What type of businesses benefit from Text Message Marketing?

In case you didn’t know, the question above in the title was a trick question. The answer to this is that any business can benefit from text message marketing! One of the main hurrdles we have when setting up a meeting is the resistance that some businesses have because they are not knowledgeable about Mobile Marketing. The key is to keep things simple, and relate back to the basics. I have had some clients in the past tell me that they don’t see how this could help their business because they don’t use their cell phone as often. The key here is not what business owners are doing with their cell phones, it’s what “their customers” are doing with their cell phones. We care about the customers behaviors and what are they doing while in the shop or restaurant.

Please find below the types of businesses that can benefit from Mobile Marketing:

Local Business – Local businesses such as restaurants, spas, salons, night clubs, and retail stores, hold the best opportunities for mobile marketing. This powerful tool can be used to attract new customers and increase the number of purchases from your current customers.

Text message campaigns are the easiest and most affordable mobile marketing efforts to launch by far. Text messaging is the easiest to implement because it is a universal application on cell phones and across carriers. Even basic features phones can do it, and it works the same on all phones, so the technological and cost barriers to launch a campaign are much lower than with any other mobile marketing tool. The reason a text message campaign is most likely to succeed is that more people send and receive text messages than use the mobile web or any other mobile application besides phone calling. So what type of campaigns can businesses run with text message marketing?

Mobile Coupons are a perfect way to increase sales from your current customers, attract new customers, and promote loyalty. Mobile coupons are also ultimately trackable so you can tell exactly how well your campaign worked. You can offer a one-time coupon, get people in the door the first time, and then get them to sign up for a text club or a coupon club. For example here are some ideas for mobile coupons:

• Free trial offer
• Special price or discount
• Regular coupons
• Contest coupons
• Creative coupons

-Anything you can offer on the mobile web or mobile websites can be accessed via a link in a text message. This technique saves time for your users. Not requiring your customers to type in the URL on their mobile devices can be a big benefit, especially if they don’t have a full QWERTY keyboard. I suggest sending a text message with a link only when you can get enough information into a text message. Provide value all the way through the process.

What businesses need to do is implement an aggressive marketing with mobile websites and material integration with mobile marketing. As an example, businesses can not just start sending text messages to a list of cell phones; a text message campaign takes some outreach, such as signs, advertisements, websites opt-in boxes, and email announcements to get customers to participate. Think about it, restaurants are already handing out flyers for delivery, or sending promotional ads through mail. With these marketing materials there is always room to add a call to action message and get the end-user to text into a your campaign. so combined both marketing efforts results to a successful, and profitable campaign.