Why SMS Marketing is a Great Way to Engage with Customers
Email marketing is dead, it has been dead for at least the last couple of years, and its funeral is no secret.
So what’s the replacement? Digital Marketing can’t be dead with emails, right? Well, that’s where SMS marketing made its appearance.
SMS marketing actually came into existence quite some time back, but was being dominated by emails. Only when emails started to fade away could the true colors and sky-high potential of SMS Marketing be recognized.
Why is SMS Marketing Still Alive?
Something was needed to fill in after the apparent collapse of email marketing.
Well emails collapsed primarily because of the bulk spam mails they started sending, plus the buying and selling of email lists to totally irrelevant industries. Also, by this time the benefits SMS marketing held over emails started to be clearly visible.
So when everyone knew that there was something better than emails for customer acquisition and people actually gave a second’s thought to what was sent, the world rushed towards it.
Other solid reasons why it’s still alive are:-
Comparatively Newer
Whenever there’s something new, there’s an initial window before people start ignoring and escaping it. Well SMS marketing hasn’t hit that window yet.
Email marketing still exists in its last breath, and people like to ignore them. While SMS marketing is the newer model of marketing and hence is taken more seriously.
Lower Spam, Much Lower
I am not claiming SMS marketing is 100% spam free, it’s not. Just the platform has changed, not the people or industries who spam.
But, the spam rates are still much lower compared to the thousands of spam emails you might receive every day on emails.
Why does SMS marketing get better results than any other marketing channel?
SMS marketing isn’t just alive, instead, it’s performing much better than almost any other bulk marketing platform, owing to the following factors:-
High open rates
How many times do you receive an SMS and you don’t actually open it? I’d say rarely. It’s our habit to open almost every single SMS.
Can you say the same for emails? Obviously no. In fact, I open less than 10% of all my received mail.
In fact, it has been proved that SMS(s) are opened almost 99% of the times, while emails have that number somewhere between 20-33%. So if you send someone 100 E-mails, they’ll check out only 20 of them and that too on your best days.
Reach customers anytime, anywhere, on any device
I guess you can say that even for emails these days which are always connected to Wi-Fi on their devices, but still I doubt people just start reading every single mail as soon as it arrives.
Instead, most people (including me), have a specific time-frame when they read and reply to emails for the whole day, and then for the next 24 hours, I forget emails were ever invented.
But as far as SMS is concerned, we do check it out no matter what time of day it is.
And not that it matters a lot, but you can reach people even when they aren’t connected to the internet in any way, while that’s not the case with email marketing.
Short
Why do people open SMS(s)? Even after knowing it might be spam? Well, the simple reason is, they know it would be short no matter what it is.
So they won’t have to scroll or read through hundreds of lines as they have to do with emails, and hence they’re willing to trade the chance of actually stumbling on an offer or a seriously legit SMS to a couple of seconds of their times instead of completely ignoring it.
High Conversion Rates
I think this point goes without saying, I mean if SMS marketing is offering better open rates, better deliverability and sense of trust, obviously it would get us better conversion rates, right?
Because only when people open something, can they convert. They don’t open emails or any other form of marketing mails as much as they open SMS messages = obviously, SMS marketing would deliver better results compared to any other platforms.
In fact, SMS messages have a CTR rate of around 36%, while emails? That’s lower than 5-6%!
Final Words
So I’m pretty sure the above had helped to shed some light on why SMS marketing is still alive and getting better results than any other marketing channel, didn’t it?
There is still one catch though, email marketing isn’t “buried” yet even though it might be dead, and so I’m not stating or claiming that SMS marketing has totally taken over.
What I am saying is, SMS marketing performs much better than emails and in the near future there’s a fair chance than not of SMS marketing taking over emails completely, but it still leaves email marketing with a fair fighting chance.
Do let me know if you agree to the above stated points.
Image: Photospin
Author Bio:
Danish Wadhwa is Digital Marketing & Branding Pro, who is helping startup and business for sales conversion optimization. His drive, passion, and analytical mind enabled his successful foray into the arena of Marketing & Sales Automation.
