Improving your lead acquisition and customer experience requires a communication method that offers reliable delivery and high engagement. Data from marketing studies indicate that text messaging boasts an open rate of 98% and an impressive click-through rate of 45%.
While text messaging can provide a remarkable boost to your marketing strategy, it’s critical to consider SMS marketing pricing to ensure your company or client gets the most value for its budget. With the right cloud-based messaging platform, you can deliver a business-enhancing SMS marketing solution that maximizes your client or organization’s budget.
Why Is it Critical to Optimize Your Budget With an Exceptional SMS Marketing Pricing Strategy?
In SMS marketing, an organization uses text messaging to deliver reminders, offers, and promotional material to a target market or customers. Engaging potential customers with text is a more personal and flexible method of communication, proving to be highly successful through its high open rates and response rates compared to other forms of communication.
Keep in mind that it’s vital to ensure recipients of business marketing have opted in to receive SMS from the organization to avoid legal issues. Typically, the business requires a record of consent, including the form of consent and date of consent, along with providing an opt-out function for recipients who no longer wish to receive communications via text message.
Getting consent from recipients is not the only challenge of SMS marketing. To unlock the benefits of text messaging and receive a better return from your marketing strategy, understanding and maximizing the value of SMS marketing pricing is vital.
While it’s clear that SMS marketing can benefit businesses of various sizes and industries, selecting the right SMS marketing pricing strategy can improve your client or company’s returns and decrease its overall investment.
Why Are Businesses Adopting SMS Marketing?
Not only does SMS marketing provide improved open rates and response rates, but it also offers a more personalized approach to marketing. Potential and existing customers are often happy to receive a message from a business via text messaging, and the ability to opt in and out provides security and privacy.
Related: How SMS Activation Can Boost Local Customer Engagement and Keep Your Business Competitive
Consumers appreciate the option to call or text their business of choice with personalized communication options depending on their needs. According to a study in PR Newswire, while consumers often prefer a phone call when they are home or driving, they prefer SMS during lunch breaks, work hours, and while commuting via public transportation. Most consumers have a mobile device capable of sending and receiving text messages and enjoy the flexibility it provides for keeping in touch with a business.
Advantages of Forming an SMS Marketing Strategy
Marketing through text messaging has various advantages for businesses. Its higher open and response rates are a primary benefit, increasing engagement and customer purchases as a result. Your client or organization can also benefit from the following:
- Companies can have a conversation with customers and potential clients, gaining valuable insights.
- Businesses can foster a sense of urgency to respond, especially for events like flash sales.
- It’s more personalized and trustworthy than an email or phone call.
- SMS is receptive to automation for reminders and bulk sending.
- It’s more cost-effective than calling, emailing, and traditional mail marketing.
- SMS can be sent from a local 10-digit longcode (10DLC) number or toll-free number.
How Do Businesses Use SMS Marketing?
While businesses use SMS marketing to grow and benefit from its high open rates and potential for automation, how can you help your organization or client achieve these goals? As a developer, you can create the ideal messaging solution for their SMS marketing strategy using a programmable SMS API. An application programming interface (API) allows you to easily integrate text messaging into a business or client’s automated systems or software to bolster its SMS marketing efforts.
Introductory and Welcome Offers
A business can use SMS to send an introductory offer or greeting to customers and potential leads who register their phone numbers with consent to receive text communications. It can help the user feel like they are a part of something and make them more likely to purchase or repurchase from the company. A welcome offer, such as a percentage off or free trial can help the client evaluate the company’s service or product at a lower price.
Referral Campaigns
Encouraging a customer to refer their friends and family is an excellent strategy to grow a business. Text messaging can be an ideal way to notify customers of a referral program, offering a link or code that the customer can send to friends, relatives, and co-workers who may benefit from the product or services. The customer is already trusted by their friends and family, making convincing others to try the product or service more persuasive.
Promotional Campaigns
Text messaging can be an ideal method of promoting a product, event, or brand. When customers sign up to receive SMS communications, they can stay updated with information, new products, events, and offers to keep them engaged and enthusiastic about the brand. Companies frequently offer a limited discount, free shipping, or a preview of the product or service to customers who receive the message.
