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About SMS Marketing

Our CRM has a built in SMS marketing service enabling single or multiple SMS messages to be sent out from your account to specific groups of people to sell, educate or for reminder purposes.   

SMS messaging is a great way to target market your products and services or improve your show rates for appointments and events.

Why choose to use SMS Marketing? 

• SMS marketing is growing rapidly and is the best and most cost effective way to communicate to people instantly. 
• Excellent open rates, with 97% of text messages opened instantly, response rates are higher than any other form of contact.
• Very competitive pricing for a marketing campaign with single SMS and Bulk SMS pricing.  Please contact our support desk for details. 
• Instant reply back responses. 
• Critical timing - you may, for example, wish to reach your customers just before lunchtime (if you have a restaurant) and you want to promote daily specials particularly on slow days of the week.
• Increase attendance levels – sending out event or appointment reminders is a great way to ensure attendees do not forget and will decrease the number of no shows.
• Excellent deliverability of your SMS text marketing ALWAYS ensured thanks to the reliability of mobile technologies that SMS marketing is built upon.
• Permission based marketing - (opt-in) your messages are sent only to those who have requested them. According to industry studies, over 80% of cell phone users are willing to receive opt-in text messages. This greatly increases ROI and provides the foundation for a successful campaign.
  
• Track SMS messaging via your CRM account on the dashboard when they are delivered as shown below: 

• View SMS messaging directly associated to a contact record as shown in the screenshot example below:

Permission Based SMS Marketing: 

Email and SMS marketing is popular with small businesses because it can be a highly cost effective route to reaching new customers. However, the introduction of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in 2003 has had a large impact on the way businesses conduct email and SMS marketing campaigns.

The legislation was designed to protect consumers and businesses from unsolicited email and mobile marketing, or Spam as it is more commonly termed.

The current legislation states that B2C unsolicited marketing via e-mail, and mobile, will be permitted only if recipients have given prior consent or 'opted-in' to receive information via these channels.

For B2B marketing unsolicited e-mails and mobile marketing may be sent without opt-in consent; however, senders must offer each recipient a chance to opt out.

Any SMS Marketing must be permission based only.  If businesses do not comply with the regulations they are at risk of being heavily fined.  

The most recent enforcement for SMS marketing spamming prosecution came into force 2012 by the DM Commission body:

http://www.dmcommission.com/news/2012/11/sms-marketing-regulation-%E2%80%93-uk-spammers-fined-440k/ 

Our CRM is a permission based only platform for our email, SMS and direct marketing services which you need to be aware of.

In order to ensure you comply with the industry regulations we have compiled the following document with clear guidelines that you need to follow, please keep reading to find out more:

How to avoid spamming when sending SMS marketing or reminders?

1. Do not buy data lists – no matter how the data supplier sells it with opt-ins or double opt ins – these lists have been sold over and over to other businesses, which may well be out of date and cost you money for poor quality lists.  Also opt-in does not comply with our CRM SMS , Direct Mail and Email Marketing permission based as it is a 3rd party who is supplying you with the data. 

You do not have a relationship at all with the data contacts and you will be guaranteed high unsubscribes, poor deliverability and recipients reporting you as a spammer – affecting your score rating as a result.  It really is not worth the time and money spent for poor quality data and we will not accept bought lists as it violates the regulations. 

2. Not your customer? Get their permission first. Perhaps the most important rule for SMS marketers to remember is that, if you are planning to roll out an SMS marketing campaign to individuals or businesses which you have no prior trading relationship with, you must gain their permission to do so first. 

This permission must be obtained by the individual or business actively agreeing to receiving communications – for example, via collecting information from visitors at a business open day or via a page on your website where they have to actively tick a box. 

This permission must be able to be easily proven and clear to the individual as to what they are agreeing to – so for instance, collecting business cards at an event which you then add to your SMS marketing list does not quality for ‘opting in’.

One final thing – you cannot use the same communication method to ask if individuals would like to opt in – so you cannot send an SMS to ask if they would like to receive SMS messages.

3. It is also important to remember that as a business you are marketing to a person and not a mobile number: it is all about building trust. The opt-in process must be transparent and the user must know why they are opting in, and what giving their permission to the business actually means.  

Make the most of rich media by attaching a PDF, picture, and video or link the message to a mobile landing page containing visual

4. Keep your text marketing regular and relevant.  Target marketing is key do not send irrelevant emails otherwise you risk putting the recipient off. 

Your communications should be regular enough to keep your business at front of mind, but not so often that you end up frustrating your customer and therefore falling into the ‘spam’ trap. 

If you keep in mind that every SMS marketing message should have a clear reason or event to publicise, and you do not send messages just for the sake of getting your name in front of the customer, you will find that you immediately start to reduce the potential for spamming – and that your customers will find your communications informative, useful and will act upon those clear call to actions that every marketing message needs.

Following our simple guidelines it will ensure that you stay the right side of the law. 

As a result you will find your SMS marketing campaigns will be informative, customer or prospects are therefore much more likely to be responsive.