What is Mobile SMS Marketing?

Mobile SMS marketing — also referred to as text message marketing, SMS mobile marketing, SMS text messaging, or mobile text marketing — is the use of text messaging to deliver promotional messages to their mobile subscribers.

Businesses, brands, non-profit organizations, political candidates, and even celebrities use text message marketing to increase brand awareness, generate sales, share news alerts, increase web traffic, solicit donations, announce new products, share promo codes, and promote sales. Depending on the SMS marketing service, brands may also use mobile marketing to send appointment reminders or delivery notifications.

Because 99% of text messages are opened within three minutes, mobile SMS marketing is an efficient, effective way to communicate with subscribers directly on their cell phones.

What is SMS?

SMS stands for “short message service.” SMS messages are short messages (text messages) sent between brands and potential customers via mobile phones. The most basic form of these messages are usually up to 160 characters, and consist of words, web links, or phone numbers.

The slightly more advanced counterpart to SMS messages are MMS messages, another form of text message marketing. MMS messages are like SMS messages but can also include images, videos, gifs, and sound files and up to 5,000 characters of text. This digital marketing tactic helps the texts come to life, so many brands use a mix of both SMS and MMS messages.

Benefits of SMS Marketing for Enterprises

SMS marketing delivers unparalleled open, engagement, and conversion rates.

99% Open Rates

SMS marketing has the highest open rate of any mass marketing channel, with an impressive 99% open rate. That’s nearly five times higher than email marketing, with open rates of just 20%, and nearly 20 times higher than social media, which shows business posts to an estimated 5% of followers. Text message marketing is the most effective marketing strategy for ensuring that virtually everyone sees your promotions and mobile alerts. You can also augment your SMS marketing campaign with push notifications from your brand apps and other social media services like Facebook.

Messages Opened Immediately

Consumers open 90% of SMS marketing messages within just three minutes. That makes text message marketing the best channel through which to promote your time-sensitive specials and customer loyalty alerts. Many enterprise businesses use mobile marketing to share promotions in real time, such as lunch coupons before consumers are more likely to buy on their lunch breaks, or news alerts after a major press conference or when they need to meet a fundraising deadline.

Spam-free Channel

Text message marketing is a spam-free channel due to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits brands from sending unwanted text messages to consumers. Marketers benefit from texting being a clean method of communicating with customers because consumers only receive messages if they give their consent, and are therefore more likely to trust and open the texts they receive.

Robust Customer Insights & Analytics

SMS marketing software features elements like click-to-call phone numbers, URL links, and unique promo codes, all of which enable enterprise brands to seamlessly track the success of text message marketing campaigns. This gives mobile marketers more insight into their consumers, and more insight into the precise return on investment of each and every message they send.

Cross-Device and Cross-Carrier

Every mobile device is able to receive SMS messages, no matter which carrier the consumer uses. This means that none of your messages are at risk of being lost on users who don’t have a certain app or software, and instead makes mobile marketing an easily accessible customer communication and marketing method used by literally everyone.

Popular with Consumers

Texting is already part of daily life for most consumers, so there's no learning curve as there can be with other marketing channels. According to the Pew Research Center, 92% of adult Americans have a cell phone capable of receiving text messages. As time spent on phones increases, mobile marketing is only going to become more popular.

Eye-Catching Promotions

Enterprise text messages can include copy, videos, images, and GIFs that products and services to life. Restaurants can promote mouth-watering images of food that make customers rush to their nearest fast-food joint, and retailers can send a message with the latest clothing that inspires customers to order right from their phones.

Highly Visible Channel

Another benefit of mobile messaging is that all marketing text messages end up in the same place as text messages from family members and friends. Whereas emails might be filtered into promotions tabs and then bulk-deleted without a glance, all text messages go to one mobile messaging app, which everyone has on their phones and opens several times an hour to text family and friends. This significantly increases the chances that consumers open (and read) the messages they receive.

Why Use Tatango?

Tatango has been the SMS marketing industry leader for the past 13 years. Our mission is to help you utilize the most powerful text message marketing platform available.

