Is SMS an Effective Marketing Tool? | EP 778

Is SMS an Effective Marketing Tool?

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, i’m Tim Strifler. My co-host David Blackmon should be back with us tomorrow. He is a digital nomad traveling in his airstream and so sometimes based off of his travel schedule stuff like that we’re not able to get our schedules to line up when we need to record new episodes. So spoiler alert we don’t actually record every day we record uh in batches. And so um yeah so he is traveling when i’m recording this batch of episodes. So in today’s episode we are talking about sms. Is sms an effective marketing tool? Now sms is essentially text messaging and you probably received sms messages from companies. So if you uh for example what’s really common is getting like order update text messages. So you buy something from an online store and then you get a text message saying “hey we’re preparing your order”, and you get another text message the next day saying “hey your order is shipped”. And then the next couple days later you get a text message saying “hey your order has arrived”. Those are sms. Right it can also be used for marketing. Right, so like “hey we’re having a sale click this to shop the sale” um you might have received those as well. So sms can be similar to like email marketing. For example David and i love email marketing, we’ve talked about it a lot on WP The Podcast over the years how it’s very very effective. It’s essentially when it comes to internet marketing there’s two types of traffic, traffic that you own and traffic that you don’t own. Traffic that you don’t own is like referral traffic from other websites it’s paid traffic from places like facebook and google and youtube and tick tock and stuff like that. Or it’s um even organic traffic from some of those social media platforms too. You’re not paying for it you’re getting free traffic but you still don’t own it. It can be taken away at any time, you can get banned algorithms can change you know you can run out of budget no longer, be able to afford to get that traffic anymore. Right, so that’s traffic that you don’t own. Traffic that you own is email marketing for example where you’ve built up a list you own that list and you can contact them whenever you want, and send traffic your way to a new offer to a new freebie a new tutorial new article whatever you can. You own that traffic. And so you can do what you want with it, no one can take that away from you, right? Even if your email marketing platform goes out of business you can still take that list export it and bring it to a new platform. So sms is essentially another form of traffic that you own because once you have a list of sms subscribers in platforms like Twilio, Twilio is the most popular you can send them targeted messages right whenever you want and sure they can just be simple order updates or they can be things that actually generate traffic like “hey you bought this product yesterday i want to let you know that you might be interested in this one over here and we’re actually having a sale on it”. They click the link boom, they’re over back on your site that’s traffic that you own so to answer the question is sms an effective marketing tool absolutely mainly because the traffic that you own that you can control however just like email marketing you can’t abuse it. An sms is even trickier. Right, uh email marketing people are so used to getting so many emails and so it’s you can basically send a ton of emails, and some people might subscribe unsubscribe, some people might not, but your emails might get ignored. And so there’s kind of pros and cons with sms and that it’s not as crowded as email marketing. There’s not as many people sending out marketing sms messages, and so you can typically get really high open rates and click rates and stuff like that compared to email marketing , because there’s less competition in the inbox essentially. And so that’s a benefit, however the the other side of the coin is you have to be extra careful because people are more protective over giving their number. And if they do give you their number they don’t want to get a ton of marketing promotion stuff like that. So you have to use it very sparingly and very effectively. But if you earn that trust then pretty much anything you send them they’re gonna check out and click. But again, if you abuse it then you’ll get the unsubscribe the stop reply you know whatever. So that’s sms. It is a very effective marketing tool, but you got to be careful not to abuse it and yeah use it sparingly. So that is it for this episode, we’ll be back tomorrow with another awesome episode and hopefully David will be back with us as well. So um you’ll have two voices, two sets of experiences uh and the typical banter that we have back and forth instead of me just having to you having to listen to me for five to eight minutes straight. So um hopefully you still learn some things these last few episodes, and uh we will see you tomorrow. Until then take care bye.