Promotional SMS: What is It, and How Can You Use Promotional Texts Effectively?

Promotional SMS campaigns are becoming increasingly common in today’s world. After all, SMS is one of the best ways to reach your customers wherever they are, introduce them to your products, and keep them engaged with your brand.

Not only do 7.2 billion people worldwide already have a smartphone, but studies show that SMS is one of the most popular ways for customers to communicate with companies.

Investing in text advertisements can significantly increase the amount of traffic you attract to your store or website, boost customer loyalty, and even increase your profits.

But there are some hurdles to overcome, like convincing customers to opt-in to your SMS campaigns, and ensuring you follow the rules of SMS compliance. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can unlock the benefits of SMS promotion, while reducing your exposure to risks.

What is Promotional SMS?

Promotional SMS messages are text messages sent by businesses to consumers to promote events, products, services, deals, and offers. They include everything from text message broadcast campaigns that announce the arrival of new products, to texts that attempt to convert customers with discount codes or perks (like free shipping).

Notably, promotional text messages are very different to transactional SMS messages. Transactional SMS campaigns focus on providing users with valuable information, such as instructions on how to log into an account, or information about an order or delivery.

Appointment reminders, multifactor authentication codes, and order confirmation alerts are all examples of transactional SMS. These messages don’t attempt to convince customers to do or buy anything. Alternatively, promotional messaging is all about driving action.

Every message you send with a promotional text campaign will focus on generating leads, increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, or earning sales.

Examples of Promotional SMS Messages

There are many different types of promotional messages companies can send to their target audience. Most forms of text messaging marketing strategies involve using automated tools to send notifications to a large number of customers at once, at a specific time.

However, there are companies that also use conversational SMS for their promotional campaigns, leveraging two-way messaging services to allow customers to respond to team members or ask questions about products. Some common types of promotional SMS messages include:

• General promotional alerts: These are messages sent regularly to customers to keep them engaged, and remind them of your top-selling products or services. For instance, if you’re using an SMS service for eCommerce, you might send subscribers a message once a week introducing your most popular, trending products.
• Promotional announcements: Promotional announcements let customers know about new products, upcoming events, or opportunities they can take advantage of. For instance, if you’re using SMS for fitness industry promotional campaigns, you could send subscribers a text letting them know you’re offering new classes or access to new amenities.
• Sale or discount messages: Sale and discount messages let customers know about the current deals available to them. You might announce an upcoming annual sale, offer loyal customers a discount on their next order, or send personalized offers to customers based on their previous purchases.
• Offer messages: Offer messages are intended to encourage customers to buy something, or spend more. For instance, you might use your mass texting service to let customers know about a new buy-one-get-one-free offer, a free delivery promotion, or a free product they can access when they make a specific purchase.
• Loyalty program messages: You can also use your SMS strategy to nurture customer loyalty. For instance, you might send a loyalty text message to customers within your loyalty program, letting them know about the points they can use. You could also invite customers to join your loyalty program with a similar campaign.

The Benefits of SMS Promotion Campaigns

A promo SMS campaign can deliver numerous benefits to businesses. SMS is one of the best channels to use when you want to connect with customers quickly and consistently wherever they are. For instance, while customers may only check their email inbox once per day, around 90% of text opens happen within 3 minutes of receiving the message.

This makes promotional SMS ideal for time-sensitive campaigns, such as when you want to advertise new deals and offers. It’s also a great way to keep your business top-of-mind with customers. While customers can easily overlook your emails or social media posts, they’re unlikely to ignore a text message sent directly to their phone.

Compared to other marketing channels, SMS delivers:

• High open rates of up to 98%
• Click-through rates is typically 19.3%
• Excellent opportunities to personalize and segment campaigns
• Full control over deliverability and reach

Plus, SMS marketing can be an excellent addition to your overall promotional campaign. You can send bulk SMS messages alongside social media, email marketing, and content creation campaigns to connect with, engage, and nurture your audience across multiple channels.

Promotional SMS and Compliance

Perhaps the biggest downside with promotional SMS, is that it can be difficult to remain compliant with the latest regulations. As you’ll see in our TCPA compliance guide and an article on 10DLC regulations, there are various governance standards to adhere to with promo SMS.

You’ll need to ensure you’re using the right number to send messages to your customers, such as a 10 digit long code, to keep costs low and avoid spam filters. You’ll also need to obtain explicit consent from all of your customers to contact them via text.

Just because a customer gives you their phone number when they sign up for an account with your website or makes a purchase, doesn’t mean that they’re agreeing to receive marketing messages from you. If you’re not using opt-in SMS strategies to obtain consent you could risk serious fines.

