Consumers in today’s world are bombarded with advertising in all forms of media. Print, television, mail and email advertisement are staples of daily life. What these all have in common is that consumers can, and do, easily ignore them. Mailers and papers can be thrown in the trash, channels changed and emails sent to spam folders.
Text message marketing allows for businesses to circumvent all these automatic dump valves and get directly to the consumer. An overwhelming majority of the public owns a cell phone, and text messaging has become a primary form of communication. Being so popular, cell phone owners will almost always read a text message if their alert goes off. This makes text and SMS message marketing a convenient and unobtrusive way to get a message to consumers.
Thanks to its unavoidable nature, text and SMS marketing is perfectly suited to the retail market. Marketing in the retail sector requires a massive campaign of direct mail, email or inserts to be effective. The success of this campaign hinges completely on a consumer actually reading the material. With SMS and text message marketing, it’s almost guaranteed that the recipient will at least check to see who the text if from, if not read it in its entirety.
Text message marketing can be highly beneficial to the retail market.
- Customers can receive texts updating them about sales and specials, or even receive specific texts, and or codes that when used shown result in a discount at checkout (text coupons).
- Notification of new arrivals and discontinuations.
- Run special limited hour sales if customer traffic is slow.
- Directions, store locations and hours.
- Build customer loyalty by encouraging responses to texts for higher discounts and special offers.
- Provide updates on special orders and returns.
- Invitations to “members only” specials.
- Personalize messages based on customer prior purchases to encourage return visits.
- Offer customers a convenient way to send customer service questions without having to come in or wait on the phone.
Text message marketing is an economical marketing plan with a high ROI. It requires little overhead, staff or effort. In a world where consumer marketing is awash with mass email and mailings; text and SMS is the new avenue. Retailers can effectively and cheaply communicate their message to all current and prospective customers with little effort.
