The Potential of Text Message Marketing

Since the beginning of marketing, there have been technology innovations that have revolutionized the way we market products and services to others. In the 1990’s, it was e-mail. E-mail was so innovative for communication purposes that marketers saw its potential as being one of the most potent marketing tools to ever find its way on to the technology stage. Now, e-mail has become less-lucrative as a method of marketing. Because of the presence and problem of commercial SPAM, e-mail marketing efforts have taken a dive into a low success rate. Granted, there are still those who find success with e-mail marketing, but generally speaking it is falling by the wayside.

Luckily, as technology evolves, new forms of media and advertising hit the floor and steal the spotlight as marketers look for new ways to promote and advertise.

One such technology evolution that’s making its way on to the stage of marketing is text messaging. This form of media is quickly changing how we communicate with one another and is clearly the dominant media for communication today. Because of its dominance in the communication world, it is now making its debut as a marketing means. There are several reasons why text messaging is a fantastic tool for marketing:

1. High read rate– This characteristic of text message marketing gives it the appeal that it has to marketers. The reason e-mail marketing became less effective was the falling of the read rates. The rates for text messages are in the high 80-90 percentile range depending on what time frame you are defining for the reading of the text. 97% of text messages are read and 83% of those are read within one hour. Those are impressive numbers.
2. High conversion rates– Conversion is essentially advertising that converts to a sale. When looking at text message marketing, because of its high read rate, the text message advertising converts into sales more often because those messages are read by the consumer more often.
3. High return on investment (ROI)– Return on investment is a comparison of profits made on advertising to how much was invested in the advertising. Doing bulk SMS marketing is very inexpensive and just a few sales can return a monthly investment in the advertising.
4. Low advertising waste– All forms of advertising have some element of waste. You send out 10,000 fliers and a certain amount of those fliers will be wasted by hitting the trash cans. The high read rates and higher conversion rates give SMS marketing lower rates of waste than other forms of marketing.
5. Timely manner of delivery– This attribute is tied directly to the high read rates. Text messages are (most often) delivered instantaneously. Nothing provides a more timely manner of delivery and almost instant read than text messaging. This makes it very useful for time-contingent marketing campaigns.

Now that you’ve seen the potential and power of text message marketing, there are ways of taking advantage of this great marketing tool. Many companies offering mobile marketing will offer affiliate programs to promote the texting service paying commissions for the sign up of customers. These companies will most often offer a reseller platform as well that will allow a marketer to harness the power of mobile marketing as their own, allowing for the selling of the service to the marketer’s customers. This helps a marketer looking to sell text message marketing to clients without having the headache of developing their own platform to do so.

The objective of this article was to provide a brief look into SMS marketing and strength it possesses as an option for advertising. There are several things that can be accomplished with it, in a much more efficient and effective way than other forms of marketing and advertising. It is suggested that you research text message marketing and determine if it can benefit you.