Are you struggling to drive sales through the door? Or perhaps the conversion of leads into sales is the issue? Employing a multichannel marketing strategy is the best way to solve this hurdle. Interestingly, you can combine two popular marketing channels – email and SMS, to ensure you get the best of both worlds. We’ll explore the difference between the two channels, how each of them can help grow your brand, and the advantages of blending them into an omnichannel strategy.
Why does your brand need it?
Customer engagement is all about fostering the relationship between your brand and its customers. When done right, a good customer engagement strategy will not only bring you new clients, but also turn them into loyal customers. The easiest way to achieve this is through an automated engagement platform.
Head-to-head comparison: Email vs SMS
The main difference between both these engagement platforms is the length and content of text they allow. With emails, you can fit in a lot more text, and include multimedia attachments to supplement your message. With SMS, you’re limited to 160 characters per text and no attachments.
About SMS marketing
This is a relatively new marketing avenue. It involves sending short, personalized messages to your clients. It is mostly used to convey time-sensitive information such as sales, offers, and discounts.
Why it matters
Most customers admit that they’d rather text than call, more so the younger demographic. A study by SMS comparison showed that 98% of text messages are opened, and 95% of these get replied within 3 minutes. Therefore, employing an SMS marketing campaign guarantees that your copy reaches more eyeballs, and solicits further engagement. Thankfully, there are SMS marketing automation tools for streamlining this process.
Email marketing
This involves sending emails to your prospective and existing customers for the purpose of increasing brand recognition and marketing customer retention.
Why it matters
With emails, you can send messages that are interactive, with images, gifs and other media. The low restriction on text length also means you can put across more details about your product or service.
Armed with enough data on your customer, you can customize your emails greatly to achieve that personal touch. You can also employ email automation tools to easier run your email marketing campaign.
Which is better – Emailing your customers or SMSing them?
Each of these channels is a strong marketing tool on its own. However, it is only by combining them that you can harness their true power.
How Email and SMS blend boosts customer engagement
You can use the data you have on your customer to send them information on products or services that they’ve shown interest in. For instance, you could send emails informing them of upcoming sales, discounts and other events. Then, on the day of, supplement this with a text message to ensure they show up and make purchases.
Perks of the Email and SMS blend
An omnichannel marketing campaign brings with it several perks, including:
- The ability to use one channel’s data to strengthen the impact of the other
- Capacity to reach more customers
- Improved customer engagement
Should you invest in Email and SMS marketing?
Considering all the great perks that come with employing an omnichannel marketing strategy, you would be amiss if you didn’t give it a shot. To that end, your brand could benefit greatly from Retainly, an intuitive automated customer engagement platform. This will guarantee you a significant bump in your sales, all without unnecessarily burdening your marketing team.
