Tag: lead generation

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.

Why B2B SMS Marketing is a Must

SMS Marketing is very often associated with B2C or Business to Customer strategies. As marketers, we tend to forget that business clients can sometimes share similar traits with individual customers. While their requirements may differ, let us remember that everybody is quickly accessible via mobile.

Most business professionals use SMSes for business purposes, and messaging is a popular channel of communication in the B2B space with over ninety percent open rates.

Following are some reasons to see how an enterprise can benefit from SMS marketing in the B2B space.

  • Inbound Marketing: Just like your regular customer, a business client would not want to spend their time reading a message that just promotes your product. A B2B client would appreciate your help or suggestions rather than being sold to. Therefore, initiate an inbound SMS marketing campaign for clients on your SMS list by offering free podcasts, e-books, training sessions, and attaching website links and URLs in the messages.
  • SMS List: Compile an SMS list of potential and existing clients and promote the same across social media platforms. This is because, without an updated SMS list, you will be shooting in the dark and would not know who is genuinely interested in receiving your SMSes. With a complete SMS list, you can pitch webinars and online events across your client base.
  • Leverage interactive messaging: While you are utilizing all channels to boost your inbound b2b campaigns, seek feedback from the clients who have signed up for your SMS list. Include short-codes, polls, questionnaires, or URLs to derive a two-way engagement.
  • Monitor your Messages: You also need to keep a regular check on the SMS response rates and ROI. Check out Kirusa Konnect’s Bulk SMS marketing platform offers tools to evaluate the ROI of the bulk SMS campaign.

Apart from boosting SMS marketing and keeping track of success metrics, it aDND filter provided to prevent enterprises from sending promotional SMS to people who have opted out officially.

 

 

An Affordable High Deliverability Bulk SMS Service

Bulk SMS is a powerful tool to boost your mobile marketing campaign. With almost 98% open rates surpassing other forms of marketing across email or social media, SMS continues to be the most ubiquitous methods to reach out to users.

The reasons are as follows:

  • Bulk SMSes are the most convenient and cost-effective means to reach out to your audience without hassles. By signing up with a reliable bulk SMS provider, one can send hundreds of messages with the click of a button.
  • Owing to its higher open rate compared to any other medium, SMSes have more chances of being read.
  • With SMSes, you have better chances of implementing a clear call-to-action or CTA and generate better response rates.
  • Almost everybody owns a mobile phone whether they have an interconnect connection or not.
  • SMS gives you the chance to keep it short, concise, and simple. You can get the message across in a few words without taking the reader’s time.

Therefore, a few tips to remember before you begin shooting out your promotions:

  • Include incentives for the user. Why would anybody bother reading your messages unless they are getting a discount or an offer?
  • Do not go ballistic with the messages on a single day. Constant messaging and promotions irk your users, and it should be moderate, exclusive and personalized. Hence, it is a good idea to update the client database, and see how each user differs based on their age and location. Make efforts to customize what you are sending and do not copy your competitors all the time.

Try Kirusa Konnect’s Bulk SMS Service, where you can customize messages while also keeping track of the delivery and ROI metric.

  • If you regularly send billing or transaction details to customers, you have an excellent opportunity to initiate a clear call-to-action using the extra whitespace. Just make sure that the codes, keywords or offers 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 has a feature called SMS Tagging that lets the company insert messages and codes within transaction SMS and billing details. Transactional SMS tend to have a higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to promotional SMS because they contain personalized information about the client’s account and transactions.

  • Most people scroll through apps and social media accounts before noticing SMSes. Social media trends and updates significantly influence our buying decision and promotional SMSes act like a ‘final push.’ Hence, it is a great idea to integrate WAP links into your SMS that direct people to your site or app.

Kirusa Konnect is an affordable provider of Bulk SMS service, which apart from boosting SMS marketing and keeping track of your success metrics, offers tools to evaluate the ROI of bulk SMS messaging campaigns.

Bulk SMS for Business

Ekon is in the middle of an important client meeting when his phone starts buzzing. Assuming an emergency, he excuses himself and takes the call. However, the call is from an insurance sales agent regarding a new health scheme. Visibly appalled, Ekon hangs up and slams the phone down.

On the other side, the sales agent, Mary wonders what went wrong. She immediately moves on to another lead only to receive a call on her mobile number. Not wanting to miss what might be an important message, she takes it. The person on the line is another sales agent offering a housing scheme. Mary instinctively wants to slam down the receiver, but she does not. A thought strikes her. They have been making cold calls at all hours. This is precisely what went wrong with the previous customer.

