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Text Marketing for Local Business | SmartWaveMobile.com
Mar 01, 2021
Do you own a local business that is in need of effective marketing?
Effective marketing is essential for any local business to grow their customer base. Businesses need a simple impactful marketing solution without the hassle and high cost.
Text messaging is ranked as the #1 channel consumers want to use to connect with businesses. With an increasing popularity among consumers due to its simplicity and high read rate, text is perfectly suited for local businesses. With a projected 18 billion active mobile devices in the world by 2024, text marketing for local business is a no-brainer.
How can you harness the power of text marketing to grow your business?
What Is Text Marketing?
Text marketing is simply the practice of promoting and marketing your business through text messages to prospects and clients. You can promote offers, market your products and services, and even directly sell them through text messages to mobile devices.
Text marketing is a powerful tool to engage prospects and customers with customized messages targeting their interests.
Why Text Marketing for Local Businesses
Text marketing provides a powerful and affordable alternative to other marketing campaigns for local businesses. What makes text marketing so unique?
- 98% of SMS messages are read, compared 20% to emails.
- It is highly affordable with each promotional text to customer list costing only a few pennies
- Increase your brand awareness through review generation
- New customer acquisition through review generation
- Increase repeat visits by customers by sending reminders and rewards
- Increase spending per customer with loyalty programs
- Mobile marketing platforms can make text marketing simple to set up and automate
These are just a few reasons text marketing is a great opportunity for local businesses to increase reach and revenue. Unlike other marketing strategies, text marketing is also very easy to understand and implement for local businesses.
How Does Text Marketing Work for Local Businesses?
There are essentially two main steps for text marketing to start working effectively for your local business.
1. Opt-inThe first step is to get customers and prospects to opt-in to receive text messages from your business. Because 75% of consumers belong to at least one loyalty program, customers are comfortable opting in which prevents unsolicited texts.
2. Text Marketing Program
The second step is to have a robust text marketing program (please link website here), custom tailored for your local business; one that optimizes your messaging for maximum customer engagement and delivers them at the best possible times.
Mobile marketing platforms can provide many text marketing strategies you can use to grow your contact list and market your business. Some of the most effective ones include:
1. Personalization & Audience Segmenting
With over 2 trillion text messages being exchanged in the United States in 2019 alone, your text messages can get lost in the crowd. That is, unless you use marketing techniques such as personalization and audience segmentation to improve engagement.
Personalized messages are a great way to engage your audience because they add a human touch to communication. Prospects and customers want retailers to personalize their experience based on their past interactions, instead of sending them generic messages for mass audiences.
Creating target lists based on customer purchase history and preferences is a great way to accurately target your audience in an effective manner that engages them and generates the best responses. Together, personalization and segmenting are powerful features to increase your sales, and develop a valuable relationship with your customers.
2. Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs, such as a cardless loyalty program (please link the relevant page here), can drastically increase the frequency of your customers visits and their spending with your business. You can gain permissions to send text promotions when customers sign up for your loyalty program with their mobile number, making it a win-win situation.
You get customer contacts for text marketing and your customers get loyalty benefits by partaking in your exclusive program through their mobile devices instead of a card.
As a result of text marketing, your business will see an increase in repeat business and spending habits across the board. You can also use text marketing to improve customer relationships and retention overtime.
3. Automated Text Marketing
Automation is changing many aspects of business by saving resources such as time, money, and administration. Automated text marketing
allows you to automatically send text messages depending on customer data collected from channels like your loyalty program.
You can automate text responses with preset messages that are sent to:
- Repeat customers immediately after they make a new purchase
- Reengage customers who have been inactive for awhile
- All customers on the first of their birthday months with birthday promotional offers
- Customers requesting online reviews that have major impact on local search presence
4. Review Generation
Reviews are a great way to boost awareness, brand image and sales. Text marketing is a proven tool to build online reviews quickly. Good online reviews on multiple platforms, like Yelp, Google, or Facebook, can do wonders for your local business.
Customers love and trust peer reviews and these reviews highly influence their buying decisions, which means the more high-rated reviews your local business has, the better. 84% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business for the 1st time. You can segment your contact list and target review request such as “like us on social media” text messages to your best customers.
This can include customers who make repeat purchases, regularly engage with your text marketing campaigns, and who generally “like” your business. They are the most likely to give you great reviews, effectively boosting your local business through text marketing! Smart mobile marketing platforms also offer reputation management to redirect negative reviews to management for prompt resolution.
You can learn more about review generation through text marketing by clicking here.
Conclusion
Text marketing for local businesses is an excellent way to grow, expand, and scale your business to new heights. Through a smart text marketing strategy, your local business can experience rapid growth in customer base and revenue.
Text marketing helps local businesses compete with larger companies because it is highly effective and affordable. If you want to implement the best text marketing strategies and techniques like automated text marketing or review generation for your local business, please contact us
today!
In this post we share the ins and outs of driving revenue with mobile engagement strategies for local businesses. Thanks for visiting our blog and we hope you find this post informative!