By Guest Post | In: Marketing
By Nico Dato
If you were a marketer for a local business and you wanted to reach an unlimited audience with a message that had a 95% chance of being opened within three minutes of receipt, how would you do it?
If your mind went immediately to SMS marketing, then you already have a good start. SMS marketing, or text message marketing, is a valuable yet often underutilized tool to convert new leads and maintain a high level of engagement with existing customers.
Local businesses often avoid SMS marketing because it may seem too complex, or people worry about having enough staff to manage the communications. However, done properly, SMS strengthens relationships with customers and requires fewer resources than you might expect.
Knowing some of the important text marketing do’s and don’ts can help your company take advantage of this powerful marketing tool and improve your results.
When conducting a text marketing campaign, make sure to:
Making sure your customer knows the name of the sender and their company will put a human touch on your message and make it feel more authentic. Three-quarters (74%) of consumers are more likely to text with a local business when they know a real person is going to receive and respond to their message, while half (50%) are more likely to respond if the person behind the texts introduces themselves.
Speaking of a personal touch, it’s important to address every customer by name. Take advantage of your messaging system’s capabilities to use the customer’s name in messaging, which will make it feel less like a marketing outreach and more like a discussion.
The language of your message should be friendly, lighthearted, and appealing. Marketers often try to motivate customers with language that ends up virtually shouting at them through capitalized messages and robotic wording (“BUY NOW!” or “OFFER ENDS TODAY”). Put these relics of the early internet back in the ’90s where they belong and use the voice you would if speaking to a friend.
Keeping your tone friendly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t encourage your customers with a call-to-action, however. The point of SMS marketing is to deliver that ever-important CTA—it should just be done in a friendly and approachable tone. Calls like “Check out our new inventory!”, “Stop by or schedule an appointment!”, and “Reply back to get 10% off your next order!” will motivate people to engage.
Everybody wants to take advantage of a great opportunity, and you can move your customers closer to a sale by letting them know that your offer is limited or stock is dwindling. A note like “we only have ten left in stock!” shared in a conversational tone will be a powerful tool for conversion.

More articles from AllBusiness.com:
Here are a few things to avoid in your text marketing campaign:
While messages should absolutely feel casual and conversational, filling your messages with spoken slang expressions like “lit,” “off the chain.” or “freakin’” runs the risk of sounding outdated, pandering, and unprofessional. Likewise, being too clever with wordplay or superfluous with your vocabulary might be misleading or confusing. While some customers may enjoy the linguistic gymnastics, it’s not worth alienating those who find it off-putting.
Aim for fewer than 160 characters with SMS messages whenever possible. Squeezing in a friendly greeting by name, identifying yourself, including a CTA, and sharing a link can feel daunting with such a short medium, but it’s worth the effort. Messages with more than 240 characters are often split into multiple messages and can arrive out of order, making your promotion unclear.
Along the same lines as the word count, don’t waste more of that valuable real estate than necessary by including an unwieldy URL. Third-party shorteners are quick and easy to use, and many SMS marketing systems include native link shorteners that will save you characters.
The marketing team’s goal in sending an SMS message should always be to reduce any friction and make everything as easy as possible for the recipient. Think through every step of the process. If you are announcing a new product, include a link to a landing page. If you want customers to schedule an appointment at your facility, insert a link to the scheduler.
This is a no-brainer, but it’s important to make sure you’re gathering the appropriate consent from your customers to send them SMS messages. Nobody likes a random text.
Successful SMS marketing requires finding the right balance of tone, urgency, and brevity. Sending a streamlined process to your offering will further encourage customer engagement and help marketing teams reach more people.
We are moving toward an increasingly interconnected world, and the power of using mobile devices to reach customers in a way they will appreciate has never been more simple. Engaging through SMS marketing is a must-have for any local business that wants to compete in today’s marketplace.
RELATED: 5 Tips for Allocating Your Digital Marketing Budget
Post by: Nico Dato
Nico Dato is the EVP of marketing at Podium, the leading communication and payments platform for local businesses. Today, more than 100,000 local businesses are powered by Podium, helping to facilitate millions of customer interactions and payment transactions. Prior to joining Podium in 2014, Nico served as the director of marketing for PeopleKeep and as a demand generation analyst for Teleperformance.
Company: Podium
Website: www.podium.com
Connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

source