For starters, Tatango is the only SMS provider that can send up to 5,000 characters per message, enabling brands to communicate whatever (and however much) they need to via text. On top of this, we can help you transition into the richer MMS and RCS messaging formats to send more eye-catching, interactive messages with your customers.

The Common Short Code Administration has awarded Tatango their highest designation of Premium Partner. With the best deliverability, speed, segmentation, and analytics in the industry, our SMS marketing tools ensure the highest return on investment for enterprise brands.

Tatango’s Mobile SMS Marketing Features & Functionality

Tatango’s SMS marketing platform is specifically designed for brands and companies that
want to interact with their target audiences via texting.

Messaging Workflows

Create custom workflows based on subscriber actions. Messaging workflows enable you to step away from your computer and turn the texting over to Tatango. You can create messaging workflows to welcome new subscribers or request custom information to personalize your campaigns based on a subscriber’s birthday, zip code, first name, or favorite products. Tatango gives you the SMS marketing tools to easily create any type of messaging workflow you want, and deploy it live with the click of a mouse.

More Info About Messaging Workflows

Tatango Messaging Platform -Messaging Workflows

Subscriber Segmenting

Send the exact right text message to the exact right mobile subscribers. With Tatango software, you can segment subscribers based on demographics like gender, age, or income, or location data such as zip code, timezone, city, and state. These hyper-local campaigns supercharge organization fundraising, event turnout, and franchise promotions. You can even segment based on whether subscribers have taken certain actions or which campaigns they opted-in from, enabling highly targeted messages for highly profitable results.

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Subscriber Analytics

Tap into easy-to-use, responsive, web-based analytics to make measuring your campaigns easy and intuitive. Create custom visual reports based on subscriber trends, date ranges, new subscribers, lost subscribers, and more. Know exactly how much profit each text message returns, and which messages drive the most customer engagement. Tatango's enterprise analytics reports are fully customizable, so you can review, export, and improve your results anywhere, any time.

More Info About Subscriber Analytics

Tatango Messaging Platform -Subscriber Analytics

Subscriber Profiles

With subscriber profiles, get extensive insights into each subscriber. See opt-in information such as when the subscriber opted in, the attribution source, and which SMS keywords they used to join. Create and store any type of information about subscribers that you find valuable, such as name, email address, birthdate, phone number, wireless carrier, texting history, and more. All of this information is securely stored for each subscriber in their subscriber profile.

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Personalization

Personalization is proven to significantly improve ROI. Tatango merge tags enable you to insert custom subscriber information into text messages, such as subscriber first name, email address, state, city, zip code, and other custom data. You can even use custom coupon code merge tags to track the point of sale, identify which coupon codes have been redeemed and which have not, insert an expiration date based on when the subscriber receives the message, and reduce coupon fraud.

More Info About Personalization

Tatango Messaging Platform -Messaging API

Enterprise Integrations

From Mailchimp to Hubspot, Marketo, Constant Contact and more, connect your Tatango account with hundreds of powerful web services — no coding required. Tatango integrations enable enterprise businesses and organizations to seamlessly grow their email lists, sell products, and collect donations using the platforms their organization is already set up on.

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Developer API

Easily integrate Tatango into any existing software or application or build any features and functionality on top of Tatango to fully customize your SMS marketing program to your company. With the Tatango API, you can easily add new mobile subscribers from existing software or applications to your Tatango database with a simple API call. You can even use the API to easily update a subscriber's name, email address, zip code, and other information.

More Info About the Developer API

Tatango Messaging Platform -Developer API

Messaging Automation

With easy-to-use marketing automation, you can automate text messages based on events such as birthdays, new subscribers, and timezones. Tatango's text message marketing software even automates CTIA and wireless carrier compliance messaging, protecting your brand from costly lawsuits.

More Info About Messaging Automation

Messaging Analytics

Track the success of every text message you send subscribers. View granular data such as how many of your mobile subscribers click on hyperlinks in your messages, a real-time feed of subscriber responses to your messages, and reports of how many customers unsubscribe after a message. These reports can help you determine which types of messages your mobile subscribers prefer and allow you to improve subscriber retention and conversions over time.

