brand voice while reaching out with the offers.

Bust these Five SMS Marketing Myths for the Sake of your Enterprise

SMS is a crucial part of Marketing, yet over the last few years, several misconceptions have been woven around it. These myths have led to quite sweeping assumptions including the misbelief that SMS is becoming redundant. Rather than dismissing a potential tool altogether, how about making an informed decision by banishing the following myths?

  • Texts annoy customers: What annoys your customer is an irrelevant promotion. There are tons of brands that make the mistake of sending unnecessary SMSes in a single day without offering any incentive. Hence, apart from making the content interesting, it is essential to keep track of your leads and look out for those who have not signed up for promotions. Bulk SMS Marketing service providers like Kirusa Konnect have DND filters (Do-not-disturb) to prevent enterprises from sending promotional messages to people who have opted out officially.
  • Low Conversion Rates: Conversion rates should not be an issue if you are initiating a two-way interaction and encouraging CTA or call-to-action. In fact, with 98% higher open rates, SMSes offer greater opportunities to pitch your promotions. However, do not use it in isolation, engage with your customers via different communication channels to boost presence and familiarity.
  • SMS Marketing is Expensive: False! It happens to be one of the most cost-effective channels of enterprise communication. If we compare the direct outreach and opening rates of SMS compared to other platforms, it is indeed, an excellent ‘value for money.’Several platforms offer affordable bulk SMS service but watch out for the ones that promise scalability for your ever-changing needs.
  • Not Enough Space to Convey Your Brand Voice: The best message does its job by saying less. As marketers, we must innovate ways to engage our audience without taking too much of their time. Similarly, to make the most of SMS marketing and the limited character space, integrate URLs and codes to initiate a call-to-action. Another way to increase engagement is by availing the extra whitespace in your transactional SMSes. Transactional SMS messages are essential in this regard because they tend to have higher impression rates – making it a valuable component of enterprise messaging.SMS Tagging from the Konnect CPaaS suite is a novel product that enables enterprises to boost engagement by leveraging higher impression and mindshare of transactional SMS and use them for promotional SMS marketing.
  • SMEs or Small Businesses Do not Benefit with Bulk SMS: On the contrary, small and medium-sized enterprises mostly benefit from localized campaigns. Bulk SMSes area useful tool for small companies to generate personalized engagement with their customers. As long as, you are invested in working on a region-specific database, expect enormous advantages with SMS marketing.