What Bulk SMS Marketing Is & Who It’s Best For

SMS (which stands for short message service) marketing refers to campaigns sent via mass text. It allows you to reach a wide audience or a highly targeted audience with low effort and high returns, and there are several different types of campaigns you could send. Keep reading to learn who it’s best for and decide whether your business could benefit from this medium.

Overview of SMS Marketing

If you’ve ever received a text from a brand with a promotion, you were probably on the receiving end of a bulk SMS marketing campaign. SMS marketing is any type of marketing or advertising campaign sent via text message. They often offer promotional discounts, announce sales, promote customer loyalty programs, and more.

An example of an SMS marketing campaign advertising a holiday sale

Text marketing campaigns offer a targeted, accessible, and sometimes even interactive platform for marketing. In fact, studies found that SMS marketing has an up to 78% higher open rate than email, and nearly 36% higher conversion rates than social media campaigns—making them an easy and effective way to grow brand presence.

Different Types of SMS Marketing Campaigns

Because SMS messages are such a simple, yet versatile medium, they’re effective for nearly any type of marketing campaign, from invites and reminders to sales and loyalty campaigns. Text messages are short and impactful, so they’re a natural fit for almost any marketing campaign.

Here are some of the most common types of SMS marketing:

• Promotions: Promotional texts are campaigns sent to promote a product or service, sales, limited-time offers (LTOs), buy-one, get-one (BOGO) deals, and similar promotions. They typically have a clear call to action (shop now, sign up, book an appointment, and so on) with a link to a landing page.
• Discount codes: Another common SMS sent to increase sales are discount code campaigns. These involve sending a time-limited unique discount code customers can use when purchasing a product online or in physical stores.
• Customer engagement campaigns: Customer engagement campaigns don’t explicitly promote anything. They’re meant to keep customers engaged and keep your brand top of mind. Examples of these are holiday or birthday greeting texts, lapsed customer outreach, and “thank-you” texts.
• Updates: Update texts are sent to give important updates from your brand—for example, appointment reminders, back-in-stock announcements, changes in hours of operation, holiday closures, package delivery updates, and so on.
• Loyalty SMS campaigns: While promotional, loyalty texts are different in that they target specific recipients. This may be people who purchased from your business recently to generate repeat sales and loyalty or members who signed up for your loyalty program.
• Text-to-enter contests: Text messages are also an easy way to get people to join a contest you’re hosting. With contest text campaigns, recipients will usually only have to reply to your text with a specific keyword or phrase (e.g., “ENTER CONTEST”) to join your contest.
• Surveys: SMS and email marketing share many common traits (more on that below), and one is that they’re both great platforms for sending surveys to customers. Whether you’re surveying for customer satisfaction or for gaining consumer insight before launching a product, text messages are a great channel for sending survey links, especially if you’re targeting certain groups of people.

Who SMS Text Marketing Is Best For

SMS marketing is more effective for certain types of businesses than others. For example, because it’s personal and targeted, it’s best for direct-to-consumer (D2C) and business-to-consumer (B2C) brands that want to form personal connections with audiences, such as retail or service businesses.

Here are some of the types of businesses it works best for:

• Ecommerce and online stores: U.S. shoppers are 87% more likely to buy from brands after subscribing to text marketing (Attentive). This makes SMS a good fit for ecommerce businesses and online stores since it’s a good medium for sharing links that drive traffic back to your site.
• Businesses with mobile apps: For similar reasons as above, text marketing also benefits any business with a mobile app, especially as clicking a link can instantly direct recipients toward your app. Text messages and mobile apps share a medium, so they are therefore a fast and easy way to increase app activity.
• Businesses with older target audiences: It might surprise you that SMS bulk marketing is one of your best options for older generations. Senior citizens are 53% more likely to find text marketing messages useful than social media (Yopto).
• Retail businesses: Retail stores are one of the biggest users of bulk SMS marketing. Most shoppers own a mobile phone, and text messages are an easy way to reach customers directly and guide them through the sales funnel, from announcing new products to offering promo codes.
• Service businesses: SMS campaigns help send appointment reminders, making them a great communication channel for service businesses, classes, or workshops. Text reminders are also more likely to be read than social media and email, which can be very helpful for service businesses.
• Restaurants: Text marketing is a natural fit in the restaurant marketing mix. Send bulk messages to showcase today’s daily special, the limited time offer (LTO) of the month, or the new item on your seasonal menu. Use automated SMS campaigns to update the club on loyalty point status and get more reviews on Google, and use rewards to bring them back in more often.
• Brands needing to get the word out fast: For the most part, people check text notifications in one minute or less from the time a text message is received (SimpleTexting). If your business needs to make a mass announcement to customers or subscribers quickly, bulk SMS is a great option.
• Businesses that need to get a response quickly: SMS campaigns aren’t just a great way to disseminate information. It’s a great way to get responses. Stats show 51% of consumers respond within one to two minutes, and an additional 33% more within five to 10 minutes (SimpleTexting).

Mass SMS marketing is more personal and immediate than most other channels. This makes it a great strategy for any business that benefits from direct contact and strong relationships with individual consumers. Conversely, these characteristics make it not the best fit for business-to-business marketing vs a more formal medium for prospecting and lead nurturing, like permission-based email marketing.

Benefits of Text Message Marketing for Small Businesses

Although largely under the radar compared to its more well-known peers in the marketing space, SMS marketing offers a wealth of opportunities for growing your small business and is overall a great addition to your marketing mix. For one, mass SMS marketing messages are easy to send out and are almost always guaranteed to be read by your audience. Consider these stats on the effectiveness and benefits of SMS marketing:

• SMS messages have an average open rate of 99%—meaning that almost all your marketing messages will be read by your recipients. Compare this to email’s average open rate, which is less than 22% per Mailchimp.
• Customers aren’t just reading text messages. They’re responding to them too. According to Postscript, the average conversion rate for bulk SMS marketing messages can reach up to 8% across all industries, higher than both social media and email marketing, which are usually no more than 5%.
• A 2022 study also found that 45% of all consumers consider text messages as one of the most helpful mediums for receiving information from brands, with 37% saying they helped increase their purchase intention.
• SMS marketing’s influence has only grown over the pandemic: Customers engage with text marketing campaigns 37% more now than before 2020.
• More customers are interested in SMS marketing than you might expect—over 90% of consumers said they would sign up to receive text marketing messages from brands, and 56% already do.
• Finally, text messages also directly influence sales. Research by Klaviyo found that 73% of consumers made a purchase after receiving a text message from a brand—24% of whom were not initially planning to at all.

Frequently Asked Questions FAQs

What’s the difference between SMS & bulk SMS?

How much does bulk SMS marketing cost?

What makes a good SMS marketing campaign?

Bottom Line

SMS marketing offers a more personal and direct avenue for communicating with consumers. And with low cost, simplicity, and relatively low competition, they’re a prime opportunity to grow your business. Now that you understand what it is and how it works, add SMS to your marketing strategy with an easy-to-use platform like Textedly—you can collect opt-ins, create contact lists, and then send campaigns, all in one platform.

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