The Pros and Cons of SMS Marketing

For most businesses, text message marketing has become a trend now. If you’re checking if you should, too, here are some of the pros and cons of SMS marketing.

SMS Marketing Pros

If you haven’t already gone through our list of SMS Marketing uses, you should do that before we move on to The Pros and Cons of SMS Marketing. You’ll quickly see why 60% of businesses are increasing their SMS marketing budget. 

1. Conversion Rates are High

According to studies, SMS campaigns can reach up to 45% conversion rates. (That characterizes the topmost part of the spectrum.)

In comparison with other digital marketing channels, average conversion rates are:

• 9.21% Facebook ads
• 3.26% Google Ads
• 3.17% email marketing

Driving conversions is one of the significant benefits of SMS marketing campaigns. Hence, a 156x return on SMS messaging was generated by Toroe Eyewear.

2. The Public Open, Read, and Reply Quickly to Texts

Individuals tend to open, read, and reply quickly to texts beyond over-the-top conversion rates. You must have come across before that the text messages open rate is 98%.

However, it doesn’t mean that they immediately open the texts. Around 90% of them read one within the initial three minutes after the reception. That’s the reason the average text message response time is 90 seconds only compared to email with 90 minutes.

All these combined, you’ll have the best channel for time-sensitive or flash sales offers. This is why Barn Bowl & Bistro practice text messaging to bring in customers and reply to downtimes eventually.

3. Cost-Effective

SMS marketing is a reasonably priced channel. This appears to surprise most marketers who believe sending texts are costly.

If your business has a $10 average order value and sends a 500-contact text blast, you will generate $1,450. That’s an ROI of 5700%!

4. Customized Text Messages

SMS is a channel that is used to communicate with families and friends. It yields the same real estate when your business earns access to a person’s inbox. Right there, that’s a personal channel.

You can step up your game by customizing your business text marketing strategy if you wonder why personalized content tops static content with 42%.

5. Track, Measure and Optimize Your Performance

We’ve written a bit-by-bit guide on how to track revenue from SMS campaigns. The majority of SMS marketing platforms provide several levels of reporting. We offer a user-friendly dashboard that eases how you can trend your business campaigns.

6. “Blue Ocean” Marketing Opportunity

“Blue ocean” is a term derived from a book entitled Blue Ocean Strategy by Renee Mauborgne and Chan Kim. It describes markets that correspond to adequate opportunities for growth.

For the last five years, paid social has boosted up, and it costs channels such as email marketing for customer acquisition. This figures why texting is becoming popular.

Brands continue to look for innovative places to communicate to customers – spaces wherein they don’t feel bored and ROI is certain. SMS marketing gives you that opportunity.

Once you come together all these, along with the fact that according to channel preference studies claims customers would like business to text them—a winning combination.

7. Your Texts are Anticipated by Your Customers

We’ve written about the benefits in another article why it is effective –text message marketing. Since individuals subscribe to get your texts, rest assured that your message can reach your target audience.

SMS Marketing Cons

Perhaps you’ve heard that customers believe text messaging is intrusive. We’ve discovered that it can be mitigated easily by following several direct practices for SMS marketing.

Still, it does not mean text messaging is flawless. It also has its disadvantages. Here are some:

1. Managing a New Channel

It is a challenge handling a new channel –multi-channel marketing at the most. 

2. Growing Your List is Required

Most business who considers SMS as a new channel fail to notice that it requires people for text marketing to work. The good thing is we provide lots of various methods to boost your SMS subscriber file.

Our top two fastest ways to grow your list are:

Keywords: These are words, even phrases that customers can hit you up to express that they want to receive a text message from you. With your text-enabled phone number, if your business is into dresses, you can invite people to text “FORMAL” to 800800.

Mobile Sign-Up Widget: With this, your website visitors can text in their keywords easily.

When a visitor clicks a trigger button, a pop-up containing additional info will open on your text marketing program. When he clicks the button inside the pop-up, their built-in text app will open along with the keyword and prefilled number. The last thing to do is hit the send button.

3. “Set It and Forget It” Is Impossible

There are little to no marketing channels that can set and forget. Marketing automation tools even require continuous tweaking and monitoring to guarantee functionality.

An effective SMS marketer must gather the target audience’s phone numbers.

Then subscribers must be kept interested using distinct calls to action (CTAs).

Sending a coupon two weeks or an identical 160-character promotional message will surely decrease people subscribing.

That’s the reason we publish articles on our Navigating SMS blog. We intend to present all the inspiration and tips needed for sending new campaigns.

Every marketing channel has it’s place and the pros and cons of SMS marketing are no different. We think that SMS marketing can make a difference for nearly every business. Contact us to see how your business could benefit from SMS marketing.