Text message marketing is traditionally used as a way for businesses to reach customers.
However, if you look at text message marketing from a different perspective, it can be used to communicate during a pandemic.
Recently, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Since then schools as well as businesses all over the world have closed their doors for the time being. During this critical time, text message marketing is a useful communication channel for businesses stakeholders, namely employees and customers.
Changing Your Mindset About Text Message Marketing
The best way to change your mindset about text message marketing is understanding that text message marketing technology is useful for literally anyone who communicates, or wants to communicate, by text message. Over 3.5 billion people around the world own a smartphone and use text in their daily life. Plus, 98% of received messages are opened and responded to within 3 minutes.
It’s pretty astonishing how fast a text message is sent and received. The timing is almost instant! As a business owner, use this to your advantage by leveraging text message marketing in the following ways.
Engage Your Stakeholders Using Keyword Campaigns
A simple way to ensure stakeholders access information you send is text message marketing keyword campaigns. These are simple to set up and easy to advertise. Perhaps you’ve already seen them around. A short example is “Text ROCCOS1 to 50505 to receive 50% off your first order.”
When a stakeholder texts in, you receive their number, and the text message keyword campaign sends them the pertinent texts you’ve pre-planned. Speaking of which, planning text messages is easy. You set them up by choosing the wording, links, and attachments you need sent. Then, when a stakeholder texts in, the message(s) are automatically sent.
Remind Your Audience with Drip Campaigns
Another way to take advantage of text message marketing to communicate during a pandemic is by using drip campaigns. Marketers use drip campaigns all the time to reel people into a sale. The idea is to keep reminding your customer about your product in the hopes that they’ll turn into an actual sale. However, during a pandemic, text message marketing drip campaigns allow you to remind stakeholders about important updates or changes to your business.
For example, a lot of businesses during this time have opted to let their employees work from home. Drip campaigns can help employees work from home by reminding them about important tasks that must be accomplished each week or even just motivation to keep working, even when they are quarantined at home. Encouragement and information go a long way.
A drip campaign texts on a specific, pre-determined schedule. So, as long as you customize and set messages, employees and customers receive them straight to their cell phone on the schedule you’ve set.
Broadcast for Efficiency
Perhaps the largest group potentially benefiting from text message marketing communication is your customers.
Broadcasting is a fancy way of saying mass text messaging. And it’s important to note that mass text messaging and group messaging aren’t the same. Group messaging sends a message to everyone at the same time and each person sees who else the message went to and everyone receives replies.
However, mass text messages are sent to many people at once, but the message is received individually. The replies are only sent to the sender of the text message. Plus, scheduling broadcasts is a sinch!
During a pandemic, everyone is busy, at least in the sense of receiving information. Each day customers are bombarded with emails from every business they’ve ever gone to about how the pandemic is affecting their business. Make sure your messages cut through the noise by reaching them a different way. With text message marketing broadcasts, customers are quickly informed about your business during the pandemic.
And remember, broadcasts send to as many people as you’d like without the hassle of trying to remember who to text and when to text them. As soon as you decide on a specific policy change to your business during the pandemic, schedule the message right then. That way you won’t forget and your customers are in the know.
Use Text Message Marketing for More Than Just Business Marketing
Text message marketing tools, like the ones discussed above, are useful for more than just business marketing. They are useful to communicate with your stakeholders during a pandemic.
Just like you use text message marketing to reach customers during normal business operation times, utilize text message marketing tools to your advantage during the pandemic.
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