How To Introduce SMS And Voicemail Marketing To Your Small Business

In today’s fast-paced and highly advanced world, businesses need to up their game when it comes to reaching out to their customers and prospects. Both inbound and outbound marketing strategies are necessary to ensure that your business retains good revenues and profits. If you want to expand your marketing efforts, you won’t ever go wrong with SMS and voicemail marketing.

Communicating via traditional text messages and voicemails is very much alive and effective, which is why modern marketers continue to leverage this tactic. It’s also important to ensure that your customers receive your messages. Fortunately, many tools would lead to marketing automation for business. It’s all a matter of understanding and investing in the most valuable ones.

Understanding Ringless Voicemails

One of the must-have tools that you can add to your marketing arsenal is ringless voicemail. A person’s cell phone voicemail will receive prerecorded messages through this specialized software. It uses advanced technology where you won’t have to worry about disturbing the recipient when they’re busy with work and obligations. Due to its ringless feature, your customers can receive your voicemail without ringing.

Ringless voicemail is affordable, flexible, and scalable to meet industries and business goals. Internal company members can utilize these voicemail features too. This makes it an effective communication medium for both the customers and company staff.

To know more about ringless voicemails, you can check this video:

How SMS Marketing Works

Some business owners may argue and believe that SMS marketing is no longer effective. But the truth is SMS remains an effective marketing medium with high response and open rates. This is because everyone still checks and uses their text message inboxes. For those without an internet connection, they still rely on SMS to deliver and receive messages.

And even non-tech-savvy citizens prefer to use ordinary mobile phones instead of smartphones. In such cases, SMS is necessary for communication. SMS texts come with 160-character limitations, which makes them easy to read and tend to. An alert usually appears on the home screen of a mobile phone, grabbing the user’s attention instantly.

Fortunately, there’s now a two-in-one marketing tool that takes care of your SMS and ringless voicemail marketing strategies. All you need is to create an account with a reputable provider. They come with service inclusions that can be tailor-fit to your business needs. You can import all your contact lists and make messages and voicemail sending a breeze. Using the SMS and ringless voicemail provider’s app, you can send out notifications promptly and conveniently.

Strategies To Use SMS And Voicemail Marketing For Small Business

Small business owners should maximize the use of SMS and voicemail marketing tools. This can help in succeeding in a business. Here are some steps and tips for launching their features and uses.

• Set Goals First

The first step is to decide what you want your campaign to accomplish. Setting goals is crucial as they act as the blueprint of the overall marketing structure. Further, the purpose of setting a goal is to measure the performance of your campaign by tracking objective results. Regardless of your goals, it’d be easier to track whether your marketing steps are effective.

• Get Permission

Legally speaking, you need permission first to send out messages related to your business. This means you should get the opt-in from your prospects and customers. Aside from following the law, this practice gives your company image a good light.

You need to be sensitive and considerate of how others would feel about receiving voicemails and messages from your brand. They should think of your message as something with value and not one they should transfer to their SPAM folders.

• Think Of Great SMS And Voicemail Marketing Campaign Ideas  

SMS and voicemail strategies are effective in creating marketing campaigns. Ultimately, they can aid in helping you generate positive results or acquire business goals. Here are some great campaign ideas where you can use SMS and voicemail marketing in:

• Order Confirmation  

Once orders have been placed, confirming them with the customer is always a good idea before finally preparing for shipment. In such a step, it’d be helpful to use SMS for this. Provide a link on your website for consumers to review their orders. This allows them to perceive your brand as trustworthy and organized.

• Exclusive Discounts and Offers  

Keeping exclusivity is a valuable tool when developing SMS marketing campaigns. Send exclusive discounts and offers to your prospects and customers who have opted into your SMS list. One of their perks as an exclusive member is to get real-time announcements when you have discounts and flash sales. This can make them feel appreciated and honored as a loyal customer.

• Announcing Restock of Their Favorite Items  

If your customer regularly purchases stock but fails to check out due to no stocks, it’s best to use SMS or voicemail marketing to announce restocks. By keeping people subscribed to your SMS messages, they may receive alerts on other popular or favorite items. They can find this feature helpful and useful, so they won’t have to keep revisiting your site just to check stocks.

• New Product Release  

Marketing plays a huge role when launching a new product. Fortunately, SMS and voicemail marketing can do wonders to promote your new product. To create hype around your new product, send SMS messages before releasing it. Subscribers can preorder the item during this time. They should also have access to the features way before others. This would give them leverage and increase their loyalty to your brand.

Finally, during product launch day, you can send SMS messages to subscribers to remind them to purchase the product or take advantage of exclusive discounts not available to other consumers.

• Event Announcements  

Another marketing strategy is to organize events and shows for promotions. You can send out invitations and RSVP links to your contact list. This enables your loyal customers to get notified about the event, and they can conveniently book a slot without hassles.

