Imagup General Magazine 2024
Bulk SMS is fast becoming the go to weapon of choice for business owners in 2024 but why?
In this article, I’d like to share with you why you might want to consider adding Bulk SMS you’re your marketing mix as well.
Reliable Delivery Rates
Deliverability is an important factor for a successful marketing campaign whether its email, SMS or plain old snail mail.
One of the ‘thorn in the side’ issues when it comes to email marketing especially is the fact that not all of your emails may actually make it to the recipient’s inbox.
According to A. Barrett from SMSpapa.com.au poor delivery rates have a major impact on sales revenue over time. Bulk SMS allows you to relax knowing that virtually 100% of bulk SMS messages will be delivered.
This doesn’t really make a lot of sense; after all, they did proactively sign up to receive your emails so why would your emails not actually make it to their inbox?
Ever heard of this thing called a ‘Reputation Score’?
This is essentially a ‘quality score’ for email accounts that the email service provider has for you and its job is to monitor and reduce spam from going out.
This means that if your score is low some or even all of your emails will be blocked from sending.
On average roughly 20% of the emails you send will not make it to the inbox, not all because of the rep score but normal things like emails being closed, people blacklisting your address, etc.
Why SMS Is Better
SMS has no reputation score. As long as the mobile number is correct and the recipient is in mobile coverage they will receive your SMS message virtually 100% of the time.
No Spam Algorithm
The reputation score has a partner in crime and that is the good old spam algorithm who’s job it is to ensure that you never get to send marketing emails to your own list – you know, the people who actually signed up to receive your marketing emails?
The spam algorithm doesn’t care that you are trying to make a buck it wants to uncover your aggressive marketing campaigns and place them into the ‘promotions’ tab in Gmail or the SPAM folder.
While working for an ecommerce business our confirmation and log in information would get blocked and sent into our customers spam folder even from legitimate orders.
Why SMS is better
Bulk SMS currently has no spam algorithm read through your text messages and deciding if it should go to the inbox or junk folder.
Obviously this is a double-edged sword for consumers and is why a small percentage of people use it to send spam text messages but for legitimate businesses this is an incredibly powerful opportunity to get all of your messages delivered.
Low Competition
Ever checked how many email messages you receive in an average day? It’s a lot. Especially when you consider how many email lists the average consumer is signed up to these days.
Another top issue for email marketers is coming up with catchy subject lines to help them break through the noise inside the inbox.
This takes a lot of skill and often requires a lot of testing to find your winners.
Why is the open rate important? Without anyone opening your promotions there can be no sale.
Why SMS is better
Consumers are quick to hand out their email addresses but are a lot more cautious about giving away their mobile numbers especially to businesses.
This is great news for businesses that use SMS because it means that you’re dealing with a lot less or even zero direct competition.
This means that without any testing or skill you can get your promotion opened and read instantly with performance levels multiple times higher than seasoned marketing pros.
High Open Rates
The average email open rate is around 20% which means roughly 80% of your campaign is going down the toilet.
Weirdly enough no one seems this is a problem, businesses are so used to getting poor to average open rates that they don’t even stop to think about the implications of running their businesses on a 20% open rate.
What if you could improve that open rate by 4x? Would that transform your business?
Why SMS is better
SMS has an open rate of anywhere from 82-97%. That is a stark difference in performance and a gamechanger for any business.
SMS Is An Offline Marketing Channel
Online marketing is amazing but the problem with the online is that it comes with a lot of policing and restrictions.
- Advertisings have to deal with strict advertising policies.
- SEO’s have to worry about constant algorithm updates that could wipe them out overnight.
- Email specialists need to worry about delivery and open rates.
- Social media gurus need to compete with an infinite number of competitors as well as following community guidelines and potential loss of accounts.
Why SMS is better
Bulk SMS is an incredibly versatile solution but one of its greatest advantages is that fact that it is an offline channel.
While ad costs continue to skyrocket upwards with no clear end in sight and with big tech continuing to place annoying restrictions on advertisers continuing to limit the performance of marketing campaigns the text messaging space is going in the opposite direction.
There are no strict advertising policies, no algorithm that can demolish your account overnight, no spam filters that can send your SMS into the gutter.
Instead of SMS prices going up, they are coming down due to new bulk SMS services entering into the space making SMS an exciting “old” technology.
Bulk SMS Has High Response Times
When I was working in online retail we had a piece of software that allowed us to see which parts of the country were making purchases along with where they were on our site, what they had loaded into their cart, etc.
One of the coolest things was sending out an SMS campaign and almost instantly watching parts of the country light up as people clicked on the link inside the text message promotion.
There was no other marketing channel that had this fast of an impact.
This is obviously great for businesses like restaurants who need to fill tables on slow nights, just send out a text message with an offer and shortly thereafter start booking tables over the phone.
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of email marketing but when it comes to generating massive open rates and noticeable gains in return on investment it is really tough to beat bulk SMS.
