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• How Can Text Message Marketing Help Me?
• The Benefits for Your Business
• Customizing Your Campaign
• Best Practices for Text Messages
• Optimization Tips
• Measuring Your Text Message Marketing Success
• To Sum It All Up

How many hours do you spend each day on your marketing? And we mean all of it. Flyers, social media, graphics, emails, website… the list goes on.

It’s likely several hours minimum. And chances are that this isn’t sustainable, which brings us here.

Now let us ask you another question. How long does it take you to send a text message? A few seconds, maybe a minute at most? It’s no wonder that we use them often. Nearly every person has a phone and uses text messaging (check!), text messages are quick and to the point (another check!), and most people check a text message within 90 seconds of receiving one (and check!).

Text messaging is often thought of for personal use only, but as a business owner, you can also reap the rewards.

This efficient and simple strategy can help save time by streamlining communication with customers, improving response rates, and eliminating the need for manual processes like emails and customer calls. With our ultimate guide to text messaging for business marketing, you’ll soon be wondering why it took so long to adopt this convenient method of customer outreach! Everything from setting up a campaign to analyzing results is covered here – let’s begin exploring how texting has become the top choice for modern organizations.

How Can Text Message Marketing Help Me?

Text message marketing, or mobile marketing, is one of the most effective methods of digital marketing in today’s world. What business doesn’t want to be able to easily keep in contact with customers or leads through a quick and short message? This form of mobile communication allows businesses to easily inform customers about new promotions, upcoming events, and pretty much any info you want to send to your audience at the touch of a button. Text message marketing gives businesses the advantage of having direct access to the mobile devices of their customers; creating a much more efficient way for consumers to interact with each other. With its proven success track record, mobile marketing is definitely something that should be part of your overall marketing strategy if you don’t like to waste time.

The Benefits for Your Business

As we said at the beginning of this post, marketing is time-consuming. With so many platforms to advertise on, how do you prioritize your most active one? That is if you know which one truly is the most active. But nearly three-quarters of the world will be using only their smartphones for engagement by 2025. On top of that, the majority of people check their phones within 90 seconds of receiving a message! So if you’re still unsure about how your business could benefit from text message marketing, think about all that time you spent creating flyers and sending emails when you could have sent a text message in only a few seconds…

“Time isn’t a huge issue for me”

What about money? The average flyer costs about $1.07 each from Office Depot. Know how much it costs to send a text message? 3 cents.

No one loves doing math, but we believe this part is important:

Not only is important to note that flyers have a 1-5% engagement rate, but their cost to send them out to each individual is nearly 35 times the cost of text message marketing.

So not only are you connecting with customers within seconds of sending a message, but you’re also cutting back dramatically on costs. With text messages, businesses can easily create a personalized experience, save time in gradually connecting with their customers, and save money in the process. Text messages are short, but they can pack quite the punch when it comes to establishing a positive working relationship with potential leads or existing customers.

Customizing Your Campaign

If you’re interested in starting a text message marketing campaign for your business, we’re here to help. You can create a custom campaign that fits your needs, and manage it from start to finish. Whether you’re looking to run a QR code contest, or simply let your customers know about your monthly specials, youve got it covered. And even if you don’t know how to incorporate text message marketing into your current strategy, Rob our lead marketer can sit down with you in a 1:1 to find the perfect campaign to fit your unique brand and business goals.

Best Practices for Text Messages

If you decide that you want to do your own messaging and stay personally engaged with your audience, how do you know what to send? What hours are most effective for maximum reach? What should you even say when messaging as a business? Let’s break down some of the best practices before you start.

When it comes to text message marketing, industry restrictions and business hours should always be taken into account. It’s important to keep up with the industry-specific regulations and laws that pertain to messaging in order to reduce the risk of a penalty. Furthermore, sending messages within normal business hours is always a good practice to give your audience a more than welcomed distraction from their typical nine-to-five.

When crafting messages for your customers, be sure to maintain a friendly yet informative tone as if you were talking to a friend. It’s a text message after all, so keeping it casual is a great way to show that you’re a real person, not just some company face. In this way, you can create an inviting experience that connotes trustworthiness while providing helpful information that they can actually use.

Optimization Tips

It’s no secret that text messaging campaigns can be a great tool for businesses to connect with their customers and keep them informed about products, promotions, and updates. To maximize the effectiveness of your text message marketing campaigns, it’s important to keep your deals fresh and up to date. Make sure to use compelling offers that capture your customers’ attention and incentivize them to stay engaged with your brand.

Additionally, don’t be afraid to get creative with your messages try out different formats like polls or quizzes – anything that will spark conversation between you and your audience. Keep in mind that these kinds of strategies all go hand in hand and help make up a successful text message marketing campaign.

