Bulk SMS: A Unicorn Marketing Weapon?

Likes, shares, and comments are great and all but it’s time to start taking your business more seriously.

Let me ask you a question. If you absolutely had to launch a successful marketing campaign or you would lose your job or your business which marketing strategy would you choose?

According to smspapa.com.au, if you picked bulk SMS (for its high open rates and click-through rates) you would get a giant gold star to take home and stick on your fridge for your family and friends to admire.

But in reality, the most common answers would be:

• Email marketing
• Facebook ads
• SEO
• Google ads
• Social Media

Whatever.

While these are ok (if you know what you’re doing) not one of them would be my first choice.

The marketing channel I’d go with would have to check off these 3 points:

1. It would have to have an extremely high delivery rate – what good is the best copy and offer in the world if the thing never gets delivered. For my campaign to have the highest chance of success I’d need somewhere close to a 100% delivery rate – I’d need to get my promotion inside as many inboxes as possible.
2. It would need to have insanely good open rates – again, the best offer in the world is no good if I can’t even get people to open it. I’m looking for about 90%+ open rates – already you might be thinking, there is NO marketing channel out there where you can get an open or click-through that high.
3. It would need (ideally) to have low competition, in other words it would need to be a marketing channel that is largely underexploited so I could get the maximum attention from the recipient without having to battle it our with hundreds of other offers competing for my customer’s money.

This already sounds like a unicorn marketing channel, right?

• Email open rates = 20%
• Email click through rates = 2-3%
• Facebook ads click through rate – 2-3%
• Google PPC click through rate – 3-6%
• Social media – crickets.

The act is that most marketing channels today offer up horrible performance.

Let’s circle back.

What is this unicorn marketing channel?

Bulk SMS.

Bulk SMS is like the Fedex of the message delivery world, if you absolutely, positively need to get your message delivered then SMS (short message service) would be my go-to every, single, time.

Here’s why…

SMS marketing has a higher ROI

Bulk SMS earns (on average) 4 times more revenue than email, and costs less since you’re only paying for people you send to as opposed to paying for the number of subscribers like with email.

SMS is Less Saturated

One of the main problems with online marketing is that everyone is using it. If you are using Facebook ads you are in an auction with other people as to whose ad gets shown.

The same is true with Google ads except that it’s a lot more expensive, have you noticed that your Google ad costs have been increasing every year? This is because more and more people are using this to reach customers.

With bulk text messaging you have virtually zero competition especially when it comes to direct competitors. People are very careful about who they allow to text them so if you’ve been given permission to text them you are now part of a very exclusive club.

This gives you the option to send them a text message before they see your competitors marketing message giving you instant top of mind and the opportunity to sell them first.

While your competition are rapidly burning through their marketing budget trying to reach your recipient you’ve already sent them a text (which costs about 2 cents) and have them on your website buying your products.

It’s like email (but a LOT Better)

The thing I love about email marketing is that you are in essence building your own platform of customers and potential customers.

This allows you to send out a promotion and start bringing in money.

The problem with email marketing is it has lousy performance.

For example, if I send out 1000 emails only 200 of those emails are going to get opened. On the other hand if I send out a bulk SMS marketing campaign up to 980 of those text messages are going to get opened.

That is a night and day difference!

Email is also plagued by SPAM filters and sender scores which means that a lot of your campaigns are going to be sent to the SPAM folder or may not even get delivered!

Bulk SMS on the other hand has no spam filters and no sender score to worry about which means nearly 100% of the SMS messages I send will land inside my customer’s inbox.

SMS Is Cheap

People think email is the cheapest option but it’s not as cheap as what you think.

For email you’re charged on the number of subscribers you have, and since most people never see your emails, they never unsubscribe so your list continually grows month by month and so too does your email subscription costs.

SMS only costs a few cents per send – you can have as many subscribers as you want the cost to send a text message actually doesn’t change.

Paid ads are always increasing in price, as more competition shows up the less overall impressions the platform has and so the costs go up. While it only costs a few cents to send a text message, it can cost $10 just to get a click from a Google ad.

I doubt very much that paid ads will ever start coming down again, it has and always will go up very year ever increasing your customer acquisition costs.

SMS not only has not gone up in price but has actually come down. Since there are more SMS competitors entering into the market this drives the prices per SMS down.

Conclusion

Bulk SMS is arguably my favourite marketing tool for times when I really need to get a promotion across the line – that said you should also be using a mix of different marketing tools so you’re hitting the market from a variety of angles to gain maximum advantage in the marketplace.