What is Bulk SMS Marketing?
Bulk SMS Marketing allows you to send out a mass text message to hundreds or thousands of people instantly.
But why would a business or organisation choose to add yet another marketing channel to their business?
Here are 7 of the biggest reasons why we think you should be adding this to your marketing mix.
7 BIG Reasons Why You Should Be Using Bulk SMS Marketing
It can take just one major advantage to make a marketing channel worth diving into…I’ll give you five!
And we’re not talking about some “nice to have’s” these are big benefits that could have a major positive effect on your results.
1. Instant Reach To Any Mobile Phone
One of the issues with modern marketing is figuring out where your customers are.
The reality is your customer is on multiple platforms (Instagram, YouTube, X, Tik Tok, etc).
So which advertising channel do you push into?
SMS is not an online marketing channel which means you can reach them anywhere and since the SMS inbox is a high-priority channel people will check it shortly after they hear or see that text message come in.
Roughly 85% of adults own a mobile phone which means your text message is going to reach them wherever they are.
2. Get Results Expert Marketers Can Only Dream Of
Ever run an ad campaign before?
If you can get 10% of people to click on your ad consistently you’re an expert.
Ever run an email campaign?
If you can get 20-25%+ of people to open your email consistently, you’re doing great!
Imagine not knowing a thing about marketing and getting 90%+ of people to open your message consistently.
That’s the power of SMS.
The easiest way to increase sales is to have more people see your offer.
Would you rather 20% (the average email open rate) of people see your offer or would you rather 90%?
Pottery Barn: The company used SMS marketing to promote a sale and saw a 14% increase in revenue1.
The Clymb: The company used SMS marketing to promote a sale and saw a 30% increase in revenue2.
Chubbies Shorts: The company used SMS marketing to promote a sale and saw a 20% increase in revenue3.
3. Email marketing is only A Few Cents Per Recipient? (It’s actually more Than You Might Think)
When you consider the cost it takes to put together an email campaign you’ll see how affordable SMS marketing actually is.
The costs for email campaigns include:
Monthly platform costs – this is based on the number of subscribers you have including the 80% that miss your email every time you send out your campaign.
When I worked for an online wine company our email campaigns involved:
- Graphics person
- Developer
- Copywriter
- Testing / Proofing rounds
When you add up the hourly rate for each of these specialists the cost of each campaign is was very high.
All to get a 20% open rate.
With SMS you are typically only dealing with text so there’s no need for specialists and it’s limited so you’re forced to cut the fluff and get to the point.
Each text will cost you 5-8 cents per recipient (depending on what package you’re on) when you send out a campaign which may be seen as pricey especially if you’re sending out thousands of text messages but the ROI on SMS campaigns if done correctly is also very high.
For example, when I was working for a an online wine retailer our SMS campaigns would net us at least 3x higher ROI than our email campaigns.
Needless to say SMS was our favourite method to bring in sales to hit our monthly sales KPI’s.
4. Consumers Want To Receive Text Messages
One of the main objections businesses or organisations have with SMS is that they believe it to be unwanted from consumers, and that it is used by spammers and scammers.
According to a recent study 93% of consumers prefer SMB’s to use text messaging to communicate with them.
When SMS is done correctly i.e. when consumers subscribe to your SMS list (rather than buying a mobile list which is violates Australian SPAM laws) then customers are actually eager to hear from you.
5. High Deliverability: You Own Your Audience
Online marketing is great because it gives you a variety of ways to reach customers but the problem with online marketing is that you do not own that platform OR the audience that your promoting your solutions on.
This means you can lose it all overnight.
This means that you need to follow strict advertising or messaging policies which vary depending on the industry that you’re in.
They can change the algorithm overnight and all of a sudden your content or ads are seeing a reduced – remember when Facebook turned off the free organic traffic on their platform?
Even email has it’s downsides which come in the form of:
- Email reputation – the lower your score the less emails get delivered.
