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DIY SMS Marketing: How to Use Your Personal Android Phone to Promote Your Business

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Nowadays, there are more channels than ever through which you can reach your customers, but SMS marketing is perhaps one of the most underutilized. There are a lot of different ways that the humble text message can help your brand to grow, help you monitor your marketing efforts, and help you to keep in touch with the people who matter the most to your business.

In this article, we’re going to show you how to use your personal Android phone to promote your business through SMS marketing, and some of the great tools out there that can make the whole process a breeze.

Is SMS Effective for Marketing?

Text messages are one of the most direct and visible marketing channels that you have access to. They arrive directly in your customers’ pockets, and they come in a form that people are naturally inclined to open and engage with.

According to HubSpot data, the average open rate for an email is between 19% and 26%, depending on the industry, and the average email click-through rate hovers around just 2.5%. Compare that to data for SMS messages, which shows an open rate of 90%-99%, with 90% of those being opened within 3 minutes of the message arriving.

While the click-through rate for SMS is not quite as impressive as the open rate (between 5% and 10%), it definitely shows that your marketing will get in front of the eyes of your customers, and the statistics indicate many more positives as well:

  • 75% of consumers want to receive opt-in SMS messages, with 64% thinking that businesses should use text messages to contact them more often.
  • Consumers are 4.5 times as likely to respond to a text rather than an email.
  • 18–34-year-olds choose text as their preferred channel for business notifications.
  • SMS messages have a response rate that is more than 200% higher than that of Facebook, email, or phone

SMS gives you a direct, responsive way to communicate with your customers, helping you to develop personal relationships that increase loyalty and encourage engagement.

What Is The Best Way To Utilize SMS Marketing?

So, there are a lot of benefits to using SMS for your marketing efforts, but what is the best way to go about it?

As with any channel, it’s important that you send the right message to the right people. This is not the space to send a blanket, cold promotions to a wide array of potential customers; it’s all about opt-in. Make sure to use comprehensive forms for compliance, so that you know your customers are going to be happy to hear from you.

Then, you need to consider the kinds of messages that you are going to use SMS for – the main two branches of which obviously are promotional and transactional.

  • Promotional SMS Marketing. You can send promotional messages to increase brand awareness, notify customers about changes and new products, or target sales directly. 
  • Transactional SMS Marketing. Transactional messages simply give the customers the information they need about things like delivery updates and order confirmations.

Finally, you need to think about automation. Even for the smallest business, manually sending and receiving direct text messages is almost impossible to do at scale, so you need to find tools that can help. AutoForward Text is one such tool, and it might be exactly what your business needs.

How Can AutoForward Text Help You?

The key to putting together an effective SMS marketing strategy is being timely and direct. That’s where AutoForward Text comes in. It’s a simple app that’s straightforward to use, and it is designed to make sure that you never miss a message from your customers. It has many features that you won’t want to do without, including:

  • Automated Text Forwarding. All of your incoming and outgoing text messages can be forwarded to whichever phone numbers and email addresses you like, so you are always staying on top of the communications you receive from your audience. That means quick responses, satisfied customers, and no missed opportunities.
  • Keyword Filtering. You can set up filters for keywords and contact numbers, which means that your incoming messages will always be organized and your responses will always be targeted to the right people at the right time.
  • Remote Access. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, AutoForward Text allows you to access your text messages remotely. You don’t even need to have your phone with you to respond immediately to what your customers need.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of this particular tool, however, is how accessible it is for a business of any size. Unlike most other SMS marketing solutions, AutoForward Text is highly cost-effective for even the smallest of businesses. You don’t need any expensive hardware or software, and you can easily set it up yourself in no time at all.

Summary: DIY SMS Marketing

So, how can SMS help you to promote your business through your phone? Well, marketing messages sent through SMS are direct, they’re engaging, and they are opened at a much higher rate than material sent through practically any other channel.

Sending promotional and transactional text messages is a great way to grow your brand, improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, and even generate direct sales. To make it work, though, you need to be quick, responsive, and targeted – which is where tools like AutoForward Text can make all the difference.