Measuring Your Text Message Marketing Success

Utilizing text message marketing is an efficient way to measure the success of your campaigns. With increased foot traffic as a result of increased customer engagement, track metrics like increased conversions, sales, and loyalty rewards. Specifically, use SMS marketing to gauge how successful doubling down on promotional campaigns can be and how that ties to increased revenue. There are many opportunities for businesses to gain more insight into their customer’s behaviors when it comes to opting in and out of content, creating additional touchpoints with customers to gauge how well your customers respond (e.g. increasing your contact list through new opt-ins).

Our dashboard breaks down the analytics in real time and has time parameter settings so you can see where you were a month, or even a year ago. Keeping track of your success can also help you optimize your messaging even faster so that you can create the perfect campaign with a few simple clicks.

To Sum It All Up

All in all, text message marketing is an incredibly effective and convenient way for your business to reach out to your customers and potential customers. This type of marketing strategy is not only trackable, but it also provides benefits like convenience, mobile visibility, speed, and personalization. Not only that, but setting up a text message campaign can be done quickly, and without requiring technical skills. With the right approach in mind and the best practices followed, you can measure success with metrics like open rates and response rates to track if your messaging is effective or not. Now that you know the importance of using text message marketing as part of your marketing plan, book a call with us and Rob can show you how text message marketing can benefit you!

Check out our library of tips and tricks for mobile marketing!

The post Text Message Marketing: The Ultimate Time Saver appeared first on StreamWerks Media.

How often have you had customers that love and use your products or services, but never followed up on giving you a good review online? What is your engagement rate with your customers? Are you able to easily convince people to join your loyalty program on their first visit to your business? What if we told you that you could encourage your customers to engage on a frequent basis, visit your store often, and even increase your popularity in your local community with a single text? Sounds like a lot of work, right? We’ll be exploring the simple concept of keywords and their multiple uses in your day-to-day marketing through loyalty programs, secret keyword contests, and text-to-win campaigns.

The Foundation of Mobile Marketing

So what are keywords, and why are they so important? A keyword is a single word that customers can text to a shortcode to opt-in to your contact lists to receive promotions and alerts. Furthermore, you can have multiple keywords for different campaigns, giving you a wide range of freedom and creativity to interlink them with your business’ own style.

The use of simple keywords is just the beginning of creating a responsive customer base. As you learn to incorporate more platform features into the use of your keywords, you’ll see how these build on each other. A new customer will use your keyword to get your promos, and inevitably get messages about your many types of contests. Once they start entering to win special prizes at your store, they’ll see the value of being a loyal member who knows about all these features at your store. The more you invest in creating loyal customers, the more likely you are to build trust in your community as a proactive business.

This an easy and effective way to increase your customer base, and a catalyst to the beginnings of a successful marketing campaign. Your keyword can be interconnected to Text-to-Win campaigns, loyalty programs, and exciting and engaging Secret Keyword contests that bring your existing and new customers back to your store over and over. So how can you do this with just one word? Let’s get into it.

Loyalty Programs

Our loyalty program feature is completely free to your customers. Through the same keyword that they use to join your contact lists, they can also opt-in to your loyalty program. While bringing in new customers is important, it’s equally important to retain them as well.

As new customers visit your store, inform them about your keyword and shortcode to instantly get coupons and special offers. Don’t forget to let them in on your loyalty program to work towards a unique surprise.  These shoppers will catch on that they can earn rewards by participating in your text message marketing. Not only are you encouraging them to come back to keep getting these promotions, you’re setting yourself apart from your competitors by offering paperless coupons that can be redeemed, and in an easy way. 

With nearly 97% of all Americans owning some type of smartphone, keyword sign-up is a quick and painless process for your audience to get your offers. Who doesn’t love an easy process?

Contests

Another way to use keywords to appeal to your audience is the use of mobile contests. Offering special prizes for new customers is a great way to reward their participation. There are two types of contests that we’ll discuss; text-to-win contests and Secret Keyword contests.

Text-to-Win Campaigns

A Text-to-Win contest is just like it sounds. Customers can text a keyword of your choice to your shortcode to enter a limited-time contest, or general monthly/weekly contests. Once they send the text message with your keyword, they receive a message informing them of their successful opt-in to the contest. To learn more about Text-to-Win contests, check out our blog breaking down everything you need to know to run your own contest!

Secret Keyword Contests

This type of keyword contest is a customer favorite! So you already have your main keyword and a decent opt-in list, and you’re looking for a new way to engage your customers and encourage them to return to your store without a coupon. This is where we introduce the Secret Keyword contest! Whether you want to do a contest every day or once a week, depending on your business, you have a secret keyword that only you know. Additionally, the only way customers can discover the secret keyword to enter time-sensitive contests is to visit your store or go to your social media to find the revealing post. This is our favorite way of engaging customers!

