Well folks, we’re about to enter into a brand new year which means that for a lot of marketers this means revising your marketing plan, reviewing what worked and what didn’t and also what potentially new marketing channels could be integrated to accelerate your business’ growth for 2024.

Not surprisingly, Bulk SMS doesn’t seem to be on the menu for most, I’ve sat on many meetings with marketing teams and I can tell you not a single one has brought up the possibility to using bulk SMS to drive sales, engagement or awareness.

If you are a marketing professional reading these words then you may be in the same boat.

In a few of these meetings I have in fact asked their opinions on bulk SMS as a marketing tool and the common replies I get are:

• “It’s too expensive, email is free” – email isn’t free. In fact, it can be more expensive depending on how many subscribers you have and how often you clean your list.
• “It’s spammy” – so is email, just because there are a few bad apples abusing bulk SMS doesn’t mean that it can’t be a powerful tool for those using it honestly.
• “Customers don’t like to be texted” – this is not true in fact; millennials especially prefer that businesses send them a text message rather than phone call or email.

According to Angus Barret from SMSPapa.com.au – “as a marketer your goal isn’t to select marketing channels that are ‘cool’ or even trending your goal is to select marketing mediums based on their ability to hit your company’s goals.”

In this article, I’ll share with you the main reasons why I think bulk SMS marketing should be a part of every business’ marketing mix in 2024 and beyond.

1. Bulk SMS cuts through the marketing noise

Ever noticed why your advertising goes up every single year? The reason for this is that more and more businesses are advertising this means there are less impressions to go around which means ad costs go up.

More businesses are trying online advertising, more businesses are trying email marketing this means that there is a LOT of marketing noise out there scrambling the brains and attention span of the average consumer.

Bulk SMS on the other hand always get noticed, this is why the average open rate for a text message is a staggering 97%.

Imagine sending out a marketing campaign and having nearly every single person actually read your promotion. Do you think your sales might be positively impacted by that? Do you think it’s worth paying a few cents per SMS for?

Worth thinking about.

On top of that the SMS inbox has hardly any competition at all outside of family members and friends, chances are pretty good that you’ll have no direct competition in there to worry about.

Check your email. See how many emails the average person gets every day – it’s about 122+ a lot of that gets thrown into the spam folder, yes, including your emails.

Bulk SMS luckily has no spam folder. At the time of writing this article, there is no algorithm scanning each incoming SMS message looking for certain spam keywords.

2. Bulk SMS is affordable

With bulk SMS you pay a few cents for each recipient. Most marketers will turn their nose up at this but this means they don’t actually understand the value of getting someone to actually open a marketing message.

If you send out an email campaign at least 80% of them will go unopened some will get bounced, land in SPAM, get overlooked inside the inbox, etc.

If you have a lot of subscribers then you’re probably paying a couple of hundred per month only to have 80% of those emails get ignored.

Let me ask you something, driving more sales from your email marketing campaigns relies largely on how many people actually open it – if nobody opens your email there is zero chance of any sales occurring.

The higher your open rate the higher your sales potential is – it’s just simple math.

How much would you be willing to pay a person to open your marketing message?

If you look at Google AdWords people are willing to pay $2 right up to $40 per click in other words they’re willing to pay $40 to get someone to read their marketing message.

That’s a lot.

What about 4 cents?

4 cents is how much a text message costs and with that 4 cents you can get a person to open and read your promotion.

Seems like a very good deal to me!

3. Bulk SMS is not an online channel

One of the biggest headaches when it comes to traditional online marketing is that as an online marketer you have to understand the enemy, that enemy is of course:

• Algorithm updates
• Quality scores
• Spam filters
• Reputation scores
• Ad policies, etc.

Every online marketing channel has its gatekeeper obviously designed to prevent scammers and spammers but this unfortunately makes it tougher for legitimate advertisers to make their advertising effective.

For example, did you know that you can’t use before and after photos on Facebook? The reason for this is that it may offend it’s users the problem is that before and after photos are incredibly powerful and are fantastic for increasing conversions.

With each new policy change your marketing performance takes a hit so only are your costs increasing but your messaging is being watered down reducing your ability to get a high ROI.

Each marketing channel suffers from similar things, email marketing for example has the spam algorithm – did you know that there are 400+ spam keywords that if used can get your marketing message binned? These are words like “buy” or “click here” if you have an email promotion chances are you’re going to be using words like these.

Bulk SMS on the other hand is not an online marketing channel and so the delivery rate is virtually 100%.

How much would you pay to guarantee that your message actually gets delivered to the inbox?

Conclusion

We live in a mobile marketing world and it’s surprising to me that business owners and marketers are not leveraging the power of arguably the most effective marketing channel available today.

If you’re a marketing pro and you’re not using it why not giver it a shot? There are SMS providers out there that offer prepaid packages, no contracts, etc. test it out I guarantee you’ll notice a major difference in engagement and sales conversions.