The importance of marketing is something that all business owners agree on, however deciding how to run a marketing campaign effectively is something that confuses many people. There are a lot of companies that offer marketing assistance. Some companies will run entire campaigns for you, managing email, business SMS, voice marketing, and web based marketing too. Other companies will take your mailing list or bulk SMS list, and send messages for you, but let you build the list and determine the content of your messages.
Do: Build an Opt-in List
Quality of leads is far, far more important than quantity, especially if you’re going to be sending business SMS messages or using voice marketing. Not only could you end up in trouble with the law if you used an opt-out list in a region where that sort of thing isn’t permitted, you could lose a lot of goodwill from prospective customers. Messages sent to mobile devices are far more likely to be read and remembered than emails, so it pays to make sure that the person actually wants to see the messages before you send them. You don’t want to be remembered for being a spammer!
Don’t: Leave it Too Long Between Sending Messages
Finding the right tempo for sending messages is important. Sending messages too often could cause people to get sick of them and unsubscribe. However, leaving it too long between messages can be just as bad. If you go months without sending a message, your subscriber could forget that they’ve signed up to the service. This means that when you do send a message, they could write it off as being unsolicited junk. Try to work out a consistent tempo - perhaps once a week, or once a fortnight, and send messages then.
Do: Honour List Management Requests
Whether you’re running a bulk SMS list, or just an email list, make sure that you follow through on list management requests. If someone asks to be removed, make sure they’re unsubscribed as soon as is physically possible. If someone asks to pause messages for a couple of weeks because they’re going on holiday, try to accommodate that request. If you keep people on your marketing list when they don’t want to be on it, you’ll end up with a bad reputation, and it can take years to undo that and rebuild your brand.
Don’t: Leave Out the Call to Action
Don’t make the mistake of getting so caught up in finding witty or useful things to put into your marketing messages that you forget the most important thing: the call to action. There’s no point marketing if you don’t tell customers what you want them to do. The message doesn’t have to be “Buy this!”, it could be “Register for another list”, or “Fill out this survey”. Whatever it is you want to achieve from this week’s marketing message, make sure you tell people what you want them to do.
This article was written by Amy Fowler on behalf of Collstream, suppliers of bulk SMS and business SMS services. To find out more about bulk SMS or business SMS, please click the link here.
Image courtesy of ODCA
