Want to generate more results from your overall marketing strategy – bulk SMS is a good place to start.
Back in the old days, brand style marketing was what every business was into this meant clever images and vague straplines where the goal was to be creative or even funny these types of ads generally failed.
This first started with the big companies who had more money than sense and then the little guy followed suit and they got crushed.
Bulk SMS is a game that the little guy can play and gain an advantage of the big guys – A. Barrett, Marketing Specialist, SMSpapa.com.au
When you are the smaller guy you actually need your marketing to bring in results i.e. new customers but big companies weren’t too concerned with that, they had much deeper pockets and could go underwater financially speaking than the small guys.
In 2024 things have changed.
Today marketing is very much a one to one experience, personalised communication should be an essential part of any company’s strategy when it comes to building a brand and driving sales.
Bulk SMS services have been around for a long time and even though text messaging technology has been around since the 90’s it’s become even more relevant due to mobile marketing but it is also an incredibly personal channel to communicate with customers on.
In this article, I’ll share 5 great ways to increase the performance of any bulk SMS strategy.
#1. Separate Your SMS Subscribers Into Groups
SPAM is basically receiving information that you didn’t ask for and don’t want.
While you might be able to get away with it via ads and email marketing SMS is a lot less forgiving.
Bulk SMS is considered “mass texting” but you need to treat it like you are texting individuals instead of a mass group of strangers.
Your top priority is to separate your subscribers into similar groups, that could be something like creating a group for men and a group for women since most of the times the needs of these two groups are going to be different.
But you could group people together based on their goals, buying behaviour, geo location, interests, etc.
The goal here is to avoid having one giant group inside one list and instead have smaller tightly grouped people so that when you communicate with them your message has much higher resonance and those people feel like you are speaking to them individually.
#2 Highly Targeted Offers
It doesn’t matter how good your offer is if it’s not something that the recipient values then it’s going to be considered SPAM and will naturally reduce conversion rates and increase unsubscribe rates – neither are good.
Now that you’ve grouped your SMS subscribers into various groups it’s now a lot easier to come up with highly targeted offers that people will see instant value in.
For example, if you are a health club and you have your groups separated into:
- Bodybuilding – women
- Bodybuilding – men
- Weight loss – women
- Weight loss -men
- Spin Class
- Yoga Class
- Rehab, etc.
Now you can push out an offer for building muscle for men specifically or women specifically.
This makes coming up with offers easier as well as making your message more personalised.
This will naturally increase conversions while reducing unsubscribe rates.
#3 Be Conversational
Now that you have everyone segmented into groups you can sound more like a person having a conversation with another instead of a brand blasting out a mass text message.
One idea you could use is to send a question to one of your groups to help you improve your service delivery.
Let’s use the health club example above targeting the bodybuilders – men SMS group:
Hey Jim, just a quick question. Is there a specific muscle group that you’re trying to develop but no matter what you do it doesn’t seem to work? We’re putting together a new product that could help – Jack
Also, it’s a good idea to step away from SMS messages that sound like you are pushing your bulk text messaging campaign out to everyone for example:
Group talk: We’ve got a great promotion for you all this month only
Personal talk: Nick! We’re running a special promo this month, thought you might be interested…
It’s only a slight difference but it adds a little more personality to your SMS messages.
#4. Turn Your SMS List Into A VIP Only Nightclub
Have you ever been in a line and then someone grabbed you and moved you all the way to the front of the line?
Imagine being at a night club and you are all the way at the back of the line then suddenly one of the bouncers notices you walks up opens up the red velvet rope and escorts you past everyone and straight into the club.
That’s kind of like the feeling you want to give to your SMS subscribers.
The thing is it takes a lot of effort to get someone onto your SMS subscribers list and while they’re on that list they can bring in hundreds or thousands of dollars to your business so it’s a good idea to try and keep them around for as long as possible.
One such way is to treat people on your list like VIP’s that may mean that they get products before everyone else or they get exclusive offers no one else can get, or they access to special events, you get the idea.
Another thing you’ll notice about the VIP area in any club is that it is very limited in space. There are only a limited number of people who can be in that area.
One other thing you can do is limit the number people that you allow on to your list, this combined with special VIP access will make it very tough for people to unsubscribe.
Take care of your bulk SMS subscribers and they’ll definitely take care of your business.
