How Bulk SMS can Boost your Business Marketing?

Bulk SMS is sending an SMS to multiple recipients simultaneously. These are generally used for marketing purposes. SMS is one of the most effective ways for communicating with customers.

SMS is one of the most convenient processes for communicating business news. Businesses use this as a medium to interact with their customers and tell them about their services, sales, promotions, etc. It helps to increase the brand awareness of your brand.

Importance of Bulk SMS in today’s business world

• Almost everyone today has a smartphone, hence businesses can send SMSs to people to promote their business, and by providing a link businesses can create traffic on their websites.
• SMSs have higher engagement rates than emails. 
• SMSs are great for countries where the internet is costly and scarce.
• SMS will act as the icing on the cake for digital marketing. It is very beneficial, especially for small businesses. SMSs are widely used by e-commerce and travel companies. SMSs are a great source for appointments and reminders as you can always check SMSs on the go. If you need to inform people urgently, then SMSs are more effective than emails.

Benefits of Bulk SMS

• Affordable- SMSs is one of the cheapest forms of communication. Hence it can really cut down the expenses of a company and help to boost its ROI.
• More Accessibility: People generally spend a large part of their day on their mobiles hence through SMS your message is easier to get noticed.
• More conversion: According to a survey, 90% of the SMSs are read within the first 3 minutes after they are sent and half of them even get a response. This makes this marketing practice very time efficient. In fact, messages are always on the notifications of the phone which makes the chances of reading them even more.
• SMS marketing acted as a great source of communication for businesses during COVID time.
• SMS just takes a few seconds to be delivered to a larger number of people. 
• You can view who has received, opened as well as responded to your messages.
• SMSs are convenient and also they have word limitations making them precise. People generally read short messages rather than long ones.
• Through SMSs you can reach an audience globally.
• SMSs can be segmented and automated for specific audiences. This saves a lot of time and burden on employees.
• You can get the delivery reports of SMSs hence you can analyze the functioning of your SMS campaign.

 How to use Bulk SMS effectively

1. Identify the target audience

There’s no point in sending SMSs to those people who don’t need your services at all. It will only be a waste of time to focus on them or everyone. It’s better to segment the audience and start focusing on them accordingly. For that, you need to be updated with the customer database.  You have to identify the leads and customers. You have to track their activities to determine which customer is interested in what and who still need to be your customers but interested in your products. Send them messages accordingly.

2. Frame your message carefully

People generally prefer personalized messages rather than generalized ones. Personalized messages make people feel that they are given attention. People connect to it more. Hence first track the activities of your customers and leads. Then segregate and segment them accordingly. Finally craft personalized messages for the segmented audience.  

3. Keep your messages coherent and precise

People generally have a tendency to avoid long messages and read short ones only hence avoiding sending long messages. Try to make your messages short and precise, to the point. Images and short videos will act as icing on the cake.

4. A clear call to action should be present

Just making your customers read your messages is not enough to make them visit your website and generating website traffic is the actual goal. Hence providing proper links is required for making people visit your website not just read your exciting offers.

5. Schedule your messages strategically

Sending an abundance of messages to people will only annoy them and they will opt out as nobody is in the mood to purchase every time. Instead, understand and analyze their database and send them personalized messages at the correct time. This will make them retain your services. Also, you have to understand at which time more people tend to buy. Like during festivals, more people do shopping so introduce exciting offers during festivals to your existing customers and leads. Introduce general sales and discounts for everyone during the festive seasons. You will definitely have more people buying your products. 

Best practices for Bulk SMS

1. Obtain consent from recipients

Giving the option of subscribing to customers will make them more obliged and chances generally increase of them subscribing. Without a customer’s permission just bombarding them with tons of messages will not work in your favor at all plus the chances of a customer getting annoyed will only increase.

2. Honor opt-outs and unsubscribes

Giving customers the option for unsubscribing is a better choice because unnecessarily wastes time on people who aren’t interested in your products and services at all. It’s better people unsubscribe you rather than get irritated and permanently block and spam you. Don’t close all the doors to get back to them.

3. Do not send messages at inappropriate times

Doing the right things at the right time is the key to success. Imagine sending a message about a particular festival’s sales after that festival. Or just immediately before Holi. Not a good idea right? You have to send them the notice one or two months prior so that they can plan what to buy according to their budget. Or they in the meantime also save money for buying stuff. You have to understand deeply customers’ psychology and actions before sending them messages. You cant send welcome messages to a customer who is purchasing from you for the second or third time. It has to be after their first order only. This will make the customer feel neglected and maybe they get disappointed because people generally connect to these messages on a personal level.

4. Segment your audience for more personalized communication

Everyone is different and has different tastes. Their tastes could be simply their personal choice or due to the influence of their geographical or demographic factors. So study the customers’ database and actions properly in order to segment them and send them messages accordingly. Your first customer will get a different treatment from your regular customer. Similarly, the messages you will send to your leads will be different. People who left items in the cart but didn’t purchase them will get different messages. Hence very important first to segment the audience and send them appropriate messages after that to have a greater impact.

5. Keep your database up-to-date and clean

The database is the foundation of a business customer relationship. If you don’t have the customers’ data you cannot do anything. Hence maintaining a customer database is of utmost importance. Clean it from time to time and remove unnecessary information which will only hamper memory locations. Make sure it is secured so that it cannot be leaked. Also, update it from time to time so that you don’t miss anything and have a grip on the activities of every new customer.

Is Mass Texting Legal?

It is definitely legal but it’s heavily restricted and full of rules, regulations, and protocols. 

Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991: 

According to this, it’s punishable to send spam messages. It amended the original communications act of 1934. It was implemented to protect customers’ privacy and misuse of communication channels.

The rules and regulations made were

• No calling employees before 8 am and after 9 pm by the company.
• Every organization has to make a list of whom to call and the ones blacklisted.
• Calls made on the line on which the recipient is charged are not allowed.
• Unsolicited messages are not allowed.
• Even robocalls for emergency purposes are not allowed.
• Without the consent of the recipient, no artificial voices or recorded calls will be made to residences.
• Businesses before making mass calls must identify themselves and the ones they are calling to.

Anyone violating the above rules and regulations will have to pay a fine of $1,500 per call or text.

SuiteCRM Bulk SMS

SuiteCRM Bulk SMS is a CRM software extension that is used to send bulk SMS to people with just a click. It makes the process of sending bulk messages streamlined. The entire process is automated you just have to choose the SMS template.

This is powered by Twilio SMS API which is leading in the market.

Features

• You will get a Twilio phone no. for sending bulk messages.
• Every message sent or received will be saved in SuiteCRM and you can view them in the history of the record.
• A live chat option is also available where you can chat with many people at a single time.
• Many SMS templates are available plus email templates can also be used as SMS templates.
• A segmented list of recipients is automatically created after choosing the recipients.
• There is a message icon just next to the phone number from which you can start a personal conversation with anyone.
• You will get a daily SMS report which will showcase all the messages delivered, received, failed, and unsubscribed. The report will also have a link through which you can go to the reports.

Conclusion- 

Since mobile phones are personalized devices for people. Hence people generally read and observe SMSs in a personalized way. SMSs are one of the best ways to connect with people as maximum SMS have high reading and response rates. Therefore maximum businesses nowadays use SMSs for marketing purposes. Since SMSs are free of cost. This cuts down their expenses a lot and increases their revenue. 

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