Whether your event or promotional ad is linked to your social profiles, your recipients won’t have difficulty checking and accessing them through SMS messages. When the event is nearing, you can send out voicemails and messages as gentle reminders for the event coming in. This will allow them to remember the event and ensure not to miss out. The key is formulating catchy messages and choosing the right words for your 160-character SMS messages.

• Create Good Quality Messages  

Personalized and highly targeted voicemail drop campaigns and SMS are the best. In order to generate leads, you should appear to be addressing an individual rather than a mass audience. Ensure that your message contains all relevant details too. After all, you want your recipients to take action or contact you after the call. Consider the following tips for creating good-quality messages or voicemails:

• Offer Value  

Whether sending out texts or voicemails, you should focus on offering something of value. While greeting is important, it’s also vital to establish the purpose of reaching out to your customers. You can send out informative content by sending out links to your blog articles.

To know what content would be most valuable or helpful to them, you should be able to observe and study the pain points of your audience. In doing so, you can determine what content is best for them, creating credibility for your brand.

When including links in an SMS message, explain what will happen if the recipient clicks on the link. Don’t send out naked links, as they can appear fishy and malicious. Always have an opening part and greeting before you explain what your SMS or voicemail is about.

• Keep It Personal  

Keep your SMS and voicemail as personalized as possible. This heightens the chances of your recipients reading and listening to them. By doing so, the customer will know they are receiving a message specifically for them.

• Keep It Short and Concise  

A message can only be 160 characters long on some devices, so it’s important to make the most of it. Wisely use up these characters and make your messages short, clear, and concise. It’ll be appreciated by recipients if your message is direct to the point.

• Don’t Spam Your Recipients  

Don’t text prospects and customers too often. This can have adverse effects on them. Doing so will turn them off and will encourage them to hit the unsubscribe button. It’s crucial to consider the right and best time and frequency to send out messages to them.

• Proofread and Review Your Content  

No matter how short your text messages are, errors can still happen. As menial as typos or auto-correct, they can affect your credibility and customer trust. Hence, it’s paramount to get your messages proofread, edited, and reviewed first before being sent out.

• Stay Away from Using Abbreviations  

Avoid using too many abbreviations in text messages, even though some may be acceptable. These acronyms may confuse your audience or even frustrate them, depending on who you are trying to reach.

• Remove Complex Terms  

There should be no ambiguity in SMS messages. Each and every word should require no trouble in understanding and deciphering. Avoid industry jargon and specialized terms by using only common and easy-to-comprehend terms. When your message is simple and straightforward, your recipient will more likely understand your point.

• Incorporate Call-To-Action  

An important part of sending out messages is to incorporate a call to action. However, don’t turn them off by adding too many. Use a single call to action only for every message sent out. Whether you insert it in the beginning or closing part of your message, you can make it subtle and natural-flowing into the entire message.

You can invite them to learn more about or take advantage of a special offer by clicking on the link. Within the same text message, avoid sending multiple offers or links.

• Prepare Your Contact List  

It’s important to have your own contact list to send out SMS and voicemail messages. Depending on the tool you use, you should import all the contact details you have on your customers. Depending on your marketing goals, you can then divide them into groups. This allows you to send out messages in a more targeted manner.

Ensure to create a separate list for those who have recently opted out of your message list. This ensures you no longer include them in your SMS or voicemail messages.

• Ensure To Send To Targeted Audience  

You can’t expect excellent results from sending mass text messages to everyone on your contact list. Customer journeys are segmented and personalized for each consumer. Therefore, it’s crucial to find and apply more strategies to keep your SMS and voicemail marketing more specific and targeted.

Segment your database according to your data insights. Segregate this list according to demographics, customer purchasing behaviors, and preferences. Such a simple analysis can help you find who to target more and generate higher revenues.

• Schedule Your Time For Sending Messages  

With ringless voicemail, you can deliver messages anytime without disrupting your recipients. You want to make sure that your message gets heard in a timely manner. The good news is such tools come with scheduling features that allow you to send out messages based on schedules. Make sure to schedule voicemail and SMS delivery during the times when your target audience is less likely to be busy with work or other obligations. Also, consider their respective time zones when sending out messages.

• Remember To Do Follow-Ups  

Finally, it’s crucial to do follow-ups for your SMS and voicemail marketing. Be prepared to follow up on your targeted prospects. It’s essential to consider their preferred communication channels or social media sites.

Ensure you delegate a team, follow-ups, and handle leads and customers. You can convert more sales when everyone in the marketing team is on the same page to make the SMS and voicemail campaign successful.

Conclusion

Follow this business text messaging and ringless voicemail guidelines to make these marketing tactics a great addition to your sales communications. Hopefully, this guide can support you as you introduce SMS and ringless voicemail marketing into your business. Your customer communications will be enhanced, helping you build stronger relationships with customers and prospects. Moreover, you’ll receive more responses and conversions by using the effective communication strategies mentioned above.