What Makes Customers Likely to Opt In to an SMS Marketing Program?

August 17, 2015 by Christine

An SMS marketing campaign can be extremely beneficial to businesses looking for new ways to engage with their customers. However, the first challenge that you face is actually getting your customers to opt in to the program. This can be difficult — people are likely to see text messages coming from a company as spam, and be reluctant to give out their phone numbers for you to contact them.

However, recent information from BlueHornet’s 2014 Consumer Views of Email Marketing Report gives a bit of insight into why customers do choose to opt in to SMS marketing campaigns.

The statistics from the study reveal that approximately 49 percent of all customers surveyed were interested in giving out their information into an SMS marketing program, which is probably a better percentage than a lot of businesses would have expected. The single-biggest reason why customers said they would opt in was to receive coupons (29.9 percent). The rest of the reasons included “to receive information” (7.3 percent), “event notifications” (6.7 percent), “sign up for contest” (4.6 percent), and “other” (1.4 percent).

The fact that receiving coupons is by far the highest reason to opt in to an SMS marketing program clearly demonstrates that the best and most effective SMS campaigns will offer some sort of value to their customers that they can’t necessarily get elsewhere. Sure, some people might be interested in receiving information about your company, but what they’re really interested in is saving money.

This means that when you are advertising your SMS campaign and focusing on getting people to sign up, you need to push the idea of exactly how it benefits your customers to do so. Give examples of sales or discounts they can expect to receive, and add an element of exclusivity. Give special discounts that only SMS customers will receive, and make sure that people know that only SMS customers will receive them — it will give people much more incentive to sign up for your alerts.

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by Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer

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Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: mobile marketing, mobit, sms mobile marketing