Text message marketing has proven to be an essential form of communication for brands across the globe. Within seconds, consumers can receive updates from brands that help to create lasting relationships, drive retention and increase brand awareness.
While we know why text marketing is successful, it can be helpful to have a deeper understanding of the text subscription strategies that work best with today’s customers.
Here are five strategies that can help increase engagement and drive purchases among your text subscribers.
1. Solution-based text marketing
How well do you know your customers? Their wants? Their needs?
Most of them are coming to you because your brand provides a product or service that adds value. It’s your job to keep offering that value.
Crafting texts that offer a solution — or even just address — any problems customers might have will encourage them to view your brand as a trusted and familiar source of valuable information.
2. Personalized communications
We’ve heard from experts who say humanizing your brand can encourage deeper feelings of loyalty and trust in consumers. It can also make your text marketing more effective.
Using conversational language and personalizing text content shows consumers you view them as people instead of numbers. This can create lasting loyalty, as it helps subscribers to feel appreciated.
3. Urgency marketing
There’s nothing like creating a sense of urgency around a product or service to really grab the attention of your customers.
There are all kinds of urgency tactics you can leverage — like scarcity, social proof and anticipation — to turn text content into fun experiences that motivate subscribers around any conversion you’re trying to drive.
Urgency tactics can be infused into text campaigns you’re already running or exist in the form of standalone urgency-marketing campaigns. Either way, the psychology of urgency can help you turn text readership into text engagement.
4. Offer notifications
Much of what makes text message marketing so effective is its ability to help marketers quickly get information to their customers. But as many marketers have come to understand, promoting content customers aren’t interested in can do more harm than good to your customer relationships.
Fortunately, discounts continue to be a top priority for consumers. In fact, our research has shown that consistently throughout the pandemic, consumers have prioritized discounts even over things like safety and cleanliness.
For this reason, while most brands are already offering discounts via text marketing, it’s still a category worth calling out. There are endless ways to personalize discounts offered, get creative with how you present them and continue testing how to get the most of this text marketing strategy.
5. Reminder notifications
Many consumers know the pain of missing out on a great deal because they didn’t know it was coming or forgot about it.
As a marketer, you may have experienced this situation from a different angle. While it’s your job to convince consumers to make purchases they’ll be happy with, it can be quite difficult to do so if they don’t know about your campaigns.
Text messages can help you get in touch with your target audience within seconds and remind them of limited-time offers, upcoming deals or any other important information you wouldn’t want them to miss.
Of course, there’s a careful balance between reminding and inundating your customers, but when done carefully, your audience will be appreciative of the follow-up messages and your brand will stay top of mind.
Text subscriptions offer brands and customers a chance to immediately connect. Having a clear understanding of various text strategies, and how to use them, can help optimize this connection and support your brand’s impact in the marketplace.
