SMS Marketing Industry News

6 Ways to Use Mobile Websites With SMS Marketing

Peter TanhamThis is a guest post by Peter Tanham, the co-founder of SparkPage, which specialized in building high performance, better-optimized landing pages that convert.


When you send your next text message campaign, it’s likely that over 80% of customers are receiving it on an internet-enabled device. The vast majority of these are smartphones.

This percentage is only getting bigger each month, so it makes sense to send more than just text in your SMS.

Directing SMS recipients to a website can give you the flexibility to include more information, images, and videos, and ultimately drive more sales.

We’ve decided to illustrate this opportunity with some examples.

Here are 6 tried and tested link templates that can drive leads, sales, and conversions from your SMS marketing.

 

1. Restaurant Reservation

Many restaurants are using really novel tactics to drive mobile opt-ins, but what should they do with the numbers they have?

One option is to include a link so that a customer can make a reservation directly from their phone.

The most popular restaurant booking software, OpenTable, has said that more than one in five restaurant diners now book online using their mobile.

Best of all, OpenTable offer restaurant mobile sites for free! Any restaurant can sign up here and start enhancing their SMS campaigns today.

open table

 

2. Download our App

Does your business have an app to promote? What better way to do it than by sending the link directly to your customer’s SMS inbox!

We’ve seen amazing results from enterprise customers who can get their apps soaring in the iTunes charts with a well-timed text message.

If your company has both an iTunes and an Android App, you can use a free service like Yozio to make one link to include in your SMS. This will detect the user’s handset type and send them to the appropriate app store.

Services like Yozio will also track your app downloads so you know how many extra downloads your text marketing generates.

 

3. Coupons

Coupons are often the simplest yet most effective SMS campaigns to run.

“Show this text for 15% off your next purchase. EXP 12/12”

9 words that can dramatically increase sales!

Why not use a link to enhance this popular SMS style? You could even link to something as simple as an image of a barcode, which can be scanned at the register.

The added bonus here is that the page you link to can be replaced with a new marketing message after the coupon has expired.

 

4. Refer to A Friend

We all know that referrals can be a huge source of new business. A well-placed link in your next SMS could drive referrals even more.

Have a look at the screenshot below for an example of a campaign one small business sent out by text.

“Refer a friend and get 3 free sessions.”

You can use a simple tool like Google Forms or Wufoo forms to capture this refer-a-friend data, then follow up with each new lead.

You could also use the Tatango API to automatically send a new SMS to the friend, giving them an equally compelling offer if they become a customer.

refer-a-friend

 

5. Extra Information

Do you ever feel like you’re sacrificing quality to squeeze your marketing message into 160 characters?

Adding a simple link can vastly increase the amount you can say in a single SMS.

Just link to a page on your website, a blog post, or even a page with a service like Pen.io.

We’ve seen this work really well with schools that need to send information to parents, with companies who have to send notices or updated terms and conditions. It can also work for copy that’s just a little bit longer than 160 characters, like a shipping dispatch notice that contains an order id, shipping address, and arrival date.

 

6. Buy Now

Yes… we’ve saved the best for last!

When we first trialed this we were blown away with the customer uptake. One fitness center sent a text message to all their clients with a special offer – buy three personal training sessions and get one free.

The link in the text message lead users to a simple page with one main call to action: “Buy Now” (see screenshot below)

This was a PayPal button that brought the user to a mobile payments page. A massive 15% of all users who opened the link used PayPal to buy the 3 sessions (for $36).

You can use PayPal’s custom button creator or SparkPage’s buy now template to create a page like this and start selling in minutes.

buy now


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