A Business Owner’s Guide to Text Message Advertising and Promotions

Posted November 20, 2018

With estimates ranging from 60-100 texts per day, the average young person is sending and receiving several texts per hour. This has made text message advertising one of the most important new mediums for communicating with your audience.

If you’ve been able to collect phone numbers, email, and addresses from your clients, you need to learn how to use each one to their full potential.

Here are four rules for using texts for your ads and promotions.

1. Know The Rules

If you’re doing your job right as a business owner, you’re getting all the information possible about your clients. When you collect customer information, you need to give your customers a chance to opt-in or out of receiving text promotions.

Many people will excitedly try to get through a form by entering in all the information without thinking about it. If you tell them frankly how often you’ll contact them and what kinds of promotions they can expect, they might choose to join your list.

According to most laws surrounding promotions, you can’t try to sell people things via their phone number unless they’ve explicitly allowed you to at some point.

2. Keep It Short

When you’re reaching out to your customers via SMS, you need to think about the format you’re using.

For many users, texts more than 160 characters long get broken up into multiple texts. If your texts exceed this figure, you could risk customers getting them in the wrong order or never getting the call to action in the second text.

In the worst case scenario, the link that you’re sending could be broken up between multiple texts, making your efforts useless.

Keep your pitch short and simple. A few words can say everything.

3. Timing Matters

Every ad medium, whether television commercials, email marketing, or text marketing, relies on timing and targeting. Television commercials that air at 3 AM are less effective than those at 9 PM. Texts that go out at 6 AM aren’t going to be as effective as those that go out at 5 PM, as people are on their phones, heading home from a workday.

You need to also ensure that you don’t overload your audience with too many texts. Too many texts and you’re sure to have yourself blocked or to have your customers drop out.

4. Give Them An Out

Every single message should either have the option to stop receiving messages or a link should be featured prominently when users hit the link. Everyone deserves the opportunity to opt out of any promotion.

It’s often also a legal requirement for using the medium of text-based promotion.

Text Message Advertising Works

Trying to catch your customers when they’re listening to the radio, are on their computers, or are watching television is hard. It’s much easier to be able to contact people when they’re on their phone 24/7.

Your text message advertising and promotion will end up in the pockets of your clients with only a fraction of the effort other companies spend.

For tips on how to make the most out of text-based advertising, contact us for more info.

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