Complete Guide to Promotional SMS & Building One for Your Business

If you’ve ever received a message from a business sharing upcoming discounts, festival offers, and sales on selected merchandize, then you have engaged with the marketing of that brand. Promotional messages are designed to attract more customers by sharing the business news and updates, so that the customers can engage with the brand. The post describes all that you need to know about the promotional SMS.

A promotional message, as the name suggests, is a message that promotes a business, a product, or a service to prospects. Such messages inform the customers about the product promotional deals, festive offers, and seasonal discounts. Businesses around the world run marketing campaigns to engage customers and increase sales. For running a successful SMS campaign, it’s important that the marketers must ask for prior consent of customers through subscriptions and forms.

Marketers can send promotional messages to non-DND numbers only. It can only be sent to the customers who have opted or subscribed to receive business communication. The marketing teams must be capable enough to prepare a strong promotional campaign and run it successfully to attract more customers and achieve higher sales. To accomplish this objective, it is important that the business must partner with a reliable bulk SMS service provider.

In this article, we’ll elaborate on the following:

• Difference between promotional and transactional messages
• How to build and run effective promotional SMS campaign
• Tips to write an effective promotional message

Difference between Promotional & Transactional Messages

Promotional messages are used by businesses to send sales and marketing information to the customers. Such messages help sharing seasonal offers, discounted deals, and business updates with the prospects and acquire more customers to promote sales. Promotional Bulk SMS are time-restrictive and marketers can only share such messages with the customers from 9 am to 9 pm.

Examples for promotional SMS includes the weekly deals offered by a brand, buy 1 get 1 free offer, flat 50% discounts, and flat sales running in the online or offline stores.

Transactional messages, on the other side, are used to share information such as OTPs, payment details, order receipt, booking alerts, delivery status, etc. with the customers. These messages are highly secured and are delivered to all registered contact numbers, regardless of their DND and non-DND status. No prior consent of the customers is required to send these messages and the customers may receive transactional messages any time of the day.

Transactional messages are used by banks for sending OTPs, account activity update, or transactional details with the customers. eCommerce stores also use transactional messages to keep the customer informed about the product order details and delivery status.

How to Build & Run Effective Promotional SMS Campaign

Well, this is something that demands marketing expertise and you need to consult a reliable bulk SMS service provider to achieve expected outcomes. Here’s the most professional procedure that you may follow to build and run a promotional SMS campaign and achieve success. First you need to describe your business goals to your provider and it will then suggest you a messaging plan that best meets your business requirements.

You need to perform a proper marketing research and know more about the current industry demographics. It’s imperative that your campaign must attract and engage customers with the brand. Know your audience by developing the buyer’s persona so that you can understand your customers better.

Build a strategic plan to know what actually you need to achieve. Make sure to reach out to all the influencers and stakeholders so that they can contribute equally in promoting the campaign. Organize your promotional calendar so that you can share to-the-moment marketing updates with your customers in a timely manner.

Make sure to interact with your bulk SMS service provider effectively so that they can help you setup a successful campaign. You may ask your service provider several questions to ensure smooth running of the campaign.

• Ask about bulk SMS plans in detail
• Do not forget about asking the features of the bulk SMS software and its working procedure.
• Make sure that the service provider is using direct delivery routes for sending SMS.
• Explore more about the branded Sender ID and the total number of recipients you can add for bulk SMS sending.
• Ensure that the service provider is having an established Support team for resolving technical glitches (if any).

Tips to Write Effective Promotional SMS

While writing a promotional SMS, the marketers need to use compelling and enticing words that customers can notice easily and gets attracted to. Here are few tips that may help you develop a result-oriented marketing message.

• Personalize your promotional Bulk SMS to your business goals.
• Determine your business goals and explore what you want to achieve.
• Be professional, precise, and transparent while writing a promotional message.
• Be clear and avoid using fancy words that creates confusions/ misapprehensions.
• Do not forget to add a call-to-action statement or button in your promotional message.

Bulk SMS marketing is the most affordable, easy, and quickest way to reach the customers and communicate business updates. The success rates of bulk SMS messaging campaigns are surprising higher and hence businesses are adopting this highly-optimized marketing strategy to gain more customers, boost retention, and surge sales.