What is the Proper Ethical Approach Towards SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing is highly popular these days for all the right reasons. It’s prompt, doesn’t depend on the internet or computer or smartphone, etc., and is for all those people who use a mobile phone. One of the simplest technologies with immense potential is this, which makes your business and product too much reachable to people anywhere. It’s estimated through surveys that globally 90 percent of the population would be using a mobile phone by the year 2024. Also, it’s surveyed that 9 out of 10 Americans use a mobile phone at present date. With this scenario, it’s quite evident that SMS marketing has a place of its own and great importance in reaching people of all types.

There are, however, some etiquette to be maintained for SMS marketing, so that you don’t annoy your target customers, win their trust, and eventually win them as customers too. This demands to understand some of the customer psychology so that your SMS marketing campaign becomes a success.

How to win the trust of your target customers?

As the business, your moves should be such that you can win the hearts of your target customers. There are some etiquettes and styles to do this. And you should understand the minds of people too. Usually, people don’t tend to share their mobile phone numbers. Sharing cell phone numbers is done among very personal and important professional contacts. Other than that, if you go and ask for the contact number, you may face rejection about it in most of the cases. Still people do sign up to offers and promotions and all that through emails and contact numbers, and accordingly leads also do get generated.

The journey from getting a list of leads to contacting them must be very calculated with cautious steps. You are entering the personal space of a person by messaging in the mobile number directly. Therefore your commercial marketing messages must comply with a few things for getting the best attention. Here you must fulfill some customer expectations, and also give the target readers the feeling that their wishes are being given priority and fulfilled. 

What kind of expectation does target readers have?

Target readers of messages have several different types of expectations. Especially when you ask for a contact number, and they give it to you, then you must establish that trust level in their mind through your offers and presentations. Some of the expectations and psychologies are:

• They expect to get exclusive, and even tailor-made offers from you owing to their customer behavior mapped by you through some questionnaire. If you send unique offers, coupon codes, or call to action messages that will help them get a discount, etc., then this expectation can be fulfilled. 
• Through SMS, they expect to know something new and not the same things as they come to know from email messages, newsletters, and social media updates. This quest for something new made them open the SMS messages and read through. Hence you should follow this and give them surprises.
• You also must be careful not to send the same message again and again, day and night, evening and afternoon, and now and then, to make your readers paranoid. You would lose all the respect this way. Hence, the target should be to message them, but very infrequently. You may send one SMS in a week or month.
• As a marketing stunt, you may declare that only those customers who are sharing their phone numbers would be getting the exclusive special offers.
• Your target customers must feel pampered with your special reminder messages, which tell about important dates to them, like recharge date, bill payment date, appointments, orders, and so on.
• Make very sure not to send an SMS message at an odd hour. Only the active day time hours and evening is considered the appropriate time to send a marketing SMS.

More etiquettes

Besides the above, there are more etiquettes about SMS marketing you must know. Most people go reluctant about them while they are very important to make or break the image of your business.

• Understand the importance of opt-in for which is to take the consent of a customer. Customers like to be asked if they want to receive marketing messages from you or not. If one is saying yes, you have no issues sending SMS to the person. In case one says no, you have to remove that number and name from your list immediately. That’s why you must ask the customer if they want it or not through the opt-in form.
• Unsubscribe button is the next important link, which should ideally be present in any and every SMS marketing message. With this link, one may unsubscribe from the marketing messages of business at any time. If you are not providing this, you are forcing readers to read or receive the messages, which is unethical.
• Replying to some marketing messages may incur extra cost to the reader. If you are not telling this to the customer, then it’s a big problem. You must educate your readers about this, and tell that replying to the messages in some cases can incur them extra charge or more bill.

For a good SMS marketing campaign, you must have the support and service of a good SMS marketing company. They will be able to guide you, assist you, and help you make no such mistakes which taint your company or brand image. Professional help highly matters and can give you exceptional results from SMS marketing. Many of the things which you can manage on our own, like data tracking and targeted marketing, etc.can be done through professional services. You can click here to read more.

Finally

SMS marketing surely fetches great results, but this depends on how much you have done it systematically. Hence for putting in an organized effort, you must plan it along with professionals, and invest properly in an affordable marketing campaign. This way, you will feel the difference and gain new customers from marketing soon.