Enabling Real-Time Communication With SMS
With increasing emphasis on omnichannel strategy when engaging customers, real-time communication becomes essential as more and more consumers prefer brands to communicate with them via SMS. Consider the following data:
- 8 percent of Americans opt for SMS as their preferred communication channel to receive transactional updates; and
- 3 percent of American consumers wish to receive subscription renewals and reminders via SMS.
Global Customer Engagement Benchmarks Report, 2022
Many successful brands, such as Air Canada, Lowe’s, and MGM Grand, utilize SMS to engage with customers. Keeping the increased adoption of SMS and its direct impact on customer engagement in mind, you can broaden your omnichannel experience and deepen customer relationships with your brand by integrating SMS with other channels such as email, push notifications, in-app, and more to deliver a seamless experience, resulting in greater brand loyalty.
Why Should Brands Adopt SMS Marketing?
SMS has long-term benefits and proven return on investment, typically because it's one of the most common communication channels and is present on all types of mobile devices. However, there are three reasons why a brand should opt for SMS:
- Higher CTR: A recent industry report showed that SMS accounted for 30 percent of clickthroughs.
- Growth in subscribers: SMS opt-ins are the most organic way to grow subscribers and have worked for many brands.
- Increase in revenue: SMS as a channel will also help reduce overall costs while amplifying your engagement reach.
Multiple industries, such as retail, financial services, media and entertainment, and travel, benefit from adopting SMS marketing as part of their omnichannel engagement strategy. SMS as a channel is more than a mere transactional messaging tool. Over the last few years, many brands have come up with unique ways of using SMS — be it turning into a self-serve customer service chat or an automatic onboarding channel.
The Road Ahead
Americans check their phones 344 times a day on average, implying that SMS could get your customers' attention every four minutes. With the SMS marketing software space expected to grow at almost 20 percent CAGR from 2022-2026, SMS is critical to your omnichannel marketing and customer engagement strategy.
Overall SMS channel engagement can be enhanced by adding a customer engagement platform. Using a customer engagement platform, you can send SMS messages during critical moments in the onboarding, engagement or purchase journey. You can help grow subscribers cross-channel, enable two-way conversational texts, deploy transactional updates, and A/B test different promotional messages based on campaigns, sales or offers. Including SMS in your omnichannel marketing strategy will go a long way in enhancing customer experience, reducing cost while amplifying the impact of your campaigns, and getting higher conversion and open rates.
Meagan White leads the North America marketing and sales development team at MoEngage, an omnichannel customer engagement platform.
Meagan White is the head of marketing at Kibo, a composable commerce platform designed to simplify the complexities of delivering modern customer experiences that span order management, e-commerce, and subscription services. Previously, she led the North America marketing and sales development team at MoEngage. She has more than a decade of marketing leadership experience within the Martech, customer experience, and content management sectors, managing marketing strategies in various functions, including demand generation, digital marketing, product marketing, and communications. She holds a master’s degree from Boston University.
