Today, most young people consider starting and running their own companies instead of looking for white-collar jobs. Self-employment allows one to become their own boss and create their desired income and wealth. That could be one of the reasons why more than 100 million small businesses get launched every year.
Having many businesses in the market is a great benefit to customers because they have the freedom to decide which shop to buy from. However, it leads to high competition among firms providing similar or identical products or services.
If you’re also a business owner, you can leverage the power of SMS marketing for your brand to stand out in the sea. However, you must install the right software to streamline your marketing strategy.
This article has all you might want to know about SMS marketing. You’ll learn what it is, the features of powerful software, and how to find one on the market. Read on to get enlightened.
Overview Of SMS Marketing
Short message service (SMS) marketing is a promotional method that involves sending adverts to the target audience by text messages. Businesses use this form of communication to interact with existing and potential customers in a more personal way.
Besides, SMS marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach a broader demographic. It also enhances customer engagement.
There are many SMS marketing strategies you can consider for your company. One of them is the use of ringless voicemail. This is a process of delivering pre-recorded audio messages to customers’ phone inboxes without disturbing them. That’s possible because the phone doesn’t ring.
There are several benefits of including voicemails in your SMS marketing strategy. For instance, it enhances customers’ responses.
When you send promotional messages to customers without disturbance, you allow them the freedom to decide when to open them. For that reason, they’ll read your messages at their most convenient time, thus, increasing their chances of responding. Apart from that, most ringless services use automated tools to send messages. This allows you to target a vast audience within no time.
It also enhances the productivity or efficiency of your agents. However, you must ensure you work with the right service provider. For instance, you can consider the Drop Cowboy ringless voicemail or those of other reputable companies.
Features Of A Good SMS Marketing Software
As you’ve in the previous section, you can reap more benefits through SMS marketing. However, it’s not always sunshine and rainbows, and can fail to generate the desired results. This is especially true if you’re still using outdated and manual SMS marketing practices. For that reason, you can consider installing software to streamline the whole process. Make sure you purchase the right tool.
Some of the features to consider when selecting SMS marketing software include:
-
Auto-Dialer Tool
Including an auto-dialer tool in your SMS marketing strategy has many benefits to take your business a notch higher. For instance, it reduces agents’ idle time.
Manual dialing of customers’ contacts leads to increased idle time. This is because the agents or representatives have to wait for a call to be connected. During the entire period, your agents will be listening to busy tones. And, in some other instances, a call might get disconnected even before connecting with a customer.
The auto-dialer technology allows your SMS marketing system to skip any time-wasting call. That reduces the idle time of your agents.
An auto-dialer tool also allows you or your agents to increase productivity. This feature allows you to automate your SMS marketing system to connect with more customers within the shortest time. If you want to connect with more contacts per hour, you can consider including Power Dialer software or any other similar software in your SMS marketing strategy.
-
Mass Group Texting
Time is one of the essential resources of your company. If well managed, time gives you the ability to realize your company’s goals. That’s why you need to eliminate time-wasting steps or processes in your business.
SMS marketing is one of the business processes that can consume a lot of your time. This is especially true if you’re still using manual tools to send messages. For that reason, you may want to buy SMS marketing software with a mass group texting feature.
Mass texting helps you save considerable time and energy. It lets you send promotional messages to your subscribers all at once. You can use the saved time to do other constructive activities.
-
Auto-Responders
It’s no doubt that, in most cases, customers are too busy. They might want to make a quick inquiry before making a final purchase decision.
Most customers don’t want to wait for hours or minutes before receiving your response. When that happens, you’ll likely lose customers to your competitors. Even if you can manually respond to customers’ concerns, it can consume much of your time. That’s where SMS marketing software with the auto-responders feature becomes essential.
The auto-responder tool enables you to instantly send pre-selected messages based on what keywords your customers have used in their messages. This allows you to save time. It also helps boost the experience or satisfaction of your customers. For that reason, more and more customers will likely remain connected to your brand.
-
Data Collection
Gathering customers’ data forms an integral part of any promotional campaign, and SMS marketing isn’t an exception. By collecting information, you can build buyers’ personas. These are profiles that represent your real customers in terms of interests.
Common details that can help build a buyer’s persona include customers’ ages, locations, purchasing behaviors, etc. Collecting target audiences’ details enables you to offer personalized products or services.
One of the best ways to collect customers’ details is by utilizing SMS marketing software. However, the tool you select must have a data collection feature. This allows you to automatically gather clients’ information to help you make the right decisions.
-
Two-Way Messaging
As noted earlier, auto-responder enables you to use a bot to respond to customers’ concerns. However, sometimes, a customer may only want to communicate with a natural person. You may want to find SMS marketing software with a two-way messaging feature in such a case.
