SMS marketing: how it works

Owned by Alessandra Sessa (Deactivated)
Last updated: Mar 12, 2021
3 min read

The SMS channel is able to integrate and complete other marketing strategies with unique characteristics: the immediacy and the incisiveness in the relationship with the customer

Here are some numbers that act as a business card for the SMS:

Average opening rates: 98%
Average openings within three minutes of delivery: 90%

The SMS is a form of inbound marketing that allows you to send messages to your users with updates, offers, and information.

The types of SMS that can be sent

Even though they may seem very simple, text messages are a flexible tool that adapts to different types of use, depending on the goal and the business. Here is a list of activities that can be managed with SMS campaigns:

Launch a new product

Especially for loyal customers with the highest degree of involvement, SMS is the most direct channel to announce (and anticipate) the arrival of a new product or a collection.

Offer coupons and flash sales

Nothing is better than an SMS to spread special sales or limited offers over time: coupons and so-called flash sales require a certain speed of delivery and immediate opening, to point out to the customers to the online store or the nearest point of sale.

Manage transactional communications

For customers, during the purchase and after-sale phase, there is no better channel than the SMS to receive order confirmations, purchase and access codes (user and login), receipts, service information such as the shipment of an article occurred.

Help desk

SMS is a great tool to integrate into customer care activities: allow customers to get in touch with the company, to have answers to doubts and uncertainties, to receive assistance and to be informed in case of urgent news.

Appointments reminder

When it comes with doctors, beauty centers, accountants, and all activities that include appointments, the SMS is the best reminder to confirm meetings, avoiding unexpected events and being perceived always alongside the customer.

Promote an event

SMS messages cover all the phases of approaching an event, from the invitation to the teasing campaigns, to the last minute reminder to convince the undecided.

Manage program changes

For those organizing events, in the sectors of tourism, transport and many others, the text messages represent the most agile and immediate way to manage last-minute emergencies and program changes (such as notification of the gate change of a flight).

Launch fundraising campaigns

Non-profit and crowdfunding organizations find a strong ally in Inbound SMS campaigns, which are scheduled for recurrence or contingency reasons. The invitation to donate via SMS is immediate and incisive.

Ask for feedback and launch surveys

With an SMS you can invite your recipients to answer some useful questions to better profile the database or ask those who have just ended an order to give feedback on the purchase experience.

Reactivate carts and inactive

For e-commerce but also for non-profit organizations, text messages are essential tools to re-establish contact with inactive customers and encourage them to make a new purchase, as well as to recover abandoned carts or invite them to complete the transaction. 

Some advice

  • Use dynamic fields
    This is an easy way to customize the SMS by entering, automatically, some recipient data. Its name, for example, to be inserted at the beginning of the SMS as a greeting. It's a small trick to give the SMS a greater degree of personalization, a more intimate and less depersonalized tone.

  • Concatenated SMS
    It is possible to go beyond the 160 characters, thus sending longer and more extensive, detailed and exhaustive SMS messages. The platform allows you to concatenate up to ten text messages. The result? 1.530 characters available for your campaign.

  • Landing pages
    They are the best ally of a text message. The drag & drop editor helps to create, with simple drag and drop operations, a page optimized for mobile in which to include all the details on products, services, events, competitions, regulations and much more. The recipients will need only a touch to deepen what has been anticipated in the 160 characters of the SMS. In addition, the editor allows a high degree of customization of the landing page, to graphically harmonize it to other channels and make your brand always recognizable. Once you have created the landing page, always remember to shorten the URL with the shortening function, to save characters and have more space for your text.

  • Schedule submissions
    You can choose the day and time to reach your recipients automatically. Just set the exact hour and minute of sending. The sending also has a large amount of flexibility: you can stop, change and resume, at any time.

  • Set do not disturb timings
    A fundamental function to avoid overnight delivery or on certain days of the week.

  • List Check 
    This feature allows you to keep your lists clean and minimize delivery errors, filtering numbers with an invalid format and automatically removing duplicates, when importing and sending.