Common SMS Marketing Mistakes – Part 1

With the emergence of SMS marketing as the mobile marketing method of choice for business, many companies have rushed into employing mobile marketing systems. While there are many great examples of how to utilize mobile marketing in your advertising, the haste with which such systems have been employed has led to multiple companies making basic errors in their strategies. This series of posts will help those new to mobile marketing with identifying and addressing such issues.

Avoid using SMS as a one off feature – One of the key points regarding mobile marketing that too many companies are missing, is that SMS is a relationship building tool. Integrate mobile with a series of campaigns and watch how the effectiveness gradually increases from campaign to campaign.

Remember as well, when considering multiple uses of SMS mobile marketing, is that one of the key features of mobile marketing is the ability to build databases. With mobile phone numbers collected and saved within the database, a whole new avenue of push marketing is opened for use.

Once relationships have been built, avoid bombarding customers with daily SMS messages. By overloading a customer with too many text messages, businesses run the risk of alienating customers and encouraging them to opt out of databases. Marketers need to remember that the last thing they want to do is appear to be ‘spamming’ consumers. One of the key differences between email and SMS for marketing is that text messages are always solicited. Don’t abuse the privilege customers have granted your business by allowing you to push text them.

Through careful planning and timing, companies are able to maximize the value of their push texts and keep the customer interested in the product. Remember to understand the product and time text messages accordingly. “Text messaging can be a highly effective marketing tool when companies leverage the personal and conversational nature of it,” Mr. Schwegman said.

Make sure you keep reading this series on how to avoid the most common mistakes in SMS marketing. Read Part 2 on not having a prevalent call-to-action and making messages too generic.

This article was written by Alex Speirs of TXT2GET, the leaders in SMS mobile marketing. To find out how you can avoid the pitfalls of badly run mobile marketing and effectively utilize it with your business, just give us a call or read some successful mobile marketing case studies.