Stay in touch with your customers with text message promotions.
Text messages, or Short Message Service (SMS), have revolutionized the way people communicate, allowing them to send short updates to their friends and family while on the move, without having to call them on the phone or use a computer. Today, SMS is beginning to be used for promotions as well. This can be a very powerful promotional tool because it grabs your audience's attention as soon as they pick up their cell phone and, if the promotion is attractive, encourages them to forward it to their friends. These services can be set up on the Internet.
Instructions
1. Assemble a list of numbers to be included in your promotion. These can be gathered from existing customers, visitors to your shop, guest comment cards or any other method that allows a customer to leave his cell phone number for the purposes of receiving promotional messages from you in the future.
2. Choose a text message service. There are many available, and a sample link is provided with this article. You will generally be able to choose from an interactive two-way service or a broadcast one-way service. A broadcast is an informational message like a commercial, while an interactive service encourages the receiver to respond to the message and is better for promotional contests or promotions limited to a set number of respondents.
3. Sign up for the service by clicking the appropriate link on the text message service's website. Some services will offer a free trial. For more complex and longer campaigns, you may want to speak to a representative to set up the service.
4. Provide the service with your company name, your message and your list of numbers. For an interactive service, you may want to compose a response message to send the customers once they respond to your message.
5. Follow the steps to complete the registration once you have entered the initial information. You will have to verify what time and date you want the message sent out, then be given a user name and password that will allow you to review the data on your sent messages and responses. Once the account is set up, you can run more campaigns easily using the online forms.
Tags: text message, cell phone, interactive service, list numbers, message service