What Makes SMS Marketing Automation Effective?

Marketing can be challenging, especially when it comes to keeping tabs on customers and connecting with them. To take a step ahead, more marketers have improved their text messaging strategy by applying automation to their business. This shift towards automated text messages paves the way to sending a more personalized, hyper-relevant text to customers.

Even more, SMS marketing automation can help you save time, be more efficient and improve communication with your customers at a faster rate.

In this article, you’ll learn the benefits of SMS marketing automation and how you can apply it to your own business.

Let’s get started!

Table of contents

1. What is SMS marketing automation?
2. The benefits of SMS marketing automation
3. How to apply SMS automation to your own business
4. How to get started with SMS marketing automation
5. Wrapping up

What is SMS marketing automation?

SMS marketing describes how businesses send promotional or transactional messages, news, and updates through text messages. Automation helps you automatically send messages to a group of individuals or persons. Unlike the traditional SMS campaign that you send to your contact list at once, automated SMS marketing delivers personalized and timely messages without having to do any or much manual work.

For instance, if you want to send a thank you message to someone who just purchased from your brand. You can set up an automated SMS marketing campaign that sends “drips” thanking the person for the purchase with additional information about your brand. It would be exhausting and inefficient if you send a text message each time a customer makes a purchase.

The benefits of SMS marketing automation

SMS marketing automation can provide great benefits to your business when done right. Here are 5 benefits:

1. Improve your team’s productivity

It’s without a doubt that manually sending text messages can be time-consuming, especially if you’re dealing with a large contact list. Apart from that, it can also negatively impact your team’s productivity. With SMS marketing automation, more work can be done in a timely and efficient manner. As a result, your team can focus better on other tasks without feeling burned out. Besides, McKinsey Institute estimates that automating different tasks can raise productivity growth to 1.4% annually

2. Reduce the potential for errors

Imagine that you send a text message to a new customer with the wrong name. What do you think will happen? The customer may take your brand as careless and unprofessional. That would not make a good first impression. With automation, you reduce the potential for errors because you’ll have the chance to proofread and check your messages repeatedly before they go live.

3. Increase in customer engagement

With automation, you have a better chance of sending your messages at the right time. In this case, the right time can be when your customer would most likely engage with your text messages. Once you click “send”, your text message goes live immediately. You can set up an SMS marketing campaign and get hundreds of clicks at once. Besides, 90% of people respond to text messages within the first three minutes. You can use the opportunity to send time-sensitive offers to customers so they can see it on time and perform your desired call-to-action.

4. Support to other marketing channels

An automated text message can improve access to other marketing channels like social media and email. For example, you can send a text message including a link to your social media page inviting customers to engage in a special promo or contest.

5. An opportunity to understand the taste and preferences of your customers

SMS marketing automation provides the opportunity to obtain high-quality customer data. For example, you can learn more about your customer’s needs and preferences by conducting surveys through text messaging. Though you may not be in complete control of the nature of the feedback, it could be positive or negative. What matters is that you use the information to improve your customer experience and marketing efforts.

How to apply SMS automation to your own business

In this section, we’ll explore some of the ways you can leverage SMS automation in your business. Here are 7 ways:

1. Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is quite common in e-commerce businesses. There are various reasons why customers abandon a shopping cart, from security reasons to shipping costs. However, failing to intercede at this point may mean losing your customers for good. With SMS marketing automation, you can set up triggers for cart abandonment text messages that will be sent whenever a customer abandons a cart. This message can remind a customer of the product they are missing out on and complete their purchase. As a result, you can recover lost sales in the process. Here is an example of a cart abandonment text message done right:

2. Special events

Special events like work anniversary, birthdays provide an opportunity to send automated text messages. When done right, they can be beneficial for your business. For example, you don't need to worry about remembering a customer's birthday or work anniversary, since the text messages are automated, they'll be sent on the right day at the right time. Here is an example of an automated birthday text message:

3. Appointment reminders

There's nothing more annoying than booking an appointment only for your client to not show up. This doesn't have to be your case. With automated SMS marketing, you can reduce your no-show rate by sending appointment confirmation texts. Besides, a study has shown that there's a 90% chance a confirmed appointment will be missed or rescheduled.

4. Customer survey or review

Your customers' words can be invaluable to your business when used right. Most people rely on customer reviews to help them decide if they should buy from your brand.

A study has shown that nearly nine out of ten (89%) consumers worldwide make the effort to read reviews before buying products. With SMS automation, you can get customer reviews by sending your customers review requests via text messaging.

5. Nurture new leads

You don't have to rely solely on emails for your lead nurturing process. Using SMS automation, you can create and set up a sequence of lead nurturing text messages to move leads further down the sales funnel. You can create SMS drip campaigns that regularly deliver valuable messages to prospects, that will help them learn more about product and brand.

6. Deliver welcome text message

While everyone that visits your website may not be ready to buy from you, you can still create a means to communicate more with them. As they are browsing through your web pages, you can invite them to subscribe to future text messages. When they've subscribed, you can set up an automated text message campaign that welcomes them to your brand and a discount offer that compels them to buy.

This text message from Toroe eyewear is a good example.

7. Feedback and two-way conversation

Automated text messaging doesn't have to be one-way. If you give your customers the chance, you can engage in valuable conversations and gain valuable feedback from them.

Most business owners are yet to realize the potential that a two-way SMS conversation provides. With two-way conversations, you can get into the minds of customers, understand their preferences and gain insights that will help improve your marketing efforts.

Here are some ways you can leverage two-way conversations in your business :

• You can invite customers for 1-on-1 consultations.
• You can send feedback surveys

Here's an example of two-way conversation via automated SMS marketing.

How to get started with SMS marketing automation

Now that you have a better idea of automated SMS marketing, how can you start using it in your business? There are various software's that you can use to make SMS marketing automation easy. However, you must choose the right platform to suit your business needs and goals. It's also important to consider one that easily integrates seamlessly with your present marketing tools.

With Engage, you can create automated SMS sequences or workflows to power your SMS marketing campaign.

Wrapping up

It can be a challenge to regularly send messages with limited time and resources, especially when you have a large audience base. This is why you should let SMS automation do the tedious work for you. When you make them part of your text messaging strategy, you’ll improve your team’s productivity, build stronger relationships with customers and drive revenue for your business.

While automated SMS marketing can be effective, you need to be strategic about the messages you send to your customers. It's important that you understand their needs, challenges and preferences, so that you can deliver messages that are valuable and relevant to them.

Engage is an Email and SMS marketing automation solution that will help you with this and more:

• Track how customers interact with your product,
• Create unique customer segments, and
• Send personalized messages to your customers via Email, SMS, Push Notification and In-app Messages.

It is totally free to try out. Sign up now.