Do you use phone texting as part of your business marketing strategy? Do you have a marketing automation system set up so that phone texting is a relatively painless exercise? Many people still are not using this great tool but with the prevalence of mobile phones these days, a phone texting strategy just might be the right thing for your business! You don’t have to manually enter numbers and text people individually; there are some great systems available to you where messages can be sent out to your customers on a mass scale.
Why would you use phone texting as part of your marketing? Basically it is a very efficient way of gathering customer data and building a list automatically which you can then promote to. You have probably seen television ads or show promotions where they ask people to text a certain word to a number; this is their way of very quickly capturing the information of a large number of viewers.
So if you are looking at this and thinking ‘how can my business use phone texting?’ here are a few ideas;
- Appointment reminders – especially service-based businesses such as salons.
- Promotions – offer a discount to those who mention receiving a text message or make limited-time offers (e.g. ‘free ‘x’ when you purchase ‘y’ between 1pm and 3pm today’).
- Use in conjunction with print advertising such as in newspapers or on posters (‘text ‘x’ to 123 to receive a free ‘y’ or to enter a competition). A great way to add customers to your list!
- Networking events – get people to text their name to a number on your card.
- Event promotion – keep people engaged with your event by sending messages regularly beforehand.
The systems available for you to use are dependent upon which part of the world you live in. We couldn’t cover the whole world in an episode, but here we take a look at what is available in Australia, the USA and the UK;
- Australia – Burst SMS
- UK – Text Local
- USA – Instant Customer. This has some really cool features such as responding back to texts and the ability to scan in business card details!
One of the great features of most of the phone texting systems available out there is that they will integrate with your auto-responder system (such as Office Autopilot – as discussed in a previous post) and allow you to add subscribers to your email list. Prices vary, some are monthly subscription-based and some charge per message, but overall you can get a good service without spending a large amount of money.
Keep an eye out for more posts on automating your business. If you would like to see an entire free webinar on tips and tricks for automating your marketing, then follow this link and enter your details…
Questions? Comments? Please let us know below!