Expanding Reach with SMS and Email Marketing

Digital marketing is no longer the supplementary marketing strategy it once was. With more companies investing more in digital marketing and less in traditional channels, they’ve found that it allows for easy communication with customers that fosters relationships and leads to loyalty and sustainable streams of revenue.

SMS and email marketing are two of the most popular digital marketing channels by offering high reach, personalization, and effectiveness. SMS, with its directness, ensures immediate communication, making it suited to timely promotions, reminders, and alerts. On the other hand, email marketing, offering richer content, can support longer messages. Together, these channels are part of a comprehensive outreach strategy offering both immediacy and depth.

Finding effective ways to communicate with customers is crucial, and many businesses understand the importance of communicating with customers in a convenient yet effective way. SMS — short message service — marketing, also known as text message marketing, allows businesses to send promotional messages, appointment reminders, and alerts directly to customers through text messages on their mobile phones.

This form of immediate, direct communication bypasses the clutter of other channels, allowing your messages to land directly in a customer’s text inbox. Additionally, these strategies are ideal for time-sensitive promotions since most texts are read quickly.

While email marketing provides depth with the capability to embed images, links, and extensive content, SMS marketing is about brevity and directness. Unlike paid social and email marketing, where your post might get buried under a feed or in an inbox, text message marketing messages are almost always directly delivered to and seen by the recipient.

Understanding SMS open and engagement rates

SMS message success isn’t just measured by its delivery rate. Instead, the main goal is to get customers to engage or take action. On average, SMS offers a 98% open rate, overshadowing other marketing channels, including email.

Building a permission-based SMS subscriber list

To send SMS messages in bulk, businesses must comply with various regulations, including having a permission-based SMS subscriber list. Always ensure recipients have willingly subscribed to your messages. To make this process easier, you can use pop-up forms, QR codes, or incentives for subscribing, like exclusive discounts and deals.

Adhere to regulations like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and ensure you provide clear opt-out options in every message.

Crafting effective SMS messages

SMS messages are concise yet impactful. Because of the limited character count, every word must count. Be straightforward to ensure the primary message is both clear and compelling. Always use a call to action (CTA) on promotional SMS messages to drive action, whether it's visiting a website, using a discount code, viewing a new product, or confirming an appointment.

Personalization in SMS marketing

Personalization elevates the impact of SMS campaigns and strategies, making the recipient feel valued. By tailoring the message based on the recipient’s previous actions, purchase history, preferences, and other customer data, you can make your SMS messages more impactful.

The best email and SMS marketing software also allows the use of merge tags that enable you to automatically insert the recipient's name and other personal information to make the message customized and tailored to them.

Email marketing is still one of the most popular communication channels because it enables businesses of all sizes to create tailored messages that foster relationships, drive conversions, and increase brand loyalty. In comparison to SMS marketing, which excels in immediacy and concise communications, email marketing offers the opportunity for richer content, detailed narratives, and a deeper connection with subscribers.

Email and SMS marketing serve different purposes and have unique advantages. Email marketing offers a broader canvas, allowing you to provide more content, rich visuals, and varied CTAs, making it ideal for showcasing new products and providing detailed information about comprehensive programs. In contrast, SMS marketing messages offer faster, more direct communication with high visibility, making them complementary tools in a holistic marketing strategy.

Building an engaged email subscriber list

With both SMS and email marketing campaigns, you must build a subscriber list before sending your first communication. You can use opt-in forms and segmentation to ensure you receive explicit consent to send these types of communications to customers.

Make sure to prioritize permission-based marketing, whether using SMS or email marketing. Adherence to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ensures legal compliance while building trust with subscribers.

Designing compelling email campaigns

Every email marketing guide will tell you the importance of effective content. Email marketing allows for eye-catching visuals and responsive design that ensures emails look appealing and function seamlessly across devices, from desktops to smartphones. However, even the most visually appealing email can fall flat if subscribers don’t open it.

Crafting attention-grabbing subject lines is an art that requires a blend of curiosity, relevance, and brevity to encourage the reader to open the email to read its core content.

Content strategies for effective emails

Effective emails often include educational content, promotional offers, or both. Engaging storytelling, interspersed with valuable insights, can captivate readers while timely promotions, discounts, and exclusive offers provide tangible value that drives fast action.

Automation and personalization in email marketing

Email marketing automation software enables the use of drip campaigns and automated workflows sent based on triggers or timelines to nurture leads and guide subscribers through the customer journey. Simultaneously, the use of dynamic content and email personalization allows for tailored emails based on past interactions, preferences, or behaviors that significantly boost engagement and conversion rates.

The power of cross-channel marketing

Cross-channel marketing uses coordinated and integrated marketing efforts across multiple platforms and touchpoints to provide a consistent and unified customer experience. Its benefits include enhanced customer engagement, increased brand recall, and a seamless customer journey.

Coordinating efforts across SMS and email marketing provides a simplified outreach that allows businesses to use the unique strengths of each channel. When these mediums are strategically intertwined, they foster a seamless journey for the customer, ensuring that audiences receive consistent and complementary messages.

Integrating SMS and email campaigns

Together, email and SMS marketing services can amplify outreach efforts by using the unique advantages of both channels. For instance, you can use text messages to remind customers of an upcoming sales event and email to provide them with more information and engaging visuals to complement the text and vice versa.

Coordinated messaging and consistent branding

Harmonizing messages and branding in email and SMS marketing allows for consistent brand voice, tone, and messaging across different platforms. This coordinated messaging and consistent branding reinforces brand identity, making the experience more recognizable and memorable for customers.

Using data to optimize cross-channel campaigns

A robust email and SMS marketing platform uses data to help businesses create effective, personalized campaigns. By collecting and analyzing insights from each marketing channel, businesses can obtain a more holistic view of customer interactions, preferences, and pain points.

This data offers clues into which channels drive the most conversions, when customers drop off the customer journey, and how interactions on one channel influence behavior on another.

Additionally, cross-channel marketing with email and SMS marketing enables continuous improvement through A/B testing and performance analysis. With A/B testing, businesses can pit two versions of a campaign against each other to determine which elements resonate best with their audience. Then, by comparing metrics like open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and conversions, marketers can determine the most effective strategy.

Leveraging SMS to enhance email engagement

SMS and email marketing strategies work together to increase engagement and provide customers with an excellent experience.

By sending SMS reminders about upcoming email promotions or newsletters, you can pique the interest of your subscribers and increase the chances of your email being opened and engaged with. In addition, providing exclusive SMS-only offers to email subscribers adds an additional layer of value, encouraging subscribers to remain engaged with both channels.

Use SMS marketing tools and email marketing to boost your business’s success with Mailchimp. Our SMS and email marketing automation platform enables brands to seamlessly integrate SMS and email campaigns and measure their performance.