This infographic is from Text Marketer http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/

For retail clients, especially those clients with bricks and mortar stores, venues or locations, I have been strongly recommending incorporating a mobile marketing SMS campaign to integrate their digital marketing with what they’re doing in store at the point of sale. According to the below infographic from Text Marketer, people like getting SMS marketing messages from companies that they shop with and 49% of people surveyed said they would opt in for SMS marketing messages (remember that at this point in time mobile marketing is an OPT OUT channel. That means that businesses have to give customers in their SMS database a way to opt out but unlike email, they do not need to get explicit consent to contact them with SMS marketing messages in the first instance).

If you’re not aware, there has been a sharp rise in the percentage of email messages that are now viewed on mobile devices. The Text Marketer infographic shows that 67% of people surveyed said they would like to get an SMS notification from a company to let them know that they have received an email offer. I am positive that this dual digital marketing strategy would definitely increase your conversion rate for that offer.

What’s very important to note is that IF your business is going to start marketing to customers via mobile and SMS, your business needs to invest in mobile enabled methods for your customers to respond to your mobile marketing messages. The survey respondents were very clear that 76% of people expect to be able to respond to an SMS message via their mobile phone – either a reply SMS or a link to a mobile website. It’s probably not surprising that only 12% of businesses seem to be using SMS as a marketing tool. And not to be pessimistic, but perhaps this is why people are open to SMS messages just now, because they haven’t been inundated with them just yet?

I’m definitely a fan of mobile marketing and SMS marketing for customer facing businesses. The open and read rate for mobile SMS marketing messages is about 96% and like I said above, the market isn’t saturated with mobile marketing yet, so businesses who get into this space now will get the first mover advantage and see a spike in their conversions. SMS marketing is also incredibly cheap and highly effective – so give it a try today.