World Magazine 2024
It’s a new year which means it’s time to sit down with the team and work out the goals for the year and how they are to be achieved.
As with most companies, the most important departments are sales and marketing since they are responsible for driving the revenue i.e. keeping the doors open.
Sadly for a lot of businesses last year meant that a lot of doors were permanently closed due to city-wide lockdowns and while a lot of businesses were never going to recover there were some that if they had planned a little more strategically would have given themselves a chance to survive and possibly even thrive during this uncertain period.
Table of Contents
How To Drive Sales For Your Business
Even though a lot of people were glad to see the end of 2024, it’s likely to continue into 2024 and even beyond so now is the time to start thinking differently about your marketing.
In my opinion, the very best way to drive sales during downturns is to create a customer database that you can use to market to.
There are two marketing channels that are fantastic for customer database marketing:
- Email marketing
- Bulk SMS
I’m a huge fan of both but if I had to choose between one or the other, I’d go with Bulk SMS mainly because of the overall engagement, ROI, and ease of use.
“Want more sales? Use Bulk SMS” – Angus B, marketing specialist for SMSPapa.com.au
3 Reasons I Use Bulk SMS To Grow Sales During Tough Times
Bulk SMS Has Massive Engagement
A lot of businesses today typically use email as their tool of choice to communicate with their customers whether that be customer service updates, newsletters, promotions, reminders, etc. but the number one issue I have with email is that it has incredibly low engagement rates.
Since we’re talking about driving revenue let’s talk about sending out promotional emails.
Did you know that the average open rate for an email campaign is only 20%? If you’re already running promotional campaigns then chances are you are sitting close to this number – it varies from industry to industry but it is typically around 20%.
If you are using email marketing as a way to generate revenue then you are driving your business on 20% – that’s not great.
That means out of 1000 emails that go out 800 people will not open your campaign, this ultimately means you need to send out promotions with more frequency which means a lot of additional work.
Bulk SMS on the other hand delivers a 97% open rate – that is a game-changer, period.
This means that for the same 1000 people only 30 will not open your marketing campaign. Now let me ask you a simple question, would you rather 800 people not open your campaign or 30? Would you rather 200 people open your marketing campaign or would you rather 970 people open your campaign?
Does this mean that if you run a bulk SMS campaign that you will drive 400% more sales revenue from your campaign? Maybe, maybe not but I think it is safe to say that your sales are going to be higher.
The more customers that you can get to read your promotion the more sales you will make, it’s just plain math.
Bulk SMS is Easy
Are you an email marketing specialist? If you are then you already know how complex email marketing can be, you know how tough it is to get an additional few percentage points above the average open rate is.
You probably A/B split test multiple subject lines, spend an hour or more writing copy, coming up with angles, selecting products, product images, writing code, getting the team to proof the email, testing buttons, selecting the audience, etc.
I used to run email campaigns and I can tell you consumers have no idea the work that goes into producing just a single email promotion just to get a frustratingly low 20% open rate and having to produce 20+ more campaigns that month.
Bulk SMS is the complete opposite.
You only have between 160-450 characters to work with so you are forced to offer the promotion, all the fat is cut leaving just the main offer which makes it quick and easy to write.
There are also no graphics or coding to worry about either, just write your text message, select your audience, and schedule.
Of course, you need to send a test text message to make sure it reads well and that the link works but the work to performance ratio is unmatched!
Bulk SMS Is An Offline Marketing Channel
Online marketing makes up the majority of the marketing budget for most companies these days, it’s fantastic because of the transparency, while not 100% accurate tracking advertising is now a lot easier.
The downside of online marketing is not only is it complicated but it is seriously hindered by performance-crushing algorithms and ad policies.
One of the main reasons that email open rates are so low is because of the SPAM filters and reputation scores both designed to stop email spammers but actually also do a great job at blocking legitimate businesses from reaching their customers.
Did you know that there are 400+ spam trigger words that if used can send your email to spam? Hint: one of them is the word “click here” tell me if you have ever used those two words inside your marketing campaigns before.
If you run paid advertising campaigns then you may have had problems using certain words or images inside your ad that violated advertising policies for example you can’t use a before and after photo for Facebook ads, before and after photos are incredibly powerful converters but Facebook won’t allow it so you need to use a lesser converting image.
Bulk SMS doesn’t suffer from aggressive ad policies or spam algorithms, algorithm updates because it is an offline media channel.
Conclusion
If your business has suffered during covid and you are using email marketing I would highly recommend using bulk SMS as a way to virtually guarantee higher engagement and ultimately sales alongside your email campaigns.
