
My colleagues and I talk a lot about how a customer’s relationship with a brand isn’t really all that different from the other relationships in their life. Customers go through a lot of the same stages when forming a relationship with a brand – from meeting to getting to know each other to defining the relationship to becoming exclusive and telling the whole world how much they love them – that they go through when dating. And just like when dating, they grant brands access to their lives at different levels the more they gain their trust. They may start out by checking out your brand’s Instagram. Maybe they’ll sign up to receive emails. Maybe they’ll even give you their real email address instead of one they created just for promotional emails or a masked one enabled by Apple! But the highest form of trust (and access)? Just like with dating, it’s getting their digits. So why are so many brands abusing that trust by treating text like an extension of email and clogging up their customers’ inboxes with incessant, irrelevant messages like that guy you went on 2 dates with who just can’t seem to take a hint?
Why SMS?
For starters, SMS is an extremely tempting channel. It provides a brand with direct, near-immediate access and attention. According to a recent survey by EZ Texting, 88% of respondents said they usually have their phone within reach, while 58% say they always have it that close. And with that kind of proximity, it follows that texts are getting read quickly: 79% read texts within 15 minutes of receiving them, and 72% respond within 15 minutes. So yeah. SMS is an extremely appealing channel for brands that want to reach their customers quickly. And there’s no doubt that it has a key role to play in your omnichannel CRM strategies.
However, it’s this same ubiquity in the average consumer’s lives that makes it all the more important that you treat this channel with care. Yes, brands get way more eyes on their SMS marketing campaigns, but with that comes a much higher opt-out rate. Postscript reports average unsubscribe rates for SMS marketing ranging between 0.9% and 3.1%, which is significantly higher than the average email unsubscribe rate of 0.17% as reported by Campaign Monitor. This is because text messages are much more intrusive than email (and because you don’t have to go hunting for an unsubscribe link) and so customers are much more trigger happy when it comes to unsubscribing.
So what’s a brand to do?
First of all, if you take nothing else away from this article, do me this one solid: please do not operate under the assumption that you can use texting as an extension of email. This is not the place for mass promotions and one-way communication. Texting should be a complement to your email strategy, but please for the sake of all of our notification screens, do not attempt to replicate your email campaigns in SMS format.
To make sure that you’re using SMS marketing in a way that differentiates your brand and doesn’t break the trust your customers have put in you, commit to really spending the time to figure out how to best use this direct line of communication with a highly-engaged audience across their connected experience with your brand.
Here are a couple of thought-starters on how to use text in a unique way and stand out from the competition who may be abusing this channel in their customer’s eyes:
There are a lot of ways that you can use texting as an effective part of your comms strategy, and exactly none of them involve lifting your email strategy wholesale. Like all of your marketing channels, SMS will work harder for you if you define its distinct role in your overall ecosystem. With texting, we have the power to deliver a message right to our customer’s fingertips through a device that is almost always on them in a channel that has near-universal adoption of real-time push notifications. Your job is to ensure you treat that channel responsibly and to not abuse the trust they have put in your brand by providing such direct access. Approach texting with that mindset, and you’re already ten steps ahead of the majority of the competition.