Mass Text Message Marketing Equals Mass Profits For Your Business: Here’s How to Get Started

95% of the American population own a mobile phone. Think about that… That’s 308 out of 325 million people.

Given that level of saturation, it’s natural that businesses would want to find a way to market through text. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information out there regarding how to get into the mass text message arena. And even if you do figure out how to get started, chances are you’ll have trouble making your text message campaigns successful given the intricacies of the medium.

This article aims to lay all of your mass text message marketing questions and barriers to bed!

In it, we go over why text message marketing rocks, how to get up and running with it and how to make it a valuable branch of your marketing tree!

Why Text Message Marketing Rocks

Text message marketing rocks for a couple of reasons.

For starters, as we mentioned, mobile phones are the king of communication devices when it comes to saturation within the US marketplace. Beyond that, did you know that text messages have a 98% open rate?

Compare that to the open rate you’re getting on your email campaigns and it becomes clear that text message marketing has a ton of value to offer businesses.

How to Get Started With Mass Text Message Marketing

If you’re excited about the prospect of getting set up with marketing through text, good!

Excitement isn’t going to get your text infrastructure built though. Following the steps we’ve laid out below, on the other hand, will get you on the right track.

Step 1: Choose a Text Message Marketing Provider

As with all marketing mediums, you’ll need a provider in order to build out your text message marketing system. Contrary to the assumptions that many business owners have, your current email marketing provider probably doesn’t offer text messaging services.

You’ll need to find a specialty service.

The good news is that there are excellent mass text messaging specialty services that offer outstanding rates and flexible terms.

Know though that not all providers are created equal. Carefully vet the company you’re considering doing business with by assessing their on-site testimonials, or better yet, testimonials that have been aggregated by third party providers like Yelp.

The last thing you want to do is put your customer’s information in the hands of a non-trustworthy service.

Step 2: Start Collecting Subscribers

With your provider in place, the next thing you’ll want to do is start adding people to your text marketing list.

You can do this in a few ways:

Ask Your Email List Subscribers to Opt-In

If you already have a considerable amount of customers sitting on your email list, send them a note asking them to opt into your text messages. You can offer them a discount on your products or services in exchange for their opt-in.

Ask Customers to Opt-In When They Do Business With You

If you run a hotel or a restaurant, chances are, you’re already collecting your customer’s phone number when they check in or make a reservation. When they give you their phone number, you can ask if they’d like to opt into promotional messages in exchange for some sort of an upgrade or perk.

Social Media

There’s no faster (or cheaper) way to spread the message about your text promotions than through social media. Put up a Facebook status, send out a tweet, post on Instagram and get people to opt-in by offering them something in return.

Step 3: Plan Your Marketing Campaigns… Carefully

Where a lot of businesses go wrong with mass text messaging is that they don’t understand how personal a text is.

People use their phones to communicative with the people that are closest to them. If they feel that a business is trying up their phone line with annoying coupons, they’re going to opt out.

That’s why it’s important to leverage texting only for your most important campaigns and only when you have a tremendous amount of value to offer to consumers.

Your customers should know that if they get a text from you, it’s really good news for them.

Step 4: Come Up With a Clever Pitch and Hit Send

Once you have your text campaigns in order, it’s time to send your first message. Keep your pitch short (no more than 200 characters), include a link that people can click on to get more information and hit send!

Keep an eye on metrics like text bounces, unsubscribes, and click rates to get an understanding of which of your promotional messages are working and which are bothering customers.

Step 5 – Repeat

By this point, you’ll have everything in place to continue mass text messaging your customers. Always work to refine your messages and provide value to customers.

If you do, you’ll find that more people join your texting list and fewer people will come off of it.

Wrapping Up How and Why to Get Into Mass Text Message Marketing

Mass text message marketing is a valuable but finicky marketing medium that is hard to get right. If your business can walk the tightrope successfully though and provide a ton of value to its customers via text, you’re going to love how much traffic texts can drive to your products and services!

Want to learn more about mass text message marketing? Looking to get more tips on how to build up your business?

If so, check out more of our content on “Find a Business That” now!