The number of smartphone owners keeps growing – a Pew Research Center study showed that 35 percent of Americans had them in 2011, but nearly doubled to 64 percent in 2014. By 2016, Statista predicts 196 million smartphone users in the U.S., and Ericsson estimates that by 2020, 90 percent of the world over age 6, roughly 6.1 billion people, will own a smartphone.

If you’re someone who relies on customer communications to stay in business, (hopefully everyone), you’ll need to connect with people via their mobile devices. Tablets remain popular, but for many, smartphones are a preferred way to interact, especially via texting.

Since most businesses are too busy or too big to individually text every customer, it’s vital to figure out ways to get your texts to as many people as possible, and make them interesting and exciting enough to get results. Luckily, there are some methods to make these things happen.

1. Drive sign-ups on every channel. Invite people to join your mailing list on your site, blog, social networking pages, printed communications, even other texts. Put these contacts in the same distribution database for your marketing outreach.
2. Find appropriate software. There are plenty of email/newsletter/survey tools to help automate mass electronic mailing but not many for mass SMS solutions. Trumpia is one provider that supports all mobile marketing channels.
3. Request additional personal details. Until they know you a little better, recipients may not want to provide a ton of demographic information. But if you make the registration process easy, and not a 100-questionform, they may be willing to share. Offer incentives – everyone who fills the form out gets a prize/discount/offer. Or invite them to complete their profile once they feel more comfortable. With this info, you’ll have better data to target them for future offers like email, gender, location, age, birthday, marital status or general interests.
4. Make messages mobile-friendly. Just because text fields have a 160-character limit doesn’t mean you need to use them all. Get in and get out quickly since your recipients probably think of themselves as busy – even if their definition of busy is reading many texts.
5. Use emotional, action-packed phrases. Since you won’t have a chance to give them a full sales pitch or a formal offer, you’ll need a tease of sorts to attract attention, get them to click a link or take other action. “Don’t forget!” “Here’s an easy way to save time/money/sanity/____.” “Remember us?”
6. Include a time limit. Unless you’re doing something hyper-local like a special event, you don’t need to say “one hour only” but you can still push people to do something today or at least soon. Even if you’re not running a specific offer, make your message timely – “call us today if we can help with ____.”
7. Make it recognizable. Since some people receive dozens of texts daily, they may not immediately know who you are, especially with your early initial contacts. Introduce your business in the first few lines. Some may not even recall signing up – but may still be interested if your offer excites them.
8. Be personable. Even if you’re sending a simultaneous message to thousands, use your one-to-one voice like you were personally and sincerely addressing the recipient. “We have a super deal just for you!”
9. Don’t be a pest. The magic number of “just enough” texts varies, but an easy way to get a negative reaction, maybe blocked, is to overdo the interactions. On social media business pages, there’s a general 1-10 ratio of “selling” posts to “chatting” posts, but with texts there seems to be less patience if senders don’t get to the point quickly.
10. Use recognizable language. Young adults definitely have mastered web- and text-speak well. But you don’t have to get carried away with the lingo, lolz.
11. Go multimedia. You’re not restricted to just texting words. With help from Trumpia, it’s easy to include photos or videos, QR codes, coupons, or clickable links to landing pages.

With fewer people using voice-to-voice, or even email, texting seems like a smart method to interact. So marketing efforts can focus on crafting great texts and sharing them with potential customers. Here at Trumpia, we can assist in creating a texting strategy.

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