It’s common knowledge that there are now billions of mobile phone users around the world. The mobile marketing and communication industry is still very much on the rise and if you are a local business owner not using mobile SMS text messaging to connect with your target market, you are massively losing out! As this provides a huge opportunity to increase your sales revenue.

The big question is how can you be using Mobile SMS text messaging to dramatically increase your sales?

Have SMS ‘VIP’ Customer List: Having a VIP Customer List that you can send valuable promotional offers to over and over again via SMS is a proven way to very much boost your sales. But to get people willingly and easily joining your VIP customer list (database), simply offer an immediate incentive to join, such as a discount offer.

Once people are on your VIP customer list, you have (according to the law) got their ‘permission’ to be sending them future promotional offers – which will give great value to them and drive in more sales revenue into your business.

Use online SMS Messaging Platform: To properly set up your SMS ‘VIP’ customer list, you will require an online ‘SMS Messaging Platform’. This is particularly required in terms of providing people with a valid PHONE NUMBER along with a related KEYWORD they have to text you in order to correctly join your list…

If you use a decent online ‘SMS Messaging Platform’, then all this stuff can seamlessly be set up from within the same platform. Providing a valid PHONE NUMBER plus a related KEYWORD is the right approach for getting people on your customer list, as they have to personally ‘opt-in’ to subscribe, which is known as ‘permission-based’ subscription.

Only Contact Subscribers: You should never run a mobile SMS marketing campaign to contact people who have not subscribed to your SMS ‘VIP’ customer list – which means they have not given you permission to contact them (on their phone) by text message. Doing this is regarded as SPAM and since people easily get irritated by SPAM messages, they can therefore take legal action.

So, using an online ‘SMS Messaging Platform’ for setting up your SMS ‘VIP’ customer list is crucial. As this approach will definitely allow people to willingly join your customer list and give you permission (according to the law) to send them future promotional messages. And by promoting great offers to the people who actually subscribed to your list, you will achieve high sales volume.

Provide Mobile Coupon: You can promote mobile coupon (e.g. 15% discount in value) at your business premises or on your website or anywhere possible as an incentive to easily get people joining your SMS ‘VIP’ customer list and as a way to easily boost your sales. Also, with this approach people would be able to willingly ‘opt-in’ to your customer list (database) while at the same time receive a redeemable 15% discount coupon on their mobile phone.

Just to re-emphasise, you must provide a PHONE NUMBER with a related KEYWORD that people have to text you to join your VIP customer list and instantly get their discount mobile coupon. Remember, all this stuff must be set up and maintained through an online ‘SMS Messaging Platform’.

For example, the message for people to join your VIP customer list and get their coupon could be something like ‘Enter this phone number XXXX and text us the keyword ‘VIP’ to join our VIP customer list and instantly receive your 15% discount coupon’. Once you have people on your VIP customer list (database), you can then be sending them ongoing promotional offers such as in relation to future major events, holiday offers, new product launches, new services or exclusive special offers.

Make Offers To Bring Back Customers: If your service requires people to visit your business premises, you can even be providing promotional SMS offers to those already on your customer list that will make them keep coming back to use your service. You can for instance be messaging valuable offers to your customer list that will bring them back into your business premises during your typical quiet days – which as a result will dramatically boost your sales revenue.

Don’t Overwhelm Your List With Messages: Make sure you don’t overwhelm your business SMS customer list with too many promotional messages in a short space of time, otherwise you will have many people on your list unsubscribing. For instance, sending 1 text message per week or every fortnight is okay in terms of frequency. By not bombarding your audience with too many text messages in a short time will really keep them warm and responsive to your offers.

Vary Your SMS Text Message Offers: Avoid making your offers predictable or repetitive to your SMS customer list, as people find this boring and off-putting. So, by varying your text message offers to your customer list, you will highly retain their interest and consistently achieve excellent sales conversions as a result.

Offer ‘Unsubscribe’ Option: Offering people the option to unsubscribe from your SMS customer list (database) will encourage a lot more people to sign up to your list. When people know they can opt-out as a subscriber, it puts them at ease to subscribe. Mention this clearly via your SMS system to increase the chances of many people easily joining your list. After all, the more people on your customer list, the greater the opportunity of highly making repeat sales.

You Must Be Time Sensitive: This is really crucial to the success of your SMS promotional campaigns. Early morning or late night SMS text messages to your customers can obviously be bad timing and irritating. So, by not sending out messages at the wrong times, your sales volume will be much healthier.

Make Your SMS Messages Relevant: People normally respond negatively when they receive non-relevant messages, which are regarded as SPAM. This then has a negative effect on conversion rates. The point is when sending an SMS text message with an offer to those that subscribed to your SMS customer list, make sure that what you are offering is not just interesting, but also relevant to what they subscribed for in the first place. By doing this, you will accomplish high sales conversions.

Use SMS To Send Appointment Reminders: If your local business service includes booking appointments with people, then use SMS as a communication tool to automatically send people reminders by text message. To do this, you require an APPOINTMENT BOOKING SYSTEM with a related SMS APPOINTMENT REMINDER SYSTEM. Having this in place will drastically decrease no-shows and you will therefore very much increase your sales.

According to Campaign Monitor, the open rates are as high as 98% when people receive SMS text messages. And 90% of text messages received are read within 3 minutes.

As you can see from all the above information, using Mobile SMS for marketing and for communicating to your target market is very powerful indeed. And if you are not doing so already, I hope you will start using SMS somehow as a strategy to effectively increase your sales revenue. If you need assistance or advice to implement SMS system in your business, feel free to get in touch.

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