What is Text Message Marketing?

Text message marketing is the practice of promoting and communicating about your business through SMS and MMS to an audience that has opted to receive your messages. Compared to most other forms of business-to-consumer marketing, text messages have far greater open and retention rates, especially when considering the diminishing returns in email marketing. It’s the ideal way to meet customers where they are so they never miss out on the content that your brand is promoting.

How Did Texting Start?

On December 3rd, 1992, software engineer Neil Papworth tested out a service that his company had been building by typing a simple “Merry Christmas” into his computer, which was sent to a project director at the telecom giant. When his well-wishes appeared on the LCD screen of an Orbitel 901, history was made. The world’s first SMS message had been sent.

In the 30 years since that fateful day, text messages have become one of the most efficient communication methods. On average, 5 billion people send and receive text messages internationally, with 292 million interactions taking place in the United States alone. That’s about 80% of the country’s population! But if you need further proof that texting has blossomed into something so much more than just a quick way to bond with friends and family, allow us to dive deeper into the concept of text message marketing with TapOnIt and what it can do to expand and enhance the influence of your business.

How do people join text clubs?

Before you can begin texting content to your audience, you’ll need to build one. Considering 75% of customers want to receive offers via SMS, this isn’t difficult to do when you follow the proper steps. Anyone interested in becoming a subscriber to your texts will need to opt-in and give consent before you can legally send them your campaigns. Fortunately, there are various ways for your business to build a database, and each one is easy to implement, making it simple for your audience to join. Website pop-up forms, QR codes, landing pages, shortcodes, and even word-of-mouth all work efficiently to onboard new customers without much stress.

First-Party Data from Texting

The fuel responsible for the success of text marketing is first-party data. The term “first-party” refers to the fact that it’s given to you willingly by your customers, so you can trust that it’ll be reliable and relevant to your business and its marketing strategies. In addition to these benefits, given your audience will be providing you with this info, you’ll completely own it! A first-party database of your very own is an invaluable asset when seeking to personalize your content and develop the bond between your brand and its fans, making them more likely to keep coming back and investing in what you’re offering. Considering text marketing is already a great way to gather first-party data (81% of retailers are using or considering using it for this), this creates an airtight cycle that ensures your text club only gets sharper as you learn more about your audience.

Redeeming Text Offers

Sending out discounts in a text campaign will drive immediate results for your brand, with 60% of offer redemptions sent in a text campaign occurring within 24 hours. With TapOnIt, redeeming and tracking offer redemptions is simple. There’s no need to involve your POS system, and you can easily customize your redemption process to fit your business with options for in-store and online methods available. You can create a QR code, trackable redeem button, barcode, or an alphanumeric code to make redemption as fluid as possible.

The Content Hub: Learn It, Love It, Live By It

TapOnIt’s Content Hub feature is tailor-made to help condense the content you text into an easily accessible location, which is “auto-magically” curated without needing a manual update. This enhances the user experience by ensuring the content you text them is finable and accessible. Subscribers access your Content Hub through a link in your text campaigns, which whisks them away to a mobile site that houses all of the content, deals, and offers your business has sent. The transition from text to Hub is seamless, and sharing is simple, making it the best way to spark organic growth for your brand and turn first-timers into superfans.

Sharing for Organic Text Database Growth

With TapOnIt, text message marketing and organic growth are like smoke and fire: you do not often see one without the other. Taking a more natural approach to list building by relying on word-of-mouth, or as we like to call it, Word of Thumb™, prioritizes the quality of your subscriber pool. It vets your base and ensures that each member is active, engaged, and genuinely willing to receive your campaigns. Users can share the content texted to them from your brand, allowing their friends to join in too.

Your brand can incentivize sharing by including bonus offers or perks. If a user shares your content and someone new joins your text database, that user earns an exclusive bonus offer. It’s a win-win!

Text Segmenting and Targeting

For those with a vast number of subscribers that vary in age, gender, location, and spending habits, TapOnIt’s segmenting and targeting tools are invaluable in helping your texts resonate with the right people at the right time. The Smart Audience Builder provides the instruments needed to reach specific user segments, optimize campaign spending, and spur impactful conversion rates. Once users share their demographic info, you can better shape your campaigns to suit their behavior.

Learn From Your Texts

Knowing what works best for your audiences allows your brand to continue improving its strategy. TapOnIt offers a slate of tools designed to assist in keeping track of the performance of your campaigns, which will give you clear insights into which types of content perform best with your audience. These tools allow you to dive into the nitty-gritty details, such as highlighting the exact number of times each piece of content was viewed, clicked, redeemed, or shared by those who received it.

Triggered Text Messages

If you integrate Shopify into your text club, you’ll be able to send messages to your customers based on certain conditions they fulfill while perusing your site. In that case, you can set up a triggered message that notifies said user of their abandoned cart automatically upon departure. These messages are especially effective when employed as a “journey” or in a series, as conversion rates for purchase abandonment campaigns are three times higher and carry a 24% higher open rate than standalone abandonment messages. Triggered messages can also be used to connect with shoppers that haven’t visited your site in a while, provide an exclusive offer to those who spend beyond a specific amount, or bestow free shipping to a customer that surpasses a certain amount of total purchases.

We understand better than anyone that even to an eager newbie, all of this information can make breaking ground on a text club seem daunting. We believe in you! The evolution of texting has made harnessing its power for promotional purposes something you shouldn’t let your anxieties suppress. If you have any questions about how texting could be a perfect fit for your brand, give us a holler, and we’d be happy to join you on your voyage into the cutting-edge realm of text marketing!

Learn more about TapOnIt’s self-service packages so you can create your own SMS & MMS campaigns and easily build and grow your first-party database.

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