An essential part of our job at emfluence is to have our fingers on the pulse of the latest online marketing trends and strategies. But this doesn’t mean we constantly throw the baby out with the bath water whenever something new comes along.
As a business fully invested in technologies like email marketing and marketing automation, we know that some of the most engaging and profitable marketing strategies deployed by and on behalf of our clients have been around for quite some time.
SMS (or text messaging) is another long-standing technology marketers increasingly call on to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Coincidentally, the first ever SMS was sent on December 3, 1992 — precisely 30 years to the date this blog post was written on December 3, 2022. So we’re not just celebrating SMS because it has reached a grand old age. Instead, we are celebrating SMS because it’s a compelling, highly targeted, and equally affordable marketing technology that deserves a bigger slice of the marketing pie in 2023.
Why Are We Talking About a 30-Year-Old Technology?
Essentially, SMS is a mighty marketing channel. As one of the first native applications of the mobile environment (pre-dating smartphones), it’s something every phone owner has access to regardless of device type or data plan. It’s also a highly personal marketing channel. People only tend to give out their mobile numbers to marketers if they really want to be contacted. This means the SMS inbox is often much less cluttered than its email equivalent. As such, SMS marketing is challenging to ignore.
It’s worth remembering many of the marketing channels we view as cutting-edge aren’t always so young themselves. And while 30-year-old SMS might be slightly longer in the tooth than Facebook and Twitter (18 and 16 years old, respectively), it would also be fair to say there is more stability in the more mature platform.
The social media landscape is in a state of flux. And it’s not just the soap opera-style dramatics that has embroiled Twitter. The social media platform formerly known as Facebook is in a state of disarray, with its aging user base having little idea of what the Metaverse actually is. Meanwhile, the younger generations are all hanging out on TikTok (if you still don’t get TikTok, it really is time you figured it out). As a result, many pundits and influencers have pointed towards social environments like Mastodon as viable alternatives.
To be fair, Mastodon has seen incredible growth since Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a kitchen sink. But without the algorithms adopted by their social media peers to keep users enthralled or enraged, will the decentralized service ever be more than a social media “also-ran”?
SMS Marketing Best Practices
As more marketers prioritize SMS as a marketing channel, emfluence is increasingly called on to share best practices and thought leadership related to the channel.
While SMS shares many commonalities with email marketing (they are both highly personal, permission-based, low-cost, high-return marketing channels), this doesn’t mean that they should be treated in precisely the same manner.
The growing importance of SMS as a marketing channel was highlighted by the popularity of the following two blog posts:
- Ten Profitable SMS Personalization Strategies: Focusing on how greater personalization dramatically increases SMS click-through rates (CTRs) from an average of 23% with generic messaging to a staggering 49% with personalized themes. While these statistics might appear somewhat incredible to the average email marketer, they highlight the value of SMS and why it is so important to keep your subscribers engaged and not disenfranchise them.
- Research Reveals Best Ways To Grow And Engage Your SMS Subscriber List: Highlighting how SMS fits into the more comprehensive online marketing ecosystem — including email marketing, social media, and paid media.
The best practices featured in these two blog posts are expanded in emfluence’s Top Ten Best Practices of SMS Marketing eBook. This guide has been compiled to give marketers the insight they need to drive higher conversions, revenue growth, better engagement, and more loyalty from happy customers.
Learn More
Anyone with a smartphone (everyone) will know how engaging an SMS message is. If you are still not convinced, try ignoring your device the next time a message notification “pings” you. You know that that SMS message will be engaged with (even if it is just a quick glance), and harnessing that engagement as a marketer would be an incredibly powerful opportunity.
To learn more about how SMS can help you create more engaging and profitable marketing campaigns, book a free discovery call with one of our SMS marketing experts at expert@emfluence.com.
