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SMS Marketing is a form of marketing that businesses use to send promotions to customers via text message.
Over the years as people start to use their mobiles more and more, this form of marketing has gained popularity.
You yourself have probably received MANY promotional text messages, and either hate them and think of them as spam or love them for the reminder.
Either way, there is no denying the benefits it can have in retaining customers within your trade business.
Retaining customers is one of the most important pieces of marketing that trade businesses often overlook.
They’re so focused on getting NEW leads, that they forget about the ones they’ve already got.
But when you spend so much money getting these new leads and converting them into customers, you need to be squeezing as much as you can out of them. Because investing in repeat business costs you LESS than finding new leads, AND makes you more because you’ve already built the rapport with the customer!
These days, phone culture is huge. You don’t often find someone who doesn’t have a smart phone glued to their side. In fact, 98% of all text messages are read, with 90% of these being read in the first 3 minutes of receiving!
SMS marketing is a quick, low-cost way to stay in touch and stay top of mind with your current customers in order to drive additional repeat jobs.
Whilst there are so many benefits to SMS marketing, fact of the matter is not everyone likes receiving a text message.
Ultimately, you will receive a few opt-outs/unsubscribes when you first start implementing SMS marketing but in marketing, you need to be pushing the envelope. Just because they’ve unsubscribed, doesn’t mean they won’t use your services again, it just means they don’t want promotional texts.
To avoid annoying your customers, you need to…
Who are you sending the text message to? Where do they live? What kind of services do they use your business for? What is their lifestyle like?
Consider here that you don’t need to send the text to your entire database, you may choose to segment it into suburbs. You may also choose to segment into services completed, or demographics like age, gender, or other.
All of these will help you think about what the message entails and what time you send it.
Who are you sending it to? If it’s just people in specific suburbs, mention the suburb. If it’s sent to people who’ve recently had HWS installations, mention HWS.
You may also like to consider here special holidays coming up (e.g Christmas and closure over the New Year), or weather events (e.g big storms that could potentially block drains).
Keep in mind the more you write, the more it will cost you. Each provider will have different pricing per message, however each ‘message’ is considered to be 160 characters. So if your message is over 160 characters, you will be paying as if it were two/three/etc. texts per customer.
We’ve provided you with some templates you can use or adapt within your business.
Click HERE to download the SMS Marketing Templates
Whilst your Job Management System can send texts to individual people, you might want to consider a different provider that allows you to send texts in bulk.
These include but are not limited to:
What contacts you’re exporting from your JMS will depend on what kind of text you’re sending.
If you’re sending a text to your entire database, you would download your entire customer list. If you were sending the text to specific suburbs, you would separate your customer list into suburbs and download just those specific customers.
You will need to download first name, last name, mobile number, and other relevant information like suburb.
Over the years customer lists can become a little messy. Clean up your list to ensure names have capitalised first letters, mobile numbers have the right amount of numbers in it, and there are no obvious spelling errors.
Log into your SMS provider and upload your clean customer list ready to start your campaign.
Because each provider has different instructions, we advise you to follow the steps in sending your text out within your chosen provider.
Generally, the steps will follow the below format:
If your provider does not automatically unsubscribe the contact from your list, manage the replies that are wanting to unsubscribe.
Some customers may also reply with questions or asking to book in, these will appear in your providers system so you will need to log in to manage these as they come in.
How much work did you get from the text message?
As jobs come in, it may help to ask them if they’ve used your services before or where they heard about you, so you can determine if they received the text and are calling because of that.
It may also help to have included an offer in the text message because when people call to book, they will mention the offer making it easy for you to track it.
Enter this in your JMS so you can understand ROI.