Why Texting is Exceptional for Communicating with Customers

The world of marketing is adapting to the way customers spend their time. In the past, TV commercials and radio spots were king and roadside billboards were a close second. That was because people were watching loads of TV and listening to hours of radio every day. They were looking out the window when on the road, so new, eye-catching billboards were quickly noticed.

How are things changing today? The average American spends more than 2 hours a day on their smartphone. Video streaming and social media now take up much of the time people used to spend watching TV or listening to a local radio station. When in the passenger seat of a car, people are more likely to have their eyes glued to a screen than looking out their window.

This change leads to opportunities for small and medium businesses because that means that there are effective, low-cost options out there for getting a brand in front of potential customers’ eyes. Traditional marketing is far more expensive than what’s available these days.

Let’s talk about one exceptional option for communicating with customers today: SMS, or as you might know them better, text messages. What makes SMS a fantastic tool small business can employ? Let’s look at three reasons.

Text Messages are More Deliverable

Email marketing is a tool many small and medium businesses have used to for years. But there is a constant battle you’ll have to face when sending out email marketing campaigns: deliverability.

You’ll be constantly fighting to keep emails from getting sent to the customer’s spam folder. Are you a car dealership wanting to remind a customer that it’s nearly time for their first oil change? It would be a shame for that carefully crafted email to be lost in the spam folder, never to be read.

With SMS, this isn’t a problem. There are no spam inboxes for text messages. You can be sure that your customer has seen your message when you use this method.

SMS is More Direct and Immediate

Social media is a powerful way to get your brand out there and communicate with both customers and potential customers, as those good old-fashioned TV and radio commercials were. All these avenues, however, are not very personal.

When you watch a video online, for example, you know that hundreds of people are watching the same video. It isn’t direct or personal.

Text messages are different. They are sent directly to the customer. That person doesn’t know how many others may have gotten the same message. All they know is that your company has sent them a personal message to their phone.

Because most adults keep their phones on them at all times, even when they are going to the bathroom or sleeping, it’s easy to get an immediate response. Send a text message to 100 customers and most of them will see and read the message within a few minutes of you sending it. Can you say the same about email or social media posts? Definitely not!

Text is Reliable

Let’s think about social media again. Organic reach is constantly fluctuating on these networks. When you post a message on your business’s social media page, you can’t always be sure how many customers and fans will see that post without you paying to boost the message.

In contrast, text messages are very reliable. When you send them, you can be sure that almost 100 percent of the recipients will get the message to their phone. It doesn’t matter if they have minutes or not, if they are online or not, or even if they have their phone on at the very moment you send the message out. They will get the message either right away or as soon as they turn their phones back on.

SMS is among the most reliable forms of communication out there. That makes text messages a great way to get important information to your customers.

With all the possible avenues and tools available for small and medium businesses to market to customers and drive up their brand awareness, it’s important for business owners to know the pros and cons for each tool and play into each tool’s strengths. As you can see, SMS is a tool that has many wonderful strengths, especially when it comes to communicating directly with customers.