Mass Texting 101: The Basics of SMS Marketing

Mass Texting 101: The Basics of SMS Marketing

More and more people connect with one another over text every single day. There is no doubt about the fact that texting has carved itself a special place in the heart of society. From texting flirty messages with potential partners, to texting our kids or our parents, to just texting our fantasy football league or the group for the girls-night-out. Everyone texts because everyone has a smartphone these days. For businesses and brands, this makes SMS marketing one of the most effective and direct lines of marketing to which they have access.

One of the reasons that SMS marketing continues to prove itself as so effective is because of the fact that consumers almost always have their phones right beside them. Additionally, it’s one of the few forms of modern day communication that rarely gets silenced by consumers because of its potential urgency, immediacy, and accessibility. It’s more common for users to mute notifications from social media platforms than it is their actual text-line.

SMS or mass text marketing isn’t as easy as picking up your phone, typing in some numbers, and pressing send. In fact, there’s a little bit you need to know before you’ll be able to jump into your first mass texting campaign.

The ins and Outs of Mass Texting

In order to get start with a mass texting or SMS marketing campaign, an organization first needs to partner with a service provider. This is a provider who will be able to assign either a short-code or a long-code to the organization which in turn enables SMS communications between consumers and organizations.

Short codes are typically 5-6 digits in length, and are design to be easily remember. The other benefit that short codes provide is their texting capacity. While other options have a much more limited bandwidth for texting volume, short codes allow organizations to send and receive around 2400 messages per minute.

If the 5-6 digit short code seems a little odd, or you don’t feel your business is going to be sending and receiving that high of a volume of texts, you can opt instead for a long-code. Long-codes are more akin to traditional 10-digit phone numbers, but they are more limited in their capability. Instead of 2400 messages per minute like their short-code counterparts, long-codes offer a bandwidth of about 60 messages per minute. It’s important to keep in mind that this is significantly fewer than the short-code.

Creating Your SMS Marketing Campaign

In addition to partnering with a service provider and obtaining a short-code or a long-code it is also highly suggest to partner with a mass text service, or invest in a software that will facilitate and manage the sending and receiving of messages from a mass text campaign. This is especially important because it helps marketing and advertising professionals stay organized amidst a flurry of incoming data.

These same service providers or SMS marketing management platforms will also assist in the design and deployment of the SMS campaign, making the whole process smooth and easy from start to finish.

The Role of Consumer Consent

Consumer and data privacy have come into the spotlight over the past few years as areas that needed major addressal. Especially in the context of online and virtual experiences. This led to a lot of the recent data privacy integrations that have taken effect across the internet.

This is also an extremely important aspect of an SMS or mass text campaign, though. Consumers always need to have an easy, clear, and obvious way to opt-out of a mass text message campaign that comes from a business or brand.

Measuring Metrics and Success

In addition to using software on the front end of things in order to design and deploy the campaign, technology should be employed throughout and after the campaign as well. Softwares that allows organizations to track the consumer data that results from an SMS campaign can offer deep and powerful insights into consumer patterns, and the success of the SMS campaign as a whole.

Folding SMS Marketing Into the Overall Strategy

While SMS marketing campaigns boast a high open-rate and can be extremely effective, they shouldn’t be the only marketing strategy on which an organization relies. Instead, SMS marketing campaigns should be folded into the organization’s comprehensive marketing strategy to complement, bolster, and expand brand presence in the modern and virtual society in which we find ourselves today.

Some Final Thoughts on the SMS Marketing Basics

There are a lot of options when it comes to digital marketing in 2022. Deciding which tactics and strategies are best suited for your business can take some trial and error. With a smartphone in the pocket of nearly every consumer, though, SMS marketing campaigns continue to be some of the most effective that there are, achieving fairly high open rates, and creating a direct path to connect and communicate with consumers.

Also Read: Popular Online Games That Took The World By Storm In 2022