Bulk SMS

Global SMS and Ringless Voicemail Software As Low as $0.004

When it comes to marketing your business, you’ve got several options. You could, if you wanted, go down the standard digital marketing route, bombarding customers with emails and PPC ads like your competitors. Or you could take the traditional course and advertise in magazines and newspapers. But there is a third way: Bulk SMS.

What Is Bulk SMS?

The founding principle behind Bulk SMS’s product is surprisingly simple. Instead of sending out thousands of emails to your prospects’ computers, you send out text messages to their mobile devices instead. You don’t rely on the internet but rather the mobile phone network to transmit text. It’s a simple idea that almost bridges the gap between old-fashioned marketing and the mobile age.

The rise of send bulk messages in the UK began around 25 years ago. It came about because marketers wanted a more effective way to communicate with their customers. People in the advertising industry realised that customers weren’t opening their emails at anything like the rate that they wanted them to. Open rates were down at around 22 per cent, despite their best efforts to make titles and content engaging.

SMS, on the other hand, seems to work differently. People don’t selectively open or discard SMS messages. Instead, they almost always read them the whole way through. Marketers, therefore, discovered that it was better to rely on the slightly older mobile phone network to deliver messages than it was the internet. Email just wasn’t a particularly powerful marketing tool.

Why Is Bulk SMS So Effective?

The major driving force behind Bulk SMS is the fact that it is a lot more effective than email and many other state-of-the-art digital marketing concepts. The company found that SMS just works, and companies are looking at ways to use bulk SMS software more.

Why it’s so effective is quite hard to pin down, but Bulk SMS thinks that there might be several reasons for it.

Marketing Can Be Time-Sensitive

When companies sent email marketing messages in the past, they often had to wait for the consumer to fire up their computer, log onto the internet, and read their emails. It meant that they couldn’t deliver time-sensitive marketing messages and had to settle for something more generic. The problem with this is that it made the firm’s marketing dry and dull. People got fed up with reading the same bland marketing material over and over, imploring them to buy at some point in the future.

BulkSMS changed all this. With BulkSMS, you could finally unleash the power of mobile advertising by delivering marketing messages to customers, just at the point where they stood to benefit from them the most. A consumer would get an alert on their phone, pick the phone up, open the message, and read it.

There Are No SMS Spam Filters

There’s another reason, BulkSMS is so effective: it bypasses spam filters. The problem with digital marketing today is that it’s become something of an arms race. The gods of the internet - Google, Facebook, and the rest - all want consumers to expose themselves to advertisers and hand over all their information in return for the services from which they benefit.

Many users, however, don’t think this is a good deal and are redirecting commercial emails to their spam folders and blocking PPC ads. It’s made these forms of advertising considerably less effective. Nobody, however, is blocking text messages from companies. It’s one of the tremendous untapped advertising resources that we still have an extremely powerful if you can get a hold of your audience’s telephone numbers.

Open Rates Are High And Timely

Research suggests that a whopping 90 per cent of people open bulk SMS messages within three minutes of receiving them. That’s more than triple the open rates for emails. What’s more, the speed with which people open messages means that companies can deliver time- sensitive marketing information. Got a deal that lasts for the next hour? You can let the vast majority of your audience know about it via bulk SMS without leaving any of them feeling disappointed that they missed out on an opportunity.

How Can Businesses use Bulk SMS?

Understanding BulkSMS’s service in principle is straightforward. It’s just sending out lots of SMS messages to your customers. Implementing it in practice is also straightforward. You just use Bulk SMS software, an SMS API, and that’s it - you’re ready to go.

Let’s go through the process you need to implement in your business to use Bulk SMS effectively.

Step 1: Create A Marketing List

Just as with an email marketing campaign, the first place to start with any BulkSMS campaign is to create a marketing list.

In general, it’s not a good idea to buy a bunch of phone numbers from a lead gen company. The chances are that customers won’t have given their permission for you to keep their numbers on file.

Step 2: Develop Your Marketing Strategy

Bulk SMS software is excellent, but if you don’t have the right marketing strategy, your efforts will fall flat. Just as with any other marketing campaign, you need to know your target audience and which kinds of messages will appeal to them the most.

Step 3: Choose Your Bulk SMS Service

Once you’ve got your marketing list and know who you’re going to target, you can start using the Bulk SMS software service. Your bulk SMS API is what allows you to send out thousands of messages all at once. Without it, you’ll struggle to do so. These special tools make it easy to send messages to all of the people on your contact list without overloading your phone.

Almost always, you’ll be using online SMS. By sending texts from a desktop computer, you avoid any computing bottlenecks or interface difficulties that might arise if you tried sending your marketing from a mobile device.

Step 4: Create A Compelling Call To Action

Once you’ve chosen your Bulk SMS service, your next job is to write the text in your message. Just as with other advertising channels, the most critical part is the call to action. You want to make your customers do something, and do it right now.

The best way to construct a call to action is to give your customers a compelling reason to take action immediately. Take a look at the following examples:

• Buy in the next hour and get 15 per cent off
• Sign up today and get 20 per cent off all memberships
• Offer ends at midnight, so don’t delay
• Buy insurance today, and get premiums half price for the first three months

Can you see the theme here? What you’re doing is giving your customer a reason to act fast. You’re also giving them a clear benefit: they get money off whatever it is that you’re selling.

Step 5: Send Your Messages

Using Bulk SMS software, send your messages to your customers. You may want to send them out in one single event, or stagger them across the day, just in case you expect massive demand.

Step 6: Review Your Performance

Just because you successfully send out messages using a Bulk SMS service, doesn’t mean that your work is at an end. The final phase of the step in the process is to analyse the performance of your campaigns. There’s almost always a way to improve.

Reviewing your performance can be tricky when it comes to sending out SMS text messages, but with the help of an excellent bulkSMS API, it’s easier. With Bulk SMS software, you can collect metrics and test the effectiveness of different advertising methods.

Often, just a small change in the text in the text message can have a profound effect on conversions. You may want to send out two versions of the advertisement and see which yields the best results. You may also want to try experimenting with a variety of differently- phrased calls-to-action to see whether that makes a difference or not.

Is SMS Marketing An Effective Tool?

Hopefully, we’ve convinced you that SMS marketing is a highly useful tool that your business can use to reach out to its audience. We’ve shown how SMS messages vault over many of the advertising defences that modern consumers have, and get opened and read. People see text messages as important.

You need to be careful, though when sending out messages. If a prospect didn’t voluntarily give you their number and provide you with permission to contact them, then you can’t.

You also need to be careful with the frequency with which you contact customers using SMS. It’s not the same as email. People will tire of contact with you if you send them SMS every day. SMS is a tool that your business can use to deliver high-impact messages once per week, perhaps less.

Finally, it’s vital to choose good software to manage your SMS advertising campaigns. With the right software, you can make sending messages easy. The software connects with the internet and then sends instructions to a device to send out messages in bulk.

So will you start using this powerful tool?