While your customer base is looking to win these exciting contests, they also have a good reason for visiting your business over and over. This will drive your sales, and increase your likelihood of converting one-time customers into loyal and frequent visitors. Sounds too good to be true? We helped one of our clients get 191 new and unique opt-ins in under 48 hours with this technique! Additionally, they now receive nearly 180 new views for their promotions each month. Then, after increasing their opt-in list, they alerted all their customers through text to go support them in their city’s local Best of the Best contest. Not only were they nominated for two categories, but they also won first place in one division and 3rd in another! And the best part is, they hardly had to put in any time to do it.

Remember how we said everyone loves an easy process?

Our Final Word on Keywords

We believe that mobile marketing should be fun and easy! Not only for you but for your customers are well. Keywords are the single most important feature within the Streamwerks platform to make you stand out in the sea of businesses. With so many uses, and so little to learn in order to use them, incorporating their uses beyond simple opt-ins is crucial to becoming a successful business.

The post Using Keywords to Engage Your Audience appeared first on StreamWerks Media.

With August coming to an end, active businesses are looking for new and innovative ways to engage new and existing customers. While newer marketing strategies and methods are being created every day, we can’t help but fall back to an existing tool that continues to pave the way for small to large businesses. QR Codes have continuously shown their worth in modern marketing. Today, we’ll talk about how to use QR codes to create a class sign-up list that can be updated instantly, generate a contact list to give updates to your participants, and highlight their advantage over paper lists.

Following Up on Classes

A QR code class sign-up is a process where customers sign up for classes by scanning QR codes with their mobile devices. This system is convenient in several ways. About 85% of Americans own a smartphone capable of scanning QR codes, making this method readily available to the majority of your customers. Additionally, QR codes, once scanned, bring a person directly to your sign-up page. This avoids the need to type in your URL or navigate to your page, making it a one-step process for your visitors. On top of an easy sign-up process, you can include your Facebook page, business page URL, and any other social media that you want to connect to the sign-up page for additional social media advertising!

Coupled with a data collection mechanism that collects generic and customized data from your customers, QR codes and mobile marketing technology give you the leverage to directly market to them in the future about classes they may be interested in. 

Once you have your attendee list for your class, keep them engaged with before and after-class tips and challenges to build up prior knowledge about the topic, engage them in learning and practice between classes, and then extend their learning after class is over. Create mobile offers for class materials before, during, and after class to keep them engaged and give them additional value from the class. And, don’t forget to send them industry updates to keep them engaged in the topic!

Create Your QR Code Sign Up

The best part about coming up with the class sign-up system is that its SUPER easy to do! We can help you plan a strategy for the pre and post-market opportunities to help you profit from more than just a one-time class fee. As the business owner, you come up with the classes you want to include, and a small description of what that entails (class description, costs, equipment needed, experience required for the class, etc.). Think about how to connect information and offers to your class and then let’s get a strategy together.

As customers scan the QR code, they can see all of the details, and if they want to sign up, the form will be right there under the description to opt-in directly to your contact list to receive additional details. Pending on if you want customers to come in and pay first to finish the sign-up process or not, they will receive a confirmation with any follow-up instructions, information about the topic offers for class materials, and encouraging quips from you before they come to your class How’s that for building brand loyalty and customer engagement?!

For example,

Debbie runs a yoga studio. She’s often too busy running the classes or doing internal work that makes manual class sign-ups difficult and time-consuming. So she creates three classes, each with its own QR code. As customers pass by or see her flyers and posters in other shops, they scan these QR codes, where they can see all the details, and finish filling out the form. Immediately after opting in for the class, they get a text message with details on paying for the class, along with any other information they need to know prior to attending. While her class sign-up runs automatically, Debbie can check in every once in a while to see how many people have opted into her classes without any of the hassle of collecting information, or continued advertising.

She suddenly remembers that she can’t run the third class session due to construction in one of the studios. Instead of running around to collect flyers to make new ones with the new information, she informs Streamwerks that it will need to be pushed back one week, and the pages connected to her QR codes are immediately updated for her customers! To keep the excitement going, she sends a text with a link to a yoga article, and even sends them a discount offer for a yoga mat and blocks from her studio. She sends a message to those already signed up to let them know of the schedule change. Having put in only an hour or two of her time, she’s planned out her whole month’s worth of classes with hardly any effort put in!

Making the Most of

Whether you’re creating new classes each week, or you have the next month planned in advance, the class sign-ups can be updated, and retired, pending on how long you want to run them. In addition to easy sign-ups, you can also update pre-existing customers with offers on similar classes and specials for class supplies after they’ve opted-in!

What if you don’t run the typical class structure? Perhaps you offer demos, do shows, or are looking to create volunteer events. You can create business conference sign ups, company-hosted events for customers, and so much more. The sky is the limit, so if you have an idea, its EASY to implement!

