Try BULK SMS marketing to reach and communicate with your clients in a constructive way.

Businesses sit with large banks of data often using marketing automation software to discover the ins and outs of their customers’ behaviors. Yet this bulk still only choose to market to their customers via email. When looking at the rate of engagement for email marketing versus text marketing, utilizing BULK SMS marketing is a no-brainer. The average open rate for email lies between 28-33% whilst BULK SMS boasts an open rate of around 99% (assuming you’ve got a squeaky clean database). And click-through is even more enticing with text messages seeing a healthy 14-20% in comparison to email’s lowly 2-8% CTR. 

Getting started with your first campaign…

• Outline your objectives
• Are you looking to promote a specific product or service? Do you want to request feedback from your customers? Here you’ll need to entice the customer with an incentive to respond; for example offering a promotional ‘BULK SMS only’ coupon for a % discount, or the opportunity to be entered into a competition.
• Make yourself known
• To guarantee the recipient identifies your business as the sender, use your brand term within the Sender ID if possible (some countries have restrictions on this). Whilst always ensuring to use your brand term within the first few lines of your message content.
• Writing your message content
• BULK SMS messages are most well-received when they’re short and snappy, don’t inundate your clients with unnecessary information: stick to the core offer. Two different types of messages will change the parameters on the number of characters that can be used. GSM – Here you have 160 characters using the ‘GSM alphabet’, which allows for the standard English alphabet as well as some basic symbols and accented letters. You can check your message against the GSM alphabet. The other format is known as Unicode. This allows for a maximum of 70 characters (per message). And allows for all characters, including those not in the GSM alphabet. Note that should you use any Unicode characters for a GSM intended message the BULK SMS will send as Unicode and you may incur the cost of two messages for each one you send!
• Segment your data
• With much higher open and click-through rates, sending more targeted campaigns will prove more lucrative in the long-run. You’re better off sending various campaigns, but to smaller and more targeted volumes of recipients, than sending more generic campaigns to your entire database.
• Measuring success
• Tracking your campaigns is an absolute must, you can easily do so by building custom URLs for each campaign, there are a variety of tools that can be used to do so including Facebook’s Google analytics URL builder and Google Developers URL builder. This will allow you to easily track campaigns using Google Analytics.

Choosing when to send…

Unlike other channels, the day and time of when you choose to send your BULK SMS campaigns are imperative to their success.

Your industry will likely influence when your BULK SMS campaigns should be sent, to determine this, you’ll need to research into the times at which your audience is most active on their mobile phones. And which align nicely with your business. For example, if you’re a bar owner who’s targeting working people in your local area, to promote your happy hour starting at 5:30 pm, you’ll want to schedule your BULK SMS campaign between 4:00 – 5:00 pm on a Friday for the most successful results.

There are some general rules of thumb, however:

• Mondays are a no-go; countless surveys have all indicated that Monday’s are the worst-performing days for BULK SMS marketing.
• Being respectful; sending your BULK SMS early in the morning or late in the evening could not only harm the appearance of your campaign but have an adverse effect and cause the recipient to complain.
• Avoid rush hour; as with most channels, rush hour is never a good time to send your promotional material, so as a standard try to avoid sending your campaigns between 6:30 am and 9:00 am and 4:00 pm and 7:00 pm.
• Timezones are important; when taking into account all of the above, taking into consideration the country you’re sending to, ensure that the times of send align with where your target audience is situated.

Other things to bear in mind…

BULK SMS can be seen as a more ‘intrusive’ channel compared to the likes of email and social ads, it’s much more direct, so there are boundaries to adhere to. These include the obvious; do not spam your recipients. This will stop you in your tracks, not only will most of your users choose to opt-out; they’ll likely complain and get aggravated by your aggressive marketing efforts. Keep your campaigns to a maximum of one message per user per week.

There’s always a first try, and in BULK SMS marketing you have to strat right to proceed. 

As soon as a new user opts-in, don’t wait too long before choosing to message them. Consumers (whether B2B or B2C) are now flooded with marketing promotions and will quickly forget that they ever opted in. Ensure you’re using several channels; a combination of remarketing, email marketing, and BULK SMS to keep the user engaged. Sending one-off BULK SMS message with Broadnet Technologies blasts will not be as effective as an interesting, Omni channel campaign.

To conclude, Broadnet Technologies believes that BULK SMS marketing is a good way to generate a lot of leads if done right. While the time to send the bulk sms is really important it is also crucial that we offer true value that will convince our target audience to check out our products.

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