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SMS & Email Marketing

Email & SMS Marketing Software for Greater Marketing Strategies

Many businesses around the world use email to communicate with their customers. Because of its higher global accessibility than any other medium serves as a trustworthy platform for sending notifications, policy updates, logins, password resets, and promotions.

However, a wholesome customer engagement experience cannot be derived using Email and SMS marketing strategies alone. 

You have to combine your email marketing with SMS marketing. SMS is a powerful and robust engagement tool that enables businesses to send crisp, well-timed messages to their customers. The email and SMS marketing combo ensures a seamless, powerful, scalable, and reliable customer communication experience. 

Email Marketing Strategies – Its Advantages and Disadvantages

With over 200 million emails being sent out each minute of the day throughout the world, email marketing has maintained itself as an important and flourishing digital marketing trend. Unlike the sedate text-only email marketing strategies of the past, today, emails are interactive, inviting, and vivid.

Firms employ email marketing for acquiring potential customers and keeping existing customers engaged with them. 

Email marketing involves the use of emails to send sale alerts, service promotions, offers, and special day greetings. It allows brands to send highly personalized, targeted, and relationship-nurturing messages to the audience.

Advantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a sure-fire way to target customers with personalized content, improve brand recognition, build credibility, increase website traffic. It also builds excitement, boosts sales, establishes authority, nurtures customer relationships, and optimizes your marketing budget and time. There is plenty of data to reinforce the merits of email marketing.

  • It is predicted that 4.3 billion people will be actively using emails by 2023.

  • 91% of email users check their emails at least once a day.

  • 87% of marketers use email marketing.

  • The average ROI of email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent.

  • 81% of small businesses employ email marketing for their primary customer acquisition and 80% retention.

  • Email is nearly 40 times more effective than a combination of Twitter and Facebook marketing in aiding you to acquire new customers.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

  • The audience often finds promotional emails to be annoying and may mark those as spam.
  • Chances of unread emails.
  • Disinterested audience in case of poorly designed emails.
  • Chances of undelivered emails (due to poor design).
  • Loading problem of large file size emails, resulting in frustrating the receivers.

SMS Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages

Today, almost every person owns a cell phone and keeps it on at all times. This has done SMS (Short Messaging Service) marketing, aka text messaging, the fastest-growing communication channel.

As it allows highly personal and finely targeted messaging, it is perfect for quickly and conveniently engaging a large group of people anytime, anywhere, as they navigate through the purchasing process.

SMS marketing involves sending permission-based text messages to the audience to spread promotional messages. It aims at building a database of subscribers to increase the conversion rate and improve customer loyalty

Advantages of SMS Marketing

  1. SMS is short, crisp, and gets straight to the point.

  2. The personal nature of mobile phones makes SMS marketing quite powerful.

  3. Most people tend to read almost all the text messages that they receive.

  4. SMS marketing is the most time-saving and cost-effective channel that can easily support and integrate with other channels.

  5. 66% of consumers prefer SMS over call/ email.

  6. SMS has a 36% CTR and a 98% open rate on average.

  7. Well-designed and personalized SMS campaigns can aid in better customer engagement and in converting your audience into buyers.

Disadvantages of SMS Marketing

  1. Brands cannot send promotional messages to the audience without them subscribing to them.

  2. There is a limitation (160 characters) on the number of words used while sharing an SMS.

  3. If you send many non-structured messages, those may be considered spam messages, ending up in subscribers opting out from the SMS subscription.

Difference Between SMS and Email Marketing

  • Message Length: While SMS has a word count limitation, emails do not. So, you can send lengthy and detailed information in one go using emails.

  • Response rate: Studies say that people take 90 seconds to respond to SMS, while this duration is 90 minutes with emails.

  • Message format: The format of emails is better than that of SMS. These have a subject line that gives an idea of what can be expected from the mail. These can include several CTAs and attachments like GIFs, images, videos, and interactive content.

  • Delivery: Delivering emails requires access to the internet while delivering SMS does not.

As seen from the above-given facts, both SMS marketing and email marketing have their own merits and demerits. So, discarding one in favor of the other wouldn’t be right. You need to know when to send an email and send an SMS and use them in a complimentary manner.

Choosing Between Email and SMS for Communication

The main aim of any marketing strategy is customer engagement that leads to sales. You can achieve this by implementing Email and SMS marketing strategies together. For, each of these is used for different communications, and your consumer wants them both.

The two factors that would help you determine which of these you should use for a particular situation are-

  • The speed at which you want your recipient to open the message.
  • The business criticalness of the message’s content.

Based on these factors and other concerns, such as the design, branding, or imagery required in your messages, you can decide upon the channel to communicate the message. And at times, the situation may require you to send both an email and SMS.

For instance, in a security breach scenario, you may choose to inform the concerned customers immediately through both mediums. 

Using Email and SMS Marketing in a Complementary Manner

By merging email and SMS marketing tactics into a single cohesive strategy, you can stand out from the crowd and take your branding to the next level. There are situations where emails work. There are other situations where SMS works.

And there are times when a combination of both of those works. Here are some scenarios that would separately suit each category.

