The more your business grows, the harder it is to reach all your customers and prospects. But among the many communications channels available to you, one stands out for immediacy, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use.
Reaching customers and prospects in a growing business
Everyone wants a growing business. Having more customers means more revenue and a great chance to make the world a better place with your products or services.
But keeping customers active means keeping in touch with them. Sometimes you want to send them notifications of new products or policies. Sometimes you need to send them alerts about essential services or time-critical events. And sometimes you just want to offer them new information.
The problem is staying in touch cost-effectively at scale. Businesses have multiple options, including:
- SMS
- Voice
- Postal mail
- Social media
- Advertising
- Word of mouth
They all have pros and cons when it comes to cost, immediacy, and reach. Email, for example, has low cost but only moderate immediacy. Word of mouth has no cost at all but very limited reach. The best combination of low cost, high immediacy, and almost universal reach is SMS, a.k.a. text messaging. It offers global reach and immediate delivery at a low unit cost per message.
SMS can reach just about everyone. According to Pew Research, 96% of Americans owned a cell phone in 2019, and the most commonly used application for mobile phones is text messaging. That means your customers and potential customers already have what they need to get your messages.
A majority of people say text messaging is their preferred communication method, and according to a widely cited figure, SMS open rates run around 98%. That’s better than any other marketing channel.
SMS has higher deliverability than other electronic channels. Many people decline to answer phone calls from numbers they’re not familiar with, and spam filters often catch bulk email messages before they reach recipients’ inboxes.
Bottom line: SMS has the best reach and the lowest costs for sending bulk messages.
We’ve written a white paper on how to optimize your SMS communications. You should download it and read our advice on topics such as when to use long code phone numbers, toll-free numbers, and short codes; how to take advantage of sender IDs for international calls; and how to avoid having carriers tag your messages as spam.
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