The feature allows you to start a conversation with a customer in real-time. This is especially important when you want to provide close guidance or direction to your customers until they make a purchase.
Also, the two-way messaging feature helps improve customers’ experience. This increases your chances of boosting your business sales.
Finding The Right SMS Marketing Software
Determining the software’s features is one of the basic steps you need to take toward the success of your SMS marketing campaign. However, you must choose the right software for a sustainable marketing campaign. You can achieve that by:
-
Purchasing Compatible Software
Running a successful business will require you to install different types of software to perform different tasks. That’s to say, apart from SMS marketing, you’ll likely have other tools to streamline other processes, like accounting, human resources management, asset management, customer relations management, etc. That’s why you need compatible SMS marketing software.
Compatibility is the ability of the selected software to match with already existing applications in your business systems. It ensures all the installed tools work in harmony with one another.
Purchasing an incompatible SMS software can force you to incur huge costs. This is especially true when you decide to replace your entire business system to accommodate the new tool, thus, affecting profitability. You could avoid that by selecting a compatible system.
-
Choose A Scalable Solution
Like any other entrepreneur, you probably want to grow your business from its current level until it becomes a giant in the market. When that happens, you might be forced to replace all your systems to accommodate your company’s growth. That’ll also attract extra costs to your firm. You can avoid that by selecting a scalable solution from the start.
Scalability refers to the ability of the selected SMS marketing software to grow with your company. It’ll accommodate your business today, when it’s small, and even when it expands. For that reason, you won’t spend any money in the future, replacing the already installed system.
-
Find High-Quality Software
Finding high-quality software is a must if you want to build an effective SMS marketing strategy. Low-quality software is more prone to malfunction than high-quality ones. That’s to say that having a low-quality system might increase your company’s downtimes, thus, hurting the productivity of your marketing staff.
On the other hand, high-quality SMS software can sustain your business for an extended period. Besides, such a system might not require heavy investment in repair and maintenance. It, therefore, allows you to minimize marketing costs to increase profits.
-
Select A Solution With Reasonable Pricing
There are different SMS marketing software out there. However, they all have different pricing. To get the total cost of any SMS marketing software, you need to take the total purchase price, installation expense, maintenance, and other associated fees.
There’s no uniform way of calculating the price of SMS marketing software services. Each company has its own method for determining prices. It’s, therefore, essential to make a price comparison list before purchasing any solution.
Some business owners consider purchasing SMS marketing software at the lowest price to minimize costs. Little do they know that the lowest price isn’t always an indication of the best deal in the market. Some SMS marketing solutions with low prices are poor quality and might not add the desired value to your promotional campaigns.
At the same time, it’d be good to note that SMS marketing software with the highest price tag isn’t always the best solution out there. Some service providers will attach high prices to their tools to make clients believe they’re the best, which isn’t true.
Before paying for any SMS marketing software, research whether it’s correctly priced. Strive to get a solution with reasonable pricing. In other words, the price attached to your preferred SMS marketing software should reflect its quality.
-
Find SMS Marketing Software You Can Utilize With Ease
Another vital thing to consider when purchasing SMS marketing software is its ease of use. While most software solutions are user-friendly, others are very complex.
There are two major disadvantages of selecting complex SMS marketing software. The first one is the time it might take to train your workers. A system that your employees will take too long to learn affects your company’s productivity. For that reason, you won’t effectively compete in the market. Apart from that, a complex system might attract extra costs to your online business. You might be forced to hire experts to train your employees on how to work with the software.
On the other hand, you can save time and money by purchasing simple SMS marketing software. Such a system may only require you to spend less time introducing your workers to the system. Besides, you might not need to spend money on hiring experts to train your workers.
-
Work With A Reputable Service Provider
Working with a reputable service provider is another effective strategy to ensure you get the right SMS marketing software. This is important because not all software vendors you find online are legit or committed to providing the best solutions.
Besides, some people who claim to sell SMS marketing software are just scammers hoping to access your personal and business data to use it to their advantage. That’s why it’s advisable to check a particular service provider’s reputation before paying for the software.
If you want to know a vendor’s reputation, you only need to visit their online platforms, like their website, to read other clients’ reviews. A company with many positive reviews is considered to have a good reputation. You might want to work with such a firm as it’ll likely provide high-quality software and excellent services.
Takeaway
If you want to boost your company’s visibility within no time, you must consider developing an SMS marketing strategy. It’s a cost-effective strategy for connecting with both local and international customers. However, it’d be good to use software to simplify your marketing efforts to save time and money. Make sure you find software with the right features from a genuine service provider.
