As a business owner, you already realize the importance of staying in touch with your leads and customers. If your marketing techniques are up to par with modern technology and proven strategy, then you are already using bulk text or email marketing in your business communications. But, have you thought about how you can use the two together to optimize success?
Why Do Companies Use Both Email and Bulk Text
Email and text marketing are two of the easiest and most effective ways to stay in touch with your customers no matter how large your contact list. They can be used for lead generation, sales conversion, and relationship building at any stage of the buyer’s journey. Your customers can easily opt-in to mailing lists that automate the introduction, education, and sales of nearly any product or service niche.
Both SMS and email marketing create easy-to-implement sales funnels for business.
What Makes SMS Different From Email
SMS marketing can be used for many of the same outcomes as email, but their varying traits separate the tasks that each can be used for. Here are the distinctive communication differences between these two forms of outreach marketing.
1. Length of the Message
Email marketing is reserved for lengthy text – delivering a notable amount of information at one time. Text messages tend to be more succinct in content (160 recommended characters). Use bulk text for shorter and email for longer, more involved messages.
2. Message Format
Emails contain subject lines, headers, body text, multiple images and links, and can include more than one call to action. SMS messages are brief, containing only a sentence or two with a single call-to-action. Use email messages for more complex formatting and SMS when you want to keep it simple.
3. Time Between Delivery & Receipt
Emails are generally opened within 24-48 hours after they are sent when they are read. Text messages, on the other hand, are usually instantly read (98% are opened and read within the first 3 minutes of delivery). Since SMS are read fast – and more often – than emails, leverage SMS to gather information or send urgent messages to customers.
Leveraging SMS & Email Together
Because of the differences between email and SMS marketing, there is no way to gauge one as more effective than the other, each has its own set of benefits. There are tasks that can be accomplished via email but not SMS, and vice versa. Using the pair to complement one another is an excellent approach.
Generate Email List Leads with SMS
Under the new GDPR all contact lists should require that leads opt-in to receive communications. There are a number of ways you can go about this, one way to generate new lists is through text message: “ To receive news, events and offers text XXXX to XXXXX”. Visitors won’t need to access your website in order to subscribe to your list.
Making sure your SMS Marketing is GDPR Compliant with Sendmode
When you want to compliment your email newsletter or promotions with SMS, you first need to understand which types of communications each channel is best suited to. Start using them together in order to acquire more customers, promote your products effectively, and gather information for your market research.
Saoirse