Appointment and Event Reminders
SMS is a suitable communication method for delivering reminders to customers or clients. If there is an event customers won’t want to miss, such as a Cyber Monday sale, sending a reminder will ensure they are more likely to take a look. Reminders of all types can be automated, including appointment reminders for businesses in the service sector. For instance, a salon that frequently encounters no-shows can benefit from sending clients a reminder of their appointment, reducing no-shows, enhancing customer relations, and improving profitability in return.
Reward and Club Benefit Campaigns
Clubs and reward programs are an effective method of getting consent from customers to receive text messages. Some consumers are reluctant to provide their phone numbers, but being part of a reward program where they can receive benefits can be convincing. With the customer’s phone number and consent to receive messages, the business can send special offers for being a member, encouraging customer loyalty and consistent business.
How Do Providers Price SMS Services?
SMS services for marketing and business purposes are priced in two primary ways. Some platforms use flat-rate payment plans to sell hundreds or thousands of messages at a time to businesses. With this SMS marketing pricing strategy, the business must know approximately how many messages they will send and receive each billing cycle. Flat rate plans are often inflexible and are best for well-established companies that send and receive a fixed number of SMS each month.
Related: Revolutionizing Business Communication: Exploring the Benefits of Messaging APIs for Enterprises
A metered or per-message plan is another way SMS providers price their messaging services. Metered plans are more flexible, allowing the business to pay for only the amount of messages it uses in a billing cycle. It allows the company to bolster its messaging campaigns without financial consequences and scale up or down on demand. As the developer, the flexibility of a metered pricing plan also allows you to test and evaluate the SMS service and API to ensure it fits the application before committing to an investment.
Considerations When Selecting an SMS Partner for Marketing
Maximizing the value of the messaging solution for your client or company requires several considerations. In addition to finding a flexible SMS provider, ensure the business is ready to succeed in its SMS marketing campaigns by evaluating your SMS partner for the following qualities.
Regulatory Compliance
While SMS was once a well-known source of spam, regulations have made it a trustworthy and reliable communication method for businesses. Regulators have made it the organization’s responsibility to register as an application-to-person (A2P) sender to send messages in bulk.
The business must also send A2P messages from a 10DLC, toll-free, or short-code phone number. Since you’re likely using an SMS API to send messages in bulk from software, this means your client or business will need to register before they begin their SMS marketing campaign.
As mentioned above, it’s also critical to receive consent from recipients. Whether signing up in person, by email, website, app, or through an opt-in text, the business must receive consent to receive messages. An opt-out form must also be readily available to recipients, allowing them to text “STOP” or a similar designated keyword to no longer receive messages from the business.
Avoiding Gray Routes
When your client or business is ready for its marketing campaign with a registered A2P phone number, it’s critical to ensure your SMS partner can consistently and reliably send A2P traffic. While typical mobile devices used by consumers send person-to-person (P2P) SMS, an application sending messages in bulk requires A2P SMS to avoid being banned by carriers for potential spam.
A gray route or aggregator helps SMS platforms avoid fees by designating A2P traffic as P2P traffic. While it can be beneficial to the provider, it can be detrimental to your client or company’s SMS delivery. When selecting an SMS platform for your API, it’s vital to determine if the provider will avoid gray routes and aggregators that can harm the company’s SMS marketing strategy.
Scalability and Reliability
The scalability, reliability, and flexibility that an SMS platform provides your client or business ensures you can get the optimal value for its SMS marketing pricing strategy. The SMS partner should guarantee the delivery of messages with a resilient network offering physical failover during network outages. Along with a flexible metered pricing plan, the platform should offer dynamic scalability to ensure uninterrupted conversations with all customers and maximize the organization’s marketing campaigns.
Get Optimal Value From Your SMS Marketing Strategy With a Reputable Partner
Optimizing the value of your SMS marketing strategy requires a partner that offers cloud-based messaging with scalability and reliability. Make sure the platform includes flexible pricing options so that your company or client pays only for what it uses in a billing cycle.
Flowroute offers cloud-based messaging and a configurable SMS API to deliver the ideal messaging solution for your client or company’s SMS marketing strategy. We offer flexible metered payment options and the scalability of the cloud to optimize your messaging capabilities. You also get the reliability of the Flowroute HyperNetwork™ for guaranteed delivery. Get started with Flowroute and maximize your SMS marketing strategy.