More Info About Messaging Analytics

Tatango Messaging Platform -Messaging Analytics

Administrative Controls

Get complete control of who has access to the account, and what permissions they have. Designate admins who can view and manage all the account's texting campaigns, or limited manager permissions so people only have access to the specific campaigns they've been given permission to manage. Invite new users, change permissions, remove users, edit billing information, and more.

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Types of Enterprise SMS Marketing

Retail Text Marketing

Top retailers use mobile marketing to message subscribers about deals, drive new sales, send SMS surveys, and announce new products. By linking directly to products, personalizing text messages, or reminding customers about products they left in their cart, SMS marketing helps retailers grow their revenue with every text they send.

Restaurant Text Marketing

Restaurants use enterprise SMS marketing to message subscribers about new food items, incentivize return visits through coupon codes, or message customers about deliveries. Compared to social media, which customers may not see until hours later—if at all—mobile marketing helps marketers send crave-worthy photos to consumers in real-time, so your restaurant is top of mind around meal time.

Agency Text Marketing

Agencies use enterprise SMS marketing to improve the results for their clients, beat out the competition, and grow their client email and text message marketing lists. Agency clients can use Tatango text messaging software to advertise opt-ins, send messages on behalf of clients, and create a successful growth strategy.

Mobile SMS Marketing FAQs

Below are some of the most common FAQs about mobile SMS messaging.

What do I need to do to start a mobile advertising campaign?

An SMS campaign requires several things to start: a provisioned 5-6 digit SMS short code to send and receive messages, a keyword for the code, and an SMS marketing software like Tatango to guide you through it all.

Because all short codes are technically leased, it’s not just as simple as telling your wireless carrier that you want to start mobile marketing via an SMS short code. Instead, when a brand wants to send and receive messages on a short code, there are two main steps:

The brand must first acquire a short code.
Then, the brand must complete the short code provisioning process.

Leasing a short code provides a brand with access and ownership over the phone number, but to send and receive messages, they must activate the number. This process is called short code provisioning.

The goal of short code provisioning is to communicate to the wireless carriers about how a short code is going to be used. Wireless carriers heavily regulate communication channels to protect consumers, so wireless carriers make sure that a short code is used appropriately following their rules and regulations.

Some of the information required in the short code provisioning process includes:

The brand use case—what the brand is using the short code for.
Where a consumer can go for support—what happens if they text “HELP” or “STOP.”
How consumers will opt in to the text message marketing program.
If there is a compliance issue, how it will be solved.

If that sounds technical to you, you’re not alone. That’s why working with an enterprise SMS marketing service like Tatango can help guide you through the process, save you time, and help you avoid missing steps in the process.

What’s an SMS short code? What about an SMS keyword?

A short code is a 5-6 digit phone number that brands use for SMS marketing. When you see an advertisement say something like “Text PIZZA to 12345 to get free mobile coupons!” then you’re seeing both the short code (the phone number 12345) and the keyword (PIZZA) at the same time. The keyword is used for multiple reasons: it gives interested customers the metaphorical “key” to access the marketing subscription, and it gives brands a data point to filter between different mobile marketing campaigns and product lines.

You can learn more about short codes on the US Short Code Directory.

How often should I send my messages?

The frequency of your messaging is entirely up to you and also varies from industry to industry. If you have customer purchase data, you can use it to determine the purchase frequency of your average customer. Do your average customers come into your business once per week? Send out your messaging once or twice a week—especially if your business is a quick-service establishment like a fast-food chain.

If your business runs on a slower cycle, like a car dealership, you might want to adjust your messaging accordingly. A dealership might send messages only a few times per month, highlighting deals on oil replacement and other maintenance services. The general rule of thumb is to match your text messaging to the frequency of your customer base. If done right, it’ll let you time your messages such that your subscribers will hear from you right as they start thinking about buying from you again.

Mobile SMS Marketing

Mobile SMS marketing is the single most effective way for brands to attract new customers, make sales, and generate revenue.