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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.

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.

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.

Choosing Between Voice APIs and SMS APIs for Your Mobile App

The highly competitive atmosphere in enterprise communication calls for technologies that keep you ahead for bridging the gap between customers and relevant solutions.

Meanwhile, Application Programming Interface or APIs are on the rise, and it is essential to know how it benefits one’s customer communication channels.

What is an API?

API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of procedures that make way to develop applications which access the procured data of other applications or services. API is merely a set of communication protocols between components.

It offers you tools to build your software. A stable API would allow one to quickly develop their platform or interface by providing all the building blocks.

Understanding Voice and SMS APIs

Voice APIs serve as a bridge between enterprises and their customers. Using the power of voice technology, this tool developed using a simple API procedure understands the clients’ requirements and develops customized voice APIs. When you call a number which uses voice API, it automatically tracks the contact number of the person and saves it in its database to proceed further with outbound phone calls.

Your mobile or software application can automatically instruct the API regarding the way it wants to proceed forward with a call. Many leading businesses use voice APIs for good connectivity between its customers. For example, cab services use Voice APIs to automatically connect the person with the cab driver without providing personal information about the customer.

Similarly, Bulk SMS APIs use codes to send short messages to the customers using a software interface. It revolutionizes communication using codes and programming languages for better prospects of businesses. These voice and SMS APIs can be integrated into websites or mobile applications of the enterprises. Konnect uses Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for connecting calls.

Following are the benefits of availing an API:

With a Bulk SMS API gateway present across all your technological networks and business platforms, you can have a unified functional core to boost seamless communication.
APIs offer flexibility and scalability, which means that you can easily integrate new features without seeking a third party’s assistance.
It is a cost-effective solution considering expandability.
You can make the most of its high transfer and delivery speed, and send hundreds of messages or make calls in the click of a button apart.
A reliable SMS or voice API ensures data security.
Enterprises can also send messages in various formats and get real-time reports on response and delivery.

Kirusa’s Konnect’s API offers both inbound and outbound messaging/call services to its users. Using the interface, one can execute robust marketing campaigns with reliable metrics and response rates.

It is effortless to use Konnect’s API services with the following steps:

All you need to do is create an account on Kirusa Konnect’s website and log in.
Konnect has a vast number of codes loaded in its code snippet among which one will be provided to you.
You need to paste the code snippet provided by Konnect in your code base and proceed to pay for your API pack.

Well now you know how a voice API works, but you still may be in a dilemma as to what are the benefits of using these Voice APIs or SMS APIs?

Send alerts and notifications

You can use voice API or SMS API to send account-related alerts automatically. Customers can be sent a reminder about a product, event, discount, etc.

Call tracking and lead generation

By using APIs, enterprises can track and find the route of the customers in their marketing campaigns.

Masked phone numbers

Enterprises can choose masked phone numbers where the buyer and the seller will be connected without disclosing their identities. Use Interactive Voice Response to generate sales by targeting the prospective customers’ list stored in the database using API.

Products of Konnect using its API are:

API call Snapcall

For example, Jumia is an online shopping app which uses Konnect’s API to get closer with its customers by solving their queries and requests.

When customers figure out a flash-call ad on the Jumia app and as and when they flash the number, it gets connected to Konnect’s Snapcall API, and their number gets stored. This process continues for every customer whenever they dial the flash-call number, and all these numbers are stored as leads. With Konnect, you can trigger voice calling using apps efficiently.

API call outbound SMS

When an API call is initiated to Konnect’s outbound SMS, an SMS is delivered to the user with a link to download the app.

API call voice OBD

To check the authenticity of the user, the Konnect API call sends an OTP number by calling instead of an SMS API. This happens when the user selects the OTP by call option. Now an API call is carried out to Konnect’s voice OBD (Outbound Dialer) to generate OTP through a call. Thereby, the user receives an outbound call.

API call Inbound SMS

Right after a few months of installing the app, the user is sent a customer SMS to draw the feedback of the user for making the required changes. The collected feedback from the user is stored in Customer Relation Management or Database for further decision making.

Now that you know about Konnect’s API services and its benefits, it would be a good idea to combine and use the Voice and SMS API tools. Sign up for a 30-day free trial and avail further.

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.