Healthy Bulk SMS Tips for Small Businesses

March 5, 2010

Thanks to the implementation of regulations pertaining to text-based marketing, bulk SMS has gained a respectable reputation in the business community. How can your business make the most of this booming technology?

Go Bulk SMS Legal

Before we start off with some powerful text marketing, we’d like to draw your attention to the United Kingdom regulations regarding the use of bulk SMS for the purposes of text marketing.

A simple explanation as well as a link to the proper governmental page can be found in the “Bulk SMS Regulations in the United Kingdom” post.

Energise Your Marketing: Powerful Bulk SMS

Bulk SMS, as the name suggests, refers to the transmission of SMS messages of a commercial nature to a number of recipients. While the number of recipients can be limited to a handful, bulk SMS refers more to the number of messages sent over a predefined period of time, for instance a month.

The benefits of using bulk SMS include:

  • using an ‘always on’ and ‘always carried’ technology.
  • communicating using a ubiquitous medium
  • enjoying increased response rates, and thereby possibly more sales

Bulk SMS also helps fuel customer retention rates. This is of increased importance, especially since the recession helped change consumer behaviour – no longer is being the closest or the biggest enough; consumers are increasingly hunting for the best deals.

While getting in on the bulk SMS action is easy, it does help to take some ‘best practice’ guidelines into consideration to not only ensure that you play by the rules, but also that your customers remain happy and, very important, loyal.

Get Your Bulk SMS Timing Right

Due to the fact that mobile phones are often carried just about everywhere (yes, even the loo and to bed), it makes it possible to get in touch with your customers whenever you want.

But you might want to hold off on the 1 AM messaging – not only will your client be slightly annoyed at being awoken from that Ibiza dream, but you won’t have their full attention.

Instead, get in touch with them when you know they’ll be wide awake but won’t be doing anything that requires their concentration, such as lunch time or when everyone’s on their way home.

Add Product Relevance to Your Bulk SMS

Let’s say Joe owns a hardware shop selling all kinds of goods; from nails to hammers to hammocks and much, much more. If you previously bought a garden hose and a couple of loose lawn sprinkler heads, would an SMS from Joe about a circular saw pique your interest? Probably not.

When offering discounts or running special promotions on certain products, ensure that they are related to some of the previously purchased items. This will not only increase your chances of making a sale, but could stimulate your customer retention rates.

Campaign Planning

Whether you sell industrial rat poison or baby rattles and teethers, you need a plan for your bulk SMS marketing campaigns.

Start with your initial offer and plan out your whole campaign down to the very last message. This will make it easier to tweak your campaign and make the necessary adjustments to ensure optimal efficacy.

Always Test!

The great thing about bulk SMS is that it’s easy to do a bit of split testing to test the actual efficacy of your campaign and iron out the creases where necessary.

This means taking a small portion of your contact list and getting them started on your campaign, just to test the waters. If any last-minute changes need to be made, this is the time to do so before going ahead with a full roll-out.

That being said, are you ready to market? To learn more, just navigate to the bulk SMS page.

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