Marketing is a scary word, and that’s justified in some ways. Because while the development of exciting new tools and technologies has made it easier than ever before for businesses to connect with their customers, it’s also created a market where being competitive often necessitates an aggressive marketing strategy.
The most effective marketing channel out there is text messaging. You can make the most of this channel by sending mass text messages and reaching thousands of customers at a time. And there are a wide variety of tools that can help guide your marketing campaign. If you’re not sure where to start, you don’t need to panic. Look for these qualities when shopping for an SMS marketing app.
Analytics
Being able to reach your customers easily is important for SMS marketing. Being able to take the information they give you and then put it to good use is even more crucial. A well-designed SMS marketing campaign can provide you with an abundant amount of information on your customers.
Through touchpoints alone, you can see how long it took for customers to engage with your message, evaluate conversion rates directly from your message, and see how long a customer lingered on a specific page.
Smarter marketing software will offer better and more sophisticated extrapolations of this sort of information. Look for software that gives you actionable information on the entire path from message to purchase. Good apps will include tools that let you identify potential trouble points and tweak your checkout process to accommodate.
Dynamic Content
Just because it’s called text marketing doesn’t mean that you need to rely solely on text. But it does mean that you need to carefully evaluate what exactly your provider promises. The ability to send MMS messages will be a necessity for any business that wants to include photos in their texts.
But the type of content you can include in text messages is significantly more sophisticated than that. A smooth text marketing campaign is one that allows you to easily integrate your messages with coupons, promotions, and surveys. And it will ideally do that without forcing your customer to jump through a bunch of unnecessary hoops.
Scheduling
One of the best things about SMS marketing is how you can essentially do all of your marketing design in advance and then just let it run its course. That’s not to say you should just kick back and relax. Analytics will be important to the long-term success of your marketing campaign, but app-based automation lets you focus your attention on what matters.
That’s especially true if you’re looking to get more targeted with your advertising. There are app-based solutions that can send messages using a wide variety of different criteria. The results are a marketing campaign that can automatically send follow-up messages after a given period of inactivity or make suggestions based on past purchases.
Presentation
Information is power, but it won’t do you much good if you don’t know how to read it. A solid user interface makes it easy for beginners to get onboarded and quickly understand the fundamental information.
But a solid UI pays dividends even to veteran and experienced users. Look for an app with a good dashboard that presents the information in a way that works for you and ideally provides some in-depth customization. A good dashboard can make all the difference in the world.
If you want to connect with new customers, an SMS marketing app can be your best friend. But that doesn’t mean they’re all built the same, or that there’s a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone. Take the time to consider what your business needs, and that will help you determine the marketing solution that works for you.