Using SMS to market to your existing customer based can be an innovative and fruitful way to keep your customer base engaged, however, you have to be very careful; most of your customers do not expect to hear from you via SMS, and it could be considered too invasive.
When marketing via SMS, use common sense principles and think about your message from the perspective of your customer.
To be successful, try to remember that your customers only care about you to the extent that you add value to their lives. Toward this goal, I believe 3 simple “best practices” can be put into place in order to improve the likelihood of success. These best practices come from a combination of e-mail marketing experience and good old fashioned common sense:
- Don’t Spam — Quality over quantity. Consumers are even more sensitive to spam via SMS then e-mail. First, they’re not used to it, and second, it’s a channel historically reserved for more personal lines of communication.
- Opt-out — Just like e-mail, ensure your customers can tell you if they’d rather not receive messages from you via SMS. One way to keep the lines of communication open. If someone opts out, ensure they have the option of directing messages to e-mail! They may still want to hear from you, just not via SMS.
- Contextually Relevant Call To Action — If you’re going to send an SMS message try to make sure the offer is contextually relevant to the medium. If it’s something you can just as easily send via e-mail, it’s probably not adding much value being sent via SMS. For instance, if you’re a night club, you might want to send out an SMS message offering a free drink for “you and a friend” on a Friday night for a “limited time” thereby justifying your use of SMS to reach out.
In conclusion, SMS marketing can be a very effective channel for generating new business and building customer loyalty, however, like all marketing channels, the common sense rules still apply.
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