When it comes to getting more customers business owners tend to make it a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
Small business owners tend to base their marketing decisions based on what their neighbor is doing or what a salesman called them up to pitch their marketing solution.
They try to jump into any and every marketing channel:
- Pay per click
- Social media posting
- Blog posting
- SEO
- Influencer marketing
- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing
The list is endless and if you’re not paying attention you can drain your marketing budget incredibly fast.
One of the simplest ways to get customers is to choose:
- 1 x Traffic generating channel
- 1 x Sales driving channel
That’s it.
For example:
- Google Ads
- Online SMS
Once you’ve mastered one traffic generating channel add another one, and just push them through to the same sales driving channel.
- Google Ads + SEO
- Online SMS
Continue to add more traffic generating channels.
While it takes little convincing to get the average business owners to adopt Google Ads and SEO it takes a lot more hand-holding to get them to use what I would call one of the best conversion channels ever created…even in 2024, and that is online SMS.
Here are 4 reasons why you should be using online SMS if you’re a small business owner.
1. SMS is a lot less competitive
“One of the greatest enemies to generating sales is being lost inside a sea of competition, SMs solves that problem.” – Angus Barrett, SMSpapa.com.au
This is the exact reason why email has become less and less effective over the years, since it has become an industry norm to use email inside your business to communicate with customers the average consumer’s inbox is getting smashed all day every day.
And it’s not just marketing communication, either.
You’re competing with personal emails, confirmation orders, calendar requests, etc. whatever, email is one of the most requested communication channels for businesses to want to connect with people.
More email noise means less chance of your messages being picked up by your customer.
Online SMS actually gives businesses a safe haven away from all of that noise where the competition is actually close to ZERO.
How many text messages do you receive from businesses? Most of the time these messages are going to be payment reminders, roster updates from work, in other words, non-promotional type messages.
I’m guessing 90+ of your messages are from family and friends.
Now, yes, any messaging is competition but in terms of competition actually trying to gain wallet share, next to zero.
This brings me to the next reason why online SMS should be your number one marketing tool…
2. SMS Inbox is a VIP club
Since the majority of SMS inboxes are actually made up of friends and family it is a place that has higher attention.
The higher attention we give something the more important it is.
This by definition means that your text messages are going to get a lot of attention and priority over other forms of advertising like email, banner ads, etc.
Once you’ve been invited to sell to your customers or prospects via SMS you must only contact them when you have something great to share with them.
The moment you start sharing mediocre experiences is that day people start kicking you out of said VIP club.
By the mere fact of being inside the SMS inbox and receiving more attention your marketing campaigns will do a lot better than traditional email marketing.
3. Online SMS is permission based
One of the primary objections to online SMS or SMS marketing is that “it’s a scam” and my simple response to that is “yes, it is a scam” if you use it as a scammer.
Just like how email can be used for scamming and also paid to advertise, etc. whenever you have a communication channel that can help bad actors get access to consumers, they’re going to find a way to exploit it.
But in reality 99% of the time online SMS is being used for legitimate purposes.
The main rule of thumb with SMS is always generating leads organically, never buy lists.
If you generate them organically using permission-based marketing then you’re protecting yourself from litigation while generating more sales since the people your marketing to have signed up to receive your promotions.
4. Engagement rates
One of the problems and frustrations with email marketing is the open rates which affect the click-through rate and ultimately conversions.
We identified the chief problem here which was competitive noise, a tsunami of businesses wrestling for what little attention span the consumer already has hoping that their email will actually get clicked on.
80% of emails never get opened.
If 80% of your emails never get opened then you can see why you need to send dozens of emails a month to make the sales numbers work.
SMS on the other hand gets a jaw-dropping 97% open rate.
This means that 97% of the marketing messages you send out will get opened, this means you will generate a much higher click-through and ultimately, higher conversions.
Online SMS is like having a cheat code for generating more sales.
Let me ask you this…if you could get 97% of your customers to open and read your marketing message how would that impact sales?
Take your current open or click rate and the sales generated and then swap out that rate for 97% and see what numbers you come up with.
For many businesses, adding SMS is a serious game-changer.
5. SMS is affordable
People say “email is free”, it’s not.
You need to pay a monthly fee and while this does work out to be relatively cheap the pricing is based on how many people you have on your list.
The more people on your list the higher the fee.
Keep in mind that on your list you have people who never receive your email due to it being blocked completely from your ESP or having that email go straight to spam.
With SMS you too will have people who may not respond to your SMS but those people will quickly unsubscribe which means that you’re only paying for people who actually want to hear from you.
For only a few cents per SMS, this makes it a pricier option but given the fact that your list only has highly qualified buyers combined with the super high open rates, online SMS easily pays for itself.