Nearly every one of us keeps our mobile phones within arm’s reach and check new messages within minutes. Which is why SMS marketing is now all the rage for marketers to connect with customers.
But have you ever thought of how SMS can support your other communication media, like email?
Web forms are a great way of capturing new subscriber details to your database, but they’re not the only way. You can also do it via SMS with virtual numbers; virtual numbers are a mobile phone number that is connected to your record as a replacement for a handset. So if somebody sends a message to your virtual number, it is captured straight within your database. Virtual numbers are extremely effective for offline email acquisition campaigns.
This is a popular method with offline competitions aimed at growing your email database.
Here are three steps you can take towards this goal:
1) Integrate metadata fields as part of your acquisition process
We’ve all seen examples of mobile subscriber sign-ups on web, while these do a great job of converting web visitors into mobile subscribers, they could be improved by integrating metadata-collecting radio buttons.
Using this method in an SMS message flow, getting your content with the collection of age verification metadata, ensures that users who do interact with your content are doing so expressively, and gives you to steadily perk up your ongoing outbound communication strategy.
2) Integrate responses into a subscriber’s overall profile
This can be accomplished at the individual or macro level – the main thing to take into account is that you want to create distinct buckets for how people respond to your campaigns. To ease the transition, start by thinking broad and then segment from there.
3) Integrate with your email system to create a more comprehensive data profile
In order to integrate SMS with your email CRM, you need a common field to map data between the two. For examples: a) use a Feedback SMS campaign to capture email address, b) ask customers for their mobile phone and email when they sign up for alerts and c) include a mobile call to action with a unique code on your outbound emails.
These three points should give you a strong start.
Use SMS marketing to:
- Text a customer to let them know that their delivery is en route.
- Tell customers about promotions & updates between monthly emails.
- Tell them about a new product launch or to offer them a discounted price if you haven’t heard from them in a while.