I’ve been recently looking into some statistics about the use of mobile devices worldwide just out of curiosity and I was truly surprised by the numbers I’ve discovered (there are nearly 10 billion of them, more than people on Earth!). I knew it must be a lot, but can you imagine that currently (2021), there are more than 4.98 billion mobile phones in use, 3.7 billion of them being smartphones?
So, when you think about SMS marketing after reading those numbers, it totally makes sense. Bulk SMS is probably what plays the biggest role in the whole process and might actually be a very beneficial tool for any business. Simply put, bulk SMS is a service that allows you to send a large number of text messages to a broad audience, all at once. It is not industry-specific, so whether you’re a marketer at some nice local restaurant, a bank, or working in an educational institution, there are still many possibilities to tailor those messages to meet your needs and add value to your audience.
I’ve explored a few of them, and here’s what I found:
- Offers, discounts, sales alerts – bulk SMS works great for exclusive offers, time-sensitive deals, when you actually need your customers to react fast
- Product news – you can send company or product updates and remind your customers about yourself from time to time
- Service notifications – one of the examples that brings benefits to both your business and your customers would be order delivery updates and status information
- Alerts and reminders – it’s an effective way to remind your clients about their upcoming appointments, widely used by dentistry clinics and many businesses in beauty and similar industries
- Safety checks – used mostly for two-factor authentication, to improve the safety of client’s accounts
- “Thank you” messages – a great way to show gratitude to your customers once the order is delivered
- Feedback requests – since a lot of people rely on reviews when making their purchase decisions, it’s important to gather them in one place, and bulk SMS can help you do that
Those are just a few of many possible uses of bulk SMS, yet what’s important to mention here is that it might be incredibly time-consuming to manage it all manually. There are actually tools that you can use to make the process faster and easier, such as a simple text marketing app. I would strongly recommend checking those out before you decide to implement SMS in your strategy, but overall, bulk SMS is something well worth considering!