SMS stands for Short Messaging Service. SMS Marketing is when you are using text messages to inform your clients, partners, employees or associates about new products, to announce to them promotions, to give them updates about your company, to send them wishes or to update them on specific things such as unpaid or overdue bills.

The main purpose of SMS Marketing or Bulk SMS is to build up a list of contacts or subscribers in order to increase customer loyalty. At the same time, by using text messaging in your strategy you can generate more sales, save time and save money.

Many people find it useful to get updates from their favourite companies about promotions, sales or other announcements and that is why with SMS Marketing you can get instant sales.

Also, people tend to carry their mobile phones with them at all times, making the SMS one the fastest and most direct way to contact your client base.

SMS Marketing is permission based, meaning that people need to give you their Ok before you can start to send them any text messages. This is true when you are targeting new clients. It is a good practice to have a method or a form to allow your existing clients to opt-in to receiving text messages from your company, so that you can use SMS to notify them about unpaid bills, to give them project updates, to send them a wish on their birthday or name day, etc.

Successfull SMS Marketing campaigns are the ones that send a short, to the point text message, with a very clear call to action.

In addition, adding personalization to your SMS Campaign will increase its effectiveness by 66% according to studies. An example of personalizing your bulk SMS campaign is to add a salutation in front of the next message so that each of your sms recipients can see their name in the SMS. So, one of them will receive "Dear George, we invite you at our cocktail party tonight at 8", which another will receive "Dear Maria, we invite you at our cocktail party tonight at 8".

It is a good practice to create segmentation of your contacts database so that you can choose to which lists to send a particular text message. For example, you can have a group "All Clients", another group "Repeat Clients", another group "Women Only", etc. So, you would choose the "Women Only" group to send a message to your female contacts on the Woman's day, while you would choose "All Clients" to send them a Season Sales Opening message. Segmentation can help in driving your sales higher.

It is also a good practice to allow your SMS contacts to be able to opt-out from your sms campaigns should they wish to do so. One simple way to do it is to add some simple wording at the end of your text message saying something like "STOP SMS-Send No to xxxxx".

These are the basics of text message marketing. You can find out more by reading our other articles on sms marketing.