Mary communicates the problem to the team lead, and they decide to find a different approach. The team realizes that cold calls hardly work for brands anymore if executed with a vanilla approach.

More brainstorming and research bring them to the conclusion that a strategized SMS engagement plan is perhaps a smarter alternative to reach out to their audience. The company already has hundreds of customers. All they need to do is collate their databases and send the right text message, that will asynchronously reach them.

Before they begin sending them out, it is necessary to have an efficient SMS marketing system for regular delivery and response. The Insurance Agency decides to sign up with Kirusa’s Konnect portal that offers a robust strategized set of bulk SMS solutions.

Initiating a Bulk SMS Marketing Campaign
  • The Konnect CPaaS portal offers a free trial for users to register and activate a new account.
  • Upon successful account activation, the insurance agency is asked to select a Sender Mask. The Sender Mask is the identity of the SMS sender. Brands can use a custom name or number as the preferred Sender Mask.
  • They are then asked to upload a list of those to whom the messages are to be sent. The option of a DND or do-no-disturb filter is provided to prevent them from sending promotional SMS to people who have unsubscribed.
  • The agency uploads its content or message on the platform and schedules a preferred shoot-off time.
  • They also have a complete metric to keep track of deliveries and response rates. The Konnect CPaaS portal also offers tools to evaluate the ROI of the bulk SMS messaging campaign.
Complementing Your Bulk SMS Marketing Campaign

The Agency also takes effective measures to generate quality leads for their scheme. This is also to ensure that word gets around quickly amongst as many people as possible. Hence, they advertise the insurance policy across various media channels with an SMS code. This serves as the CTA or call-to-action.

People who see the advertisement send a text to the number and express interest regarding this policy. The Insurance Agency captures the phone number of the sender. This is how a lead is generated. The agency sales team then reaches out to these leads to turn them into customers.

SMS marketing is an effective method to gain traction for your business. In spite of the popularity of smartphones, SMS remains the most accessible means of communicating to the masses. One must also remember that SMS marketing methods should not be implemented in isolation. It is always a good idea to integrate them with various channels. An omnichannel experience provides leeway for maximum customer engagement.

4 Common SMS Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Lately, Tamara has been receiving a lot of unsolicited messages from some new bakery on the block. They apparently have the best dough balls and serve the most delicious chocolate brownies, but she needs no reminding every two hours.

It is not like Tamara is indifferent to brownies. She loves them, and garlic dough balls are amongst her favorites. Plus, the bakery is only 2 kilometers away.

In fact, she has attempted ordering a few times, but the experience has been unsatisfactory. They keep transferring her call and never give a discount. In short, their messages have been unreliable.

On top of that, the abbreviations are enough to put anybody off, and some messages are just blank texts. Tamara decides to dismiss them and moves onto another bakery.

Classic Mistakes

Our bakers were making the classic SMS marketing mistakes that we take no notice of sometimes.

NO CTA: There were hardly any clarity on CTA or call-to-action in the promotional SMSes that Pristina bakery was sending to its customers. While they introduced discounts and coupons, nobody knew what to make of them because there was no mention of time and day. A typical message from them went: “Hi. We been missin u. Come by. Grab a discount on your next order.” They never mentioned on what and when. Poor Tamara chose the wrong day.

Unorganized SMS List: First of all, you do not say you miss somebody on the first meeting. Pristina Bakers made this blunder. Perhaps Tamara did not notice, but many of us would realize that the bakery was sending uncustomized generic messages to every person on their database. Considering that she had never bought anything from them, “we been missin u” was highly inappropriate.

Forgot to Keep a Clock: Nobody needs to remember croissant and donuts every two hours. Not during dinner, in the middle of a meeting or before going to bed. The bakers did precisely that. They kept sending uncustomized messages to people too often without any profound CTA. Also, they did not give their leads the option to unsubscribe or opt out, causing many of them to dismiss the promotion.

Isolated the Campaign: People scroll through food delivery apps and social media accounts even before noticing any SMS. Social media trends and updates influence our buying decisions, and promotional SMSes act like the “final button.’ Plus, one can integrate WAP links into SMSes that direct people to their site or app. Pristina Bakers had done none of that and made a leap of faith with SMS marketing. They seemed like intruders.

In conclusion, no matter how convenient or cost-effective SMS marketing may be, one has to tread carefully. It needs extensive research much like any other form of marketing. Part of the effort will also involve choosing a credible SMS marketing service provider.

Despite best measures, marketers often fall short, and it is safe to have an SMS marketing system in place to assist in the implementation.