Business Description
With more new digital channels accessible for promotion, it is hard for small businesses to get in touch with customers just with their marketing message. Though there’s almost no limit to possibilities for promotion nowadays, this huge amount of publicity creation and promotion have compelled the people to become “blind” and smarter in a selection of tools to shun them.
Smart marketers had turned this weird situation in their favor when some of the underestimated or forgotten communication channels were decided to be used by them. We are talking about SMS and SMS marketing.
What can be efficiently done with SMS by small businesses than with other digital channels?
Below is a list of suggestions:
1. Promote Flash Sales
When businesses offer a single service/product for sale of some limited time (e.g. 1 day), this type of scarcity marketing is called flash sales. People usually attach more value to things that are few in quantity, or time-limited, hence this particular nature of promotion is very efficient. If personalized direct marketing or scarcity principle is combined and carried out by SMS, your marketing campaign will yield great results finally. Exclusivity is loved by people so once your premium VIP offer is received, they will surely feel special and be willing to take action.
2. Make Sure You Use Mobile Discount Coupons
Without a doubt, people love discounts. Many go ahead and spend lots of time searching for specific websites used to sharing discount coupons and vouchers made for various products. Knowing this, this model should be hence implemented by your marketing strategy, but ensure you carry it differently.
Once more, let’s remind you of exclusivity. When you try to offer discount coupons on your website and tell people to fill in forms to receive the coupons via email, many people will end up giving up. And even when they sign up, email campaigns, having a relatively low open rate. MailChimp regularly updates their email benchmark stats, and their data show that the average open rate for email marketing campaigns is just around 20%.
Compared to the SMS open rate (a huge 98%), the communication channel that more effectual is clear. If you put in order, SMS campaigns, and ask people to opt-in to get your exclusive discount offers directly to their phones, which is far more convenient than email, surely, the number of people who will accept this will be larger. Even if the number is not bigger, the quality of leads collected this way is much more relevant basically because you will get people who are interested in what you do. Also, data show that mobile coupons are ten times more likely to be redeemed than their paper versions which confirm you should use them.
3. Always Reward Customer Loyalty with a Virtual Customer Card
This approach is helpful and guarantees you more people and more sales in your store. Rewarding the loyalty of customers by making them win great prizes is a great incentive for regular shopping. It’s a very convenient marketing strategy for small businesses that operate in brick-and-mortar stores. A virtual customer card makes it easy to handle and to track purchases, amounts and overall customer activity. Such an approach readily makes you define rewards and create reward vouchers that will be sent to your customers automatically via SMS. A virtual customer card is ideal for both increasing customer loyalty and keeping track of purchase frequency and business development. This approach is helpful and guarantees you more people and more sales in your store. Rewarding the loyalty of customers by making them win great prizes is a great incentive for regular shopping. It’s a very convenient marketing strategy for small businesses that operate in brick-and-mortar stores. A virtual customer card makes it easy to handle and to track purchases, amounts and overall customer activity. Such an approach readily makes you define rewards and create reward vouchers that will be sent to your customers automatically via SMS. A virtual customer card is ideal for both increasing customer loyalty and keeping track of purchase frequency and business development.
4. Make Sure You Announce a Brand New Product
If you have a new product that you are about to launch, an excellent way of promoting it is to send exclusive info to your regular customers via SMS. SMS is an excellent choice for such marketing activity because, other than textual announcements, you can send links to your website or e-commerce where you will provide more details. The average SMS click-through rate is more than 30% (the average email CTR is 3%), so the chances that people will see and know about your new product are pretty good.
You can also combine product launch and special offer campaigns by leading your good customers to a specific landing page that was designed to present an exclusive offer created just for them. This way, you are also implementing a scarcity principle, and the combination of the three will give excellent results. Not to mention word of mouth marketing that naturally comes to play.
5. Facilitate Appointment Reminders
Appointment-based businesses, such as doctors, dentists, beauty salons, etc. are surely in real trouble if they get to have lots of no-shows. Waste of time, resources and money, are something small appointment-based businesses cannot afford. Therefore, the best investment in cases like that is an automated SMS appointment reminder service. This service is a time and cost-effective one as it allows you to pre-schedule reminders that will be sent automatically. This way, you will reduce no-shows and have an appreciable positive impact on your ROI.
