How Can Retailers Use SMS Promotional Text Messages to Stand Out?

Email marketing is still an effective strategy for many retailers, but that doesn't mean it's the most effective advertising opportunity out there.

• As technology advances, retailers are gaining more immediate access to their customers through SMS messaging services.

Many consumers still sign up for email newsletters and discount promotions, but their inboxes are overflowing with advertisements with carefully worded subject lines designed to grab their attention.

• The result is that fewer emails are opened because consumers are overwhelmed with unwanted messages.

With the surge of online email marketing promotions, it's now common for consumers to set up email accounts just for advertising campaigns.

• Others categorize their email accounts so that messages from marketers go into a separate folder from personal and professional messages.
• These strategies keep their primary email inboxes less cluttered, but it means that your emails aren't necessarily going into an account that is checked regularly.

When retail marketing emails land in overcrowded email inboxes, the recipient is less likely to open the messages even if they signed up to receive promotions from the retailer.

• Most consumers don't have the time to sort through the SMS promotional messages received, so they do mass deletes of all messages to save time.
• Compare that to an impressive 99 percent of text messages that are opened.

Email messaging allows you to send bulk messages to thousands of customers simultaneously, so it is an advertising strategy that saves time.

• SMS text marketing is even faster, which is why many retailers are investing more in this modern advertising method.

Sending bulk email messages is still one of the most cost-effective advertising strategies for retailers, so it remains on most retail marketing plans.

• It's just not enough to serve as the primary marketing strategy for most retail businesses.