SMS marketing isn’t right for your customers. It’s invasive and people just find it annoying. Right?
Wrong.
When done properly, SMS marketing can be an extremely effective way to communicate with customers.
And more and more people are accepting it as a suitable way for businesses to connect with them.
According to AIMIA’s Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index, consumers have become more proactive and responsive in the use of their mobile phones to engage with businesses. The survey found that 57 percent of mobile phone users have now opted in to receive SMS messages from businesses (up from 47 percent last year).
The report also found that the proportion of respondents who opted in to receive messages increased for almost all business types, with banking, retail, and health and beauty providers leading the way.
Does this mean you should start blasting out promotional SMS messages to customers? Definitely not. That’s a sure path to disaster.
But I do think you should start thinking of ways to add value to your customer communications using SMS. As a communication channel, SMS is more immediate and has a higher read-rate than other channels. It therefore naturally lends itself to things like appointment reminders, service alerts and time-sensitive promotions.
If you’re new to SMS marketing, the most important thing to remember is that it’s permission based. So it’s vital to have consent and comply with anti-spam legislation. Here in Australia, the Spam Act 2003 incorporates email and SMS marketing with the same basic requirements applying to both.
- Consent must exist prior to sending your message
- The recipient should easily be able to identify the sender
- The recipient needs to have a simple method for opting out
Australia’s governing body ACMA provide good advice for adhering to anti-spam legislation around consent for SMS marketing. Plus Vision6 takes the worry of processing opt out requests off your hands as this happens automatically with the capture of SMS responses from your campaigns.
So whether you’ve tried SMS marketing in the past, or not at all, maybe it’s time to give it another look.
