Most of us keep our mobile phones within arm’s reach and check new messages within minutes. So it’s no wonder SMS marketing is now a popular way for marketers to connect with customers.
But have you ever considered how SMS can actually support your other communication channels, such as email? Here are some ideas to get you thinking how your SMS and email activities can work together to grow, maintain and engage your customer base.
1. Email acquisition
Web forms are a great way of capturing new subscriber details to your database, but they’re not the only way. You can also do it via SMS with something we call virtual numbers.
Virtual numbers are a mobile phone number that is connected to your database instead of a handset. So if someone sends a message to your virtual number, it is captured directly within your database. Virtual numbers are extremely effective for offline email acquisition campaigns as they provide a simple, familiar way for people to submit their email address.
You simply ask people to SMS their email address to your virtual number and they become instantly subscribed to your database. This is a very popular method with offline competitions aimed at growing your email database.
2. Update bounced customer emails
Before deleting a customer’s record from your database because their email address has bounced, try contacting them by SMS. Tell them you’ve tried sending them an email about “xyz” and that it has bounced. And ask them to reply with their current email address.
This is where technology becomes your best friend too, because e-messaging platforms like Vision6 can automatically capture your customer’s reply SMS and update your database with the new email address. You can even automatically re-send your original email message to your customer’s new address, so this whole process can happen in close to real time without you even lifting a finger.
3. Engage email subscribers
Integrating SMS with email as part of a promotional campaign can be a very effective way to capture people’s attention, particularly when people aren’t reading your emails. Consider this example SMS message that seeks to drive people back to their email inbox to register for an event.
With the right targeting, these sorts of messages can work really well to entice people towards opening your email and following through on your call to action.
Have you implemented any of these ideas into your e-messaging strategy? How did it go?
