What is SMS Marketing? Guide to SMS Campaigns in 2025

January 15, 2025
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SMS marketing is a strategy in which a business or individual uses sms to communicate and connect with its customer base or audience via text

This is a form of direct marketing you can employ to inform customers, increase brand awareness, and promote specific products and services. SMS marketing is being used majorly in certain regions like Africa where mobile penetration is high and most consumers are used to receiving sms campaigns.

This is 2025 and the question you should ask yourself is how are you leveraging on sms marketing to grow your personal brand or business?

SMS marketing is more expensive than email marketing but generates higher than average return on investment. Alongside with email, WhatsApp, and push notifications, SMS messages give you a direct line of contact. That’s why text message marketing (also called mobile marketing and SMS marketing) is one of the most effective forms of communicating with customers.

The types of sms marketing

You can consider incorporating several types of marketing sms into your sms marketing strategy. Some common types include:

Welcome sms
Promotional sms
Transactional sms, such as confirmation sms or password reset otp
Milestone sms, such as for customer birthdays or anniversaries

Benefits of SMS marketing

SMS marketing can be an extremely powerful marketing tool to have at your business’s disposal. While there are endless benefits, we’re sharing the top six that can directly impact your bottom line.

Direct and instant communication

Nearly everyone has a mobile phone. Sending your customers SMS messages allows you to reach your intended recipients easily, regardless of their location or what they’re doing. Mobile phones are almost always within arm’s reach, making them ideal channels for direct communication.

High open and engagement rates

The notification sound of an incoming SMS message often elicits an immediate response. With your customers glancing at their phones regularly, the likelihood of them seeing your messages is extremely high.

Plus, most phones display a snippet of text messages right on the lock screen. SMS marketing is more personal and stands out from other notifications, causing SMS message marketing to have high open rates.

Personalized communications

Whether you’re sending transactional messages or promotional text messages, SMS marketing tools enable businesses to create personalized messages that resonate with specific audience segments.

More Engagement, Clicks, and Sales

Of course, open rates aren’t the final goal of SMS marketing. You need those text messages to convert into website traffic, in-store visits, and sales. Yes you can track clicks on sms campaigns too

Insider Intelligence and eMarketer conducted a series of surveys in 2023 related to SMS marketing.

SMS marketing best practices

Ensure you get permission

Simply because you have a contact’s phone number doesn’t mean you can go ahead and use it. Texting people without permission isn’t just rude. It’s actually illegal.

Companies must get explicit permission from users before texting them. You can do this in 2 ways:

Keep to 160 words

Keeping to the 160 words for your sms campaign is easier to make a count of total send and received. Also, it helps to wrap the message within a view rather than getting to the user twice

Personalize your sms

Most sms marketing platform offer personalization with custom fields. Part of an effective writing involves knowing your audience. It’s tempting to think of thousands of people reading your sms text messages, but you need to remember those thousands aren’t sitting in a room together. Each one is by themselves in front of a screen and you need to find a way to make your messaging connect with your individual readers.

Measuring your success with sms marketing metrics

Analyzing key sms marketing metrics will teach you how to improve your strategy for future campaigns. Most SMS platforms like Yournotify have an analytics dashboard with at least the following real-time metrics:

Delivery: The ratio of the number of people who opened your sms divided by the total number of recipients.
Click-through rate: The ratio of the number of people who clicked on a link in your sms links divided by the total number of recipients.
Failed rate: The number of sms that failed to deliver divided by the total number of sms sent.

Conclusion

Whether you own a small business or work for a larger company, using targeted sms is a cost-effective way to improve your conversion rate. SMS marketing will help you build a long-term relationship with your customers that translates to better bottom lines.

We hope this article has given you an in-depth answer to “What is sms marketing?” and how it can benefit your business growth. We know there’s a lot of information here but by taking things step by step, anyone can use sms marketing to grow their business. Consistency matters.