- Spam algorithms – if you are using specific word combinations your emails are intercepted and placed into the spam folder.
Text messaging is a little different.
While their are t laws around sending unauthorized text messages, if you play the game properly you can benefit from:
- Owning your audience (like with email) no platform can switch off your account and take them away from you.
- Not losing money due to your message being sent to the spam folder.
- Not having a reputation score crushing your delivery rates.
- Not having to worry about censorship or some digital oligarchy controlling your success.
- No algorithm changes that can switch your reach off overnight.
6. SMS Has 2-7x Times LESS Inbox Competition Than Email
If you’re running email campaigns you need to have a very good understanding of how to write sales copy as well as how to not trigger the spam algorithm.
By the way…
Mailmeteor lists out 750 spam words to avoid so that your email doesn’t get sin-binned. It’s tricky writing a promotional email while avoiding common words like “access” or “click below”.
Alright, so if you can actually get your email to land in the inbox, now you need to find a way to stand out amongst the other few dozen emails competing for that person’s attention.
According to Campaign Monitor the average person receives around 100-121 email per day – that’s a lot of competition.
Let’s compare that to SMS.
People typically receive anywhere from 16-52 text messages per day depending on the age group and the large majority of these texts will be from family and friends not from businesses.
Chances are, your competitors are not using SMS marketing which means you don’t need a skilled specialist to get your SMS delivered or opened.
This gives you a massive advantage in terms of having your promotion read without any competitive distraction.
Your message will get delivered straight into the inbox and your SMS will get opened.
You will be one of a very few businesses competing for that revenue.
7. Virtually Zero Learning Curve
If you have every signed up for an online marketing platform whether it’s email or advertising it can be incredibly intimidating, there are dozens of options you need to tweak and personlize before you even think about sending out your first email campaign.
Online SMS is very different.
If you’ve ever sent a text message or group text message from your mobile phone then you’re 95% trained up on how to use and send and SMS marketing campaign.
As far as setup, all you need to do is upload your mobile contacts.
Sending a text message is simply a matter of selecting the people or groups you wish to text, typing your message and then sending (or scheduling for later).
There’s no need for a copywriter or other specialists which makes it friendly for small business owners or soloprenuers with no technical background to get up and running right away.
Compared to other online marketing platform an SMS dashboard is super easy.
Step 1: upload your mobile contacts
Step 2: select the group/s you want to send a text message to just like on your phone.
Step 3: write your text message and click send.
Key Takeaways
- Instant Reach To Any Mobile Phone: People keep their mobile phones next them everywhere they are, either on their desk or in their pocket or handbag. Bulk SMS allows you to reach customers wherever they are.
- Get Results Expert Marketers Can Only Dream Of: Marketing is incredibly competitive and highly paid marketing professionals can only dream of getting the type of engagement, click-through and open rates that SMS is able to achieve natively even with a person who has never done marketing in their life.
- It’s Only A Few Cents Per Recipient (More Than You Might Think): While bulk SMS does charge for recipients it typically works out much cheaper than email when you consider how technical emai marketing is combined with it’s 20% open rates. SMS achieves 4-5x the opens and is able to drive more revenue as a result.
- Consumers Want To Receive Text Messages: contrary to popular belief, today’s consumer is happy to receive SMS messages from businesses they want to hear from.
- High Deliveribility: You Own Your Audience: Owning your audience is essential, especially when social platforms are censoring and constantly changing algorithms that directly affect your engagement. Even email platforms have reputation scores that can hurt your deliverability. SMS avoids all of this completely.
- SMS Has 2-7x Times LESS Inbox Competition Than Email: The average person receives 100-121 emails per day. SMS subscribers receive 16-52 SMS messages per day and almost all of them are family and friends, not businesses.
- Virtually Zero Learning Curve: Email and ad platforms can have an incredibly high learning curve for those who are not tech-savvy. Online SMS is much more basic which allows you to hit the ground running.