In Conclusion

It’s just a fact that QR codes are used more now than ever. As a powerful and convenient method of marketing and connecting with customers, and being an easy and affordable transition method for all business sizes and types, there’s no better time to incorporate QR codes into your marketing strategy. Interested in spending less time creating class sign-ups and extending your reach? Call us today to see how you can get started immediately! For more information on how our QR Codes work, click the link below to learn more.

The post QR Code Class Sign Up appeared first on StreamWerks Media.

You’ve probably heard of the phrase “less is more”. When it comes to marketing your company brand, you want your audience to know exactly what you’re offering, and how customers can partake in your business. QR codes have been around for several years now, and their function has become more valuable with the emphasis on paperless advertisement and efficiency. From apparel brands to major corporations like Coke, the need to engage with consumers digitally has become essential for connecting physical and digital marketing.

Text-To-Win campaigns and QR code Scan-To-Win campaigns are the pinnacles of this marketing movement. With the ability to create lead lists and drive foot traffic to your store and social media platforms, this simple widget makes the most of your time allocated to marketing. Here, we’ll go through the process of campaign creation, launching, and multi-platform integration.

How to Build a Contest

In order to create a contest, you’ll need a contact list to include in your contest, the final date of your contest, and a pre-selected prize. Customers can opt into your contact list through your company keyword and shortcode, or by scanning the QR code linked to the contest. There, shoppers will be asked for their contact information in the event that they win. After they click submit, the platform automatically organizes this information into your contact list.

On the final date of your contest, the Streamwerks platform will randomly select 1-5 winners, depending on how many prizes you want to give away. The system automatically sends the winners the message included in your contest. For the message, we recommend a brief description of the prize, and how the winner(s) can go about collecting it. On your end, you can choose to receive an email, text message, or both to be notified of the winner’s contact information and name.

Additionally, if you need to apply an age gate for age-specific products, you can check this option on the platform. While the system cannot acquire ID information to verify their age, you can check the winner’s information when they come to collect their prize.

Lead Creation

Text-To-Win campaigns and QR code campaigns are great ways to generate leads. Shoppers agree to give you their phone number in order to be contacted about their prize, and you get to increase your contact list. This aspect of the campaign allows you to send future offers and incentives to shop at your store after the contest has ended.

Sharing Your QR Codes and Keywords

Sharing is caring, and if a shopper loves the deal they received at your store, they’ll likely share this information with friends and family. This form of free advertising is significantly better than word of mouth. While this builds your reputation in your local commerce, you are also increasing your contact list.

In your campaigns, you can incentivize non-winners by attaching coupons. Just as the winner receives your automated winner message, the non-winners are also automatically notified that they didn’t win the main prize. This is a perfect business opportunity to inform them that while they didn’t win, they still get a special coupon as a “thank you” for joining the contest. Now you’ve encouraged them to continue entering future contests and come back in to use their new coupon. Sending a message to non-winners is not required, as it can use a significant portion of your message credits if you have a large contact list. However, it could also increase your sales in the aftermath of the contest.

Collecting Information

The more you know about your customer base, the better you can cater to them. As shoppers enter your campaigns, they’ll be required to enter their first name, last name, and email address as a point of contact in case they win. When creating your contests, you can request more information, like their zip code, gender, date of birth, and custom questions (“What is your favorite beverage?”, “How did you hear about us?”) that include a dropdown box of options.

However, you want to be careful with how much information you initially ask for. The less work someone has to put in to enter your Text-To-Win campaigns or QR code campaigns, the more likely they’ll complete the form to enter the contest. Additionally, requesting too much can make contest applicants weary of why you’re asking them these questions. While you know that it’s to help give them better offers, they will not recognize this and abandon the contest entry form. Remember, this is only the beginning of potential long-term relationships with your customers and you’ll have more opportunities to gather data to cater more effectively to them over time.

Social Media Integration

If you have social media platforms or a website, you can easily redirect contest applicants to them after they’ve entered your campaign. Once a shopper has completed their entry, they will receive a confirmation message that they’ve entered. This is where you can include your website URL or links to your social media. This can work retrospectively as well! Including your keyword or QR code in social media posts or on your website increases awareness of your brand and advertises to a larger audience. Here, people can tag others in the post to share the contest or share your URL.

It’s important to note that Facebook does not permit pages to request follows or likes to enter a contest or to have better chances of winning.

Conclusion

Text-To-Win campaigns and QR code campaigns are extremely versatile tools when growing your contact lists. They’re engaging, customizable, and simple to create, making them user-friendly for both business owners and customers alike. They can be linked to your social media, and save you valuable time when trying to increase potential leads and in-store sales. If you’re interested in what a demo looks like, you can try it out here.

The post Text-to-Win and QR Code Scan-To-Win Campaigns appeared first on StreamWerks Media.