To avoid compliance issues, you’ll need to read up on things like CAN-SPAM act text messages and specific industry guidelines, such as those from HIPAA and SEC.

How to Send Promotional SMS Messages: Best Practices

Before you send promotional SMS messages to your customers, it’s important to have a clear strategy. The right approach to SMS promotion will rely on a combination of using the right best practices, strategies, and technologies to optimize your campaigns.

Here are our top tips for success.

1. Adhere to Compliance Standards

First, it’s important to ensure you’re adhering to the right compliance guidelines for promotional SMS. As mentioned above, all forms of promotional text messages require you to obtain explicit consent from your customers to contact them.

This means you’ll need to use landing pages, online forms, or text to join campaigns to confirm customers actually want to hear from you. It’s usually a good idea to offer customers something in exchange for their contact details, such as a free gift or a promotional code.

It can also help to use double opt-in methods, to ensure you’re only communicating with customers that definitely want to hear from you. Aside from getting your customers to opt-in, make sure you have a strategy in place for:

• Respecting opt-out requests promptly
• Archiving and retaining crucial data from conversational marketing messages
• Securing your customer’s data with encryption and access controls

2. Use Personalization in your Messages

Around 76% of customers say they feel frustrated when companies don’t deliver a personalized experience. That’s why it’s so important to make your messages feel relevant to your audience.

When you collect contact details from customers, segment them into different groups based on demographic data (like their location and age) and behavioral data (such as their interests). Think about how you can enhance your messages by using a customer’s name in your notifications or introducing them to products that will appeal most to their interest.

You can even consider allowing customers to choose which types of messages they’ll receive when they sign up for your SMS promotion campaigns.

3. Keep Messages Short and Professional

Whether you’re texting from a landline, using Zoom 10DLC campaigns, or taking advantage of mass messaging software, remember to keep your notifications short and sweet. Get straight to the point with your messages, and only include valuable relevant information.

This will not only ensure that you don’t overwhelm your customers with lengthy messages, it will also improve your chances of bypassing the spam filters used by various mobile carriers. Messages that are too long or include spammy keywords can lead to customers not receiving texts.

When crafting your messages:

• Try to stick to 160 characters or less.
• Use texting short code and keywords to enable interactivity
• Don’t use too many capital letters or punctuation marks
• Avoid spammy language like “free” or “buy now”
• Ensure you convey your brand’s unique personality

4. Include a CTA and Create a Sense of Urgency

Writing an impressive and engaging message alone won’t guarantee positive results from your promotional SMS campaigns. You need to (gently) push your customers to take action. A strong Call to Action (CTA) will tell customers exactly what they need to do next.

For instance, companies investing in texting for hotels might use CTAs like “confirm your booking” or “get the deal” if they’re offering customers something special, like a discount on a room.

Ensure your CTA includes a link your customers can access from their smartphone, and try to create a sense of urgency. Let customers know if you’re only giving them access to an offer for a specific amount of time, or if there are only so many “discount codes” available.

This will encourage customers to act fast and take advantage of new offers as they arise.

5. Use the right Promotional SMS software

Finally, make sure you’re using the right SMS software to manage your campaigns. A comprehensive SMS marketing solution like Clerk Chat will help you to create compelling campaigns with branded texting templates. Plus, it will give you access to tools for:

• Automating campaigns: You’ll be able to create automated workflows to ensure your promotional and conversational ecommerce and marketing messages reach customers at the right time (when they’re most likely to be using their phones).
• Experimenting with different marketing strategies: With Clerk Chat, you can create mass messaging campaigns, experiment with two-way text messaging, and even take advantage of AI text messaging, to boost your return on investment.
• Tracking results: An intuitive SMS platform will allow you to track the results of your campaigns with metrics focusing on open, click-through, and delivery rate. It can even allow you to create text surveys to gather feedback from customers on your promo SMS strategy.

Plus, Clerk Chat is designed to keep companies compliant with SMS texting standards, and it can integrate with the tools you already use for collaboration, customer relationship management, archiving, and more.

Unlock New Growth with the Clerk Chat Promotional SMS Service

Investing in promotional SMS is an excellent way to engage your customers, increase loyalty, and boost your revenue in any industry.

With the right strategy, you can drive more customers to your store, deliver exceptional experiences to your target audience, and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Clerk Chat makes it easy to get started with promotional texting, offering an all-in-one platform for all types of SMS-based campaigns. Contact our team today or request a demo to learn more about how we can help you achieve your SMS marketing goals.