Why Text Message Marketing is Important
This is part 1 of 6 in the series: A Mobile Marketing Crash Course for Small Business Owners
As mentioned in our opening post, this series tackles the problem or challenge of mobile marketing from the perspective of a small business owner, be it B2B or B2C, as opposed to from a mainstream brand or high profile entity where the rules and nature of the game might be different. As a small business owner, there are a few terms and concepts, or tenants, with which you want to be familiar. These are:
- Text Messaging, a.k.a. SMS
- SMS Software
- Bar Codes, Tags, and QR Codes
- Mobile Web Sites
- Mobile Apps
Text Messaging
Text messaging is the every-day term for SMS which stands for Short Message Service. It is a protocol, or technology that has standards and so it works across all brands and devices that support SMS. Much like radio where all you need is FM support to access FM channels, or HD support to experience high-definition television, to benefit from text messaging you only need a device or system that can send and/or receive text messages.
As its name implies, “short message service”, text messages are limited to 160 characters, including spaces. As you can see, this is quite limiting.
Or is it?
One of the most popular systems in the world today is Twitter, which similar to SMS, restricts user’s ability to send and receive messages to only 142 characters. If a system like Twitter can be deemed so popular and useful, then certainly SMS can be too. After all, SMS supports an additional 12% of characters.
So what makes SMS, or text messaging so useful?
Statistically, 99% of text messages are read by recipients and 93% of them are opened within THREE minutes. This is no surprise considering that text messages are received on your mobile device which is almost always on hand. Plus with such a limited amount of space to create interest, you are forced as a marketer to really think about what you are saying. If your messages aren’t engaging then you will undoubtedly lose your subscribers.
This leads us to the next tenant – SMS Software, which is software that gives you the ability to send text messages and manage SMS subscribers for marketing purposes.
This blog series was also put together in the form of a White Paper which dives into these issues and offers solutions for small business owners, which you can download free by clicking on the button below.