It’s time to use your email marketing strategies if your message includes-

  • Detailed, meaningful content
  • Coupons and deals
  • In-depth and educational information
  • Exclusivity
  • The building, establishing and operating a community.
  • Action, advice, or feedback requests.
  • Product or service promotions

It’s time to use your SMS marketing strategies if your message includes-

  • Straight to the point content
  • Coupons and deals
  • Personal alerts, e.g., account updates and notifications
  • Information to customers who refrain from websites or apps
  • Keeping customers acquainted with your brand

Your brand would also benefit by simultaneously sending your message through email and SMS. For instance, you may choose to send a short, summarized text message to complement your email campaign. This will keep all of your subscribers informed about your new products, brand updates, exciting offers, and promotions, irrespective of whether they opened your email. 

Why Use Email and SMS Marketing Software?

The use of software for email and SMS marketing reduces the cost and workload, eliminates the chances of errors, and helps reach a wider audience quickly and conveniently. Here is a deeper insight into email and SMS marketing software

Email and SMS Marketing Software

An email and SMS marketing software, like the one from NotifyVisitors, comes with several useful features and tools for email marketing, SMS marketing, and marketing and sales automation. With it, you can nurture leads, manage campaigns, and perform marketing analytics. 

Its email marketing feature lets you segment your contacts, create beautiful and responsive emails in minutes, and run effective email campaigns. It comes with email designing templates that let you create catchy emails. It also offers features for in-depth analysis (open and click-through reports) of your email campaigns. 

Its CRM platform integrates your email and sales automation and organizes all your customer data in one place. Thus, you can easily manage your pipelines and update deals.  

Its SMS marketing tool enables you to reinforce your bond with your customers through texting. It also allows customer segmentation and customer engagement tracking.

So, you can create personalized messages using customer attributes like name, location, age, source, country, subscription date, tag, company name, etc. to get great customer engagement. This will enable you to render flawless customer service, which in turn can earn you more opportunities. 

Thus, with NotifyVisitors email and SMS marketing software, you can easily carry out email and SMS marketing, manage those activities on one single platform, automate your marketing, and get to know the performance of your marketing campaigns.  

Some firms successfully use a combination of Email and SMS marketing

Several firms from around the world have been successfully using a blend of Email and SMS marketing strategies. Here is a look into three of those. 

1. Lyft

Lyft is a leading rideshare firm in the U.S. People can request a ride through the Lyft mobile app and get in touch with a Lyft driver close by within minutes. Lyft employs email marketing to draw new passengers, award bonus points to customers, and extend its ambassador program.

Once a user creates an account with Lyft, Lyft starts email marketing to them with an automated welcome email. Lyft engages customers with newsletters, special promotions, milestone rewards, etc. It also sends emails bearing the customer’s automated ride receipts. 

Lyft uses SMS to enable a real-time conversation between passengers and drivers. It sends automated text messages when a driver accepts a passenger’s drive request, when there is a change in their ride status, or when the driver reaches a location.

So, drivers can communicate with passengers without sharing their phone numbers with them. 

Such use of SMS has facilitated Lyft to eliminate 100% of support costs. This has also freed up the support team to concentrate on more important matters. Thus, Lyft’s integrated email and SMS usage ensures a positive and safe experience for both the riders and the drivers. 

2. Doordash

Doordash is a food delivery service operating in the U.S. It delivers restaurant food at the doorstep of the customer. People can use their app to buy food from local sellers and get it delivered to their doors within 45 minutes. 

This firm uses email marketing to draw new customers and award bonus points to loyal customers. It uses creative emails to send out info about new food outlets, offers, discounts, special promotions, etc. to satisfy customer cravings. 

It uses SMS to communicate with its customers, drivers, and dispatch staff to provide quick and dependable service. Its SMS program enables customers and dashers to text each other via masked phone numbers.

This secures the privacy of both parties and ensures the delivery of food to the right recipients. The firm also uses SMS to help transform interest into sales, provide real-time customer service, and track orders. 

By combining SMS and email marketing, Doordash reduces the delivery time and generates new sales.

3. Uber

Uber, a renowned platform for car rides, has been operating a global network of regular and luxury cars. In India, it initially relied on Email and SMS marketing strategies alone. It found that this was not providing the reliability and speed required to know if a ride had reached or been canceled on them. To gain this degree of communication expected from its service, Uber resorted to SMS.

The SMS communication from Uber keeps customers updated with real-time ETA (Estimated Time of Travel) alerts. Texts are sent to the passengers as the status of their requests varies from the driver accepting their request, to when the driver is less than a minute away, to when the ride has been accepted or canceled due to some reason. 

From the above-given instances, you will understand that email and SMS marketing can complement each other. A brand can seamlessly communicate, interact, and engage with its customers and trigger sales this way. So, do consider using SMS in combination with email marketing to empower your business.

FAQs

1. What are the advantages of email marketing?

Email marketing helps increase web traffic, nurture customer relationships, build credibility, establish authority, boost sales, optimize marketing time and budget, and improve brand recognition. 

2. What are the advantages of SMS marketing?

SMS marketing facilitates finely targeted and highly personalized messaging. It is great for conveniently and quickly engaging a huge audience at any point of the sales funnel

3. Why should businesses use both email and SMS marketing?

Email marketing and SMS marketing come with their advantages. Merging the two into a single cohesive strategy helps businesses be competitive and take their branding to the next level. 

Also Read:

Sara

Sara is a Content Writer at NotifyVisitors. She is not only a creative writer but also paints a beautiful canvas. She makes sure that you are left with no doubt on keeping up with marketing and sales.

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