7 Secrets of SMS Marketing that every Nigerian Business Should Know
SMS marketing in Nigeria can be a great tool to reach your customers instantly on their mobile phones. SMS messages are likely to be opened within just five minutes of being received.
However, in this decade, there are challenges with your messages actually reaching your customer or even making any sort of impact. Worst case, you irritate your prospect and they put you on the DND or Spam list.
Some people say, SMS marketing doesn’t work and customers are tired of it. However, the best marketers know that SMS marketing is more than just broadcasting a message to a bunch of phone numbers. Smart marketers can send a message to a crowd, personalized for each recipient. In order to do this, you need the right strategy as well as the right SMS marketing software.
In the digital landscape an SMS is one of the most expensive means of reaching a random customer. More expensive than an impression, a click, or an email, or a facebook ad, or google ad. However, it has a noticeable quicker response time. Digital marketing preaches ROI so care must be taken to ensure your mobile marketing is relevant to your customer and generates revenue for your business.
Below are the 7 Critical Areas of Mobile Marketing that Guarantees business Results.
Segmentation
As your customers are different, so are their needs. Before sending out a message you need to consider their needs in your business relationship such as previous purchases, previous interaction with your messages. Also attributes such as location, sex, membership type etc might indicate different needs per customer.
Your SMS marketing software should be able to segment (separate) your customers using varying parameters. Now, you can send the relevant message to the right segment.
Personalization
Do not be the brand that talks too much and doesn’t listen. Like any other relationship, that will not work and it definitely wouldn’t work with your customers.
Capture your contacts’ attention with personalized text messages. Instead of your message to read “Dear Customer”, it should read “Dear Chukwudi”. That could be the difference between your message being read and being deleted.
Tell them about a recent shopping experience, or something related to their location with the right SMS marketing platform.
Tracking & Analytics
Strategize, Make Projections, Execute then Measure is the 4 Step process to a good marketing strategy. It goes the same way with SMS marketing. You need to measure your results. Ensure that you are not wasting money sending to consistently undelivered numbers or customers on DND.
Ensure your SMS marketing platform is giving you good delivery of about 70%. Analyze the best times to send your message based on customers response via link tracking. Find out the proportion of you customers on mobile that are using Feature phones, Smart Phones, Android Phones, Apple Phones etc.
Data Capture
When communicating with your customer, you should always strive to have more than one customer touch point. Moreover, as earlier stated SMS is expensive.
The best way to do this is by sending SMS messages with links to landing pages or lead capture pages, which will be integrated to your SMS marketing platform’s contact database giving you a unified view of your customer data. Capture Names, Emails, Secondary Phone Numbers, Date of Birth, etc. The more data you have of your customer the better Customer Experience you can provide.
Re- Targeting and Remarketing
Helps you reconnect with your customers and bring them closer to you.
Stop beating the dead horse. If your customer has shown interest in one of your products in your previous SMS broadcast via a link clicked, or a form being submitted, the next message you should send should facilitate closing the deal, not another introductory message about your product.
Cross-Channel Marketing
A mobile marketing platform with cross-channel capabilities will help you save time, money and improve your customer experience. Assuming you now have your customer’s contact data – both phone number and email; The right platform will help you communicate to your customer on their preferred channel. No link interaction on SMS but there is link interaction on email? Next message to your customer should be an email.
Forbidden Words
TELCOs all over the world have a list of “Banned Words” that don’t get transmitted over the networks. If your SMS message contains any of such words it would never reach the customer and your SMS units would be charged. Always update yourself with the list of banned words. You can find a list here:
