Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning we get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through our links, at no cost to you. Please read our disclosure for more info.
Last Updated on August 15, 2021 by Work In My Pajamas
Short Marketing Service (SMS) marketing gives you many ways to promote your business by leveraging the popularity of mobile phones and text messaging. One of the lesser-known applications of this type of marketing is to promote a website.
In This Post:
Is SMS Marketing Effective?
Building traffic to a website traditionally involves strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), online advertising platforms such as PPC or Facebook ads (along with many other paid advertising platforms) and email marketing. SMS, however, provides a fresh, highly engaging and less saturated alternative.
The Benefits of SMS Marketing
Many of the usual methods used to promote websites are saturated. They are also extremely competitive. Whether you are using SEO, for example, you must create lots of content with keywords and focus on getting links to your site. PPC and other types of advertising can be expensive and involve bidding on keywords. There is also the growing risk that your audience will not be responsive to your ads or emails.
SMS marketing takes advantage of the vast popularity of text messaging. Compared to emails, text messages have a very high response rate. The open rates of text messages has been estimated at between 95% and 98%. Emails, meanwhile, have an average open rate closer to 20%. This means that your audience is more than 4x more likely to read a text message than an email!
While SMS marketing has many offline uses, such as promoting physical businesses and live events, it can also be used to promote websites.
SMS Strategies to Promote Your Website
There are several ways to promote a website via text messages. When you put up a blog post, article, video or other content on your site, you can send out messages informing your contacts. It’s best to promote engaging content that people will enjoy accessing from their phones. A video or short blog post usually works better than a long article.
Just as SMS can be used to send people coupons that can be used in stores, you can send out coupons that can be applied to online items, whether they’re physical products, digital products or services. People only have to type in a certain keyword to access the coupon.
Because of the high response rate of SMS, your recipients are more likely to visit your website after receiving a text than from seeing an online ad or receiving an email.
Tips to Keep in Mind When Promoting Your Website
Here are a few tips that can help you get better results.
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. When you’re sending out text messages to promote your site, you can be sure that people will be accessing your site from their phones. So make sure you have a good mobile landing page or a site with responsive design (which works no matter what type of device is being used).
- Promote flash sales and time sensitive deals. Texting is a very spontaneous activity. You don’t want to give people time to forget about your promotion. That’s why it’s best to give them a short time frame to respond. Your coupon, for example, might only be valid for a few hours or, at most, a day.
- Segment your customers -As your list of contacts grows, you may want to segment them into different categories. If you have an online store, for example, you might have items that appeal to men, women or people in certain age groups. When getting people to sign up for your SMS campaigns, be as specific as possible to ensure they’ll be getting messages that are relevant to them.
