Bringing in a new customer is one challenge, but creating a long-lasting relationship with a loyal customer is another game entirely. To win this game, your brand will need to take advantage of multiple channels, from email to mobile wallets to web notifications, to make sure you are offering the best customer experience possible.

SMS, because of its mobile nature and immediacy of message delivery, can serve as an excellent support channel for loyalty programs. Whether it’s points balance updates, order notifications or promotions, SMS can be used to keep your loyalty members engaged, informed and participating in your loyalty program. 

Need an example or two? Here are a few of the use cases we’re seeing from customers when it comes to leveraging SMS to support your loyalty programs.

Making Enrollment Easier with SMS

Putting a customer on the spot to register for a loyalty program can be pretty daunting or inconvenient. Imagine wanting to sign up for a loyalty program at a hotel check-in but having to take the time to rattle off your personal information with people behind you in line. That might make you think signing up isn’t worth the hassle. Luckily, SMS can be a huge help for scenarios like this.

Providing a simple short code on a sign at check out or point-of-sale can offer a much lower barrier of entry for new loyalty sign-ups. You can offer a join keyword like “join” or “rewards” for a user to text in to sign up. Once they join with the keyword, you could respond with a welcome message that includes a URL for that user to later complete their profile either online or in the app.

You could also deliver a mobile wallet version of the customer’s loyalty card to use at their next visit. This can be especially helpful for those customers that want to be part of your loyalty program but may not be ready to download your app. Providing a great experience via SMS and Mobile Wallet can be a great introduction to the digital version of your brand and can act as an “on ramp” to your mobile app.

Widen Your Promotional Campaigns Net with SMS

SMS is a great channel to send and support promotional content such as offers, holiday sales and events. You can use SMS to send messages to keep your customers engaged and drive in-store traffic or add SMS to your other marketing campaigns to increase your visibility and opportunities for engagement. 

Keywords can also play a big role in SMS promotional campaigns as you can set up different “opt-in” or campaign categories. For example, for brands that sell products or services in multiple categories, you could provide category-specific keywords, such as “fashion” or “home.” Then, if you’re running a sale for jeans but not outdoor furniture, you can target the appropriate audience. 

The same holds true for different campaign types like weekly sales or user-specific offers. Or, if you’re having a week of Black Friday deals but don’t want to overwhelm customers who might not be interested, you could create a keyword specifically for that campaign. Lastly, we’ve had a few customers who have wanted to set up store-specific keywords so that they can track the number of loyalty sign-ups from specific stores to use as a measuring tool for store performance. 

Strategically Orchestrate Your Transactional Messages

Transactional messages are extremely important to your customers and getting your customers the information they need in real-time is what makes or breaks a great customer experience. However, sending an email, SMS, push, AND a web notification for an order confirmation might be overkill for some customers, pushing them to opt-out.  

Using Airship’s orchestration capabilities you can make sure the right message is getting to the right customer at the right time every time. Whether it’s your team setting a priority order for channels, or giving customers the ability to curate their experience via something like a preference center, Airship can help you strategically orchestrate your messages, and your customers will thank you for that. 

One more thing to mention and that is Airship’s Inbound Message (MO) Handling via Webhook. This feature will forward the SMS inbound content (keyword or combination of keyword and additional text) directly to your brand’s backend system, allowing the system to programmatically process the content and curate a custom response. This can be used to support sophisticated use cases, such as returning dynamic values like loyalty points balances or user-specific offers/coupons. It could also be used to collect email addresses via SMS. 

Do More with SMS

SMS marketing can be used for more than just fostering loyalty, and Airship has the tools you can use to create and send powerful text messages. You can use our link shortener to save your limited characters for your message or link tracker to measure engagement. If you’re sending a Mobile Wallet item like a loyalty card or coupon, our Adaptive Links will handle device detection to create either the Apple Wallet version (iOS) or Google Pay (Android) without you having to know what type of device the customer has ahead of sending.

Whether used alone or in combination with other marketing channels, SMS can be the best tool in your martech stack to engage with your loyal customers. Let us know how we can help you put together an SMS marketing strategy that will wow your customers. 

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Learn more about SMS in our Resource Library.

The post Winning Customer Loyalty with SMS Marketing appeared first on Airship.

We had AccuWeather and Zillow and members of the Airship team give great presentations on how brands can use Airship’s Customer Engagement Platform to be there for their customers at the right time with the right message.

Here are some of my highlights from the event.

Brands Need to Be Flexible as Customer Behavior Changes

Mike Stone, SVP of Marketing at Airship, made a great point about how brands don’t drive the roadmap for messaging channels, consumers do, and you can’t always predict where their preferences will go. A few years ago wearables were being hailed as the next big thing, but adoption hasn’t taken off as predicted. Meanwhile, companies are looking into car screens and voice technology, but it’s difficult to determine which channels users are going to want to use. So the best strategy for brands is to be flexible and prepared to change as customer behavior changes (that’s why our Customer Engagement Platform makes it easy to add new channels. Learn more about Channels).

Zillow Views Products as “Jobs to Be Done”

Zillow is a great real estate product and a client for Airship so we were fortunate to have Chris Bettin, Senior Group Manager of Mobile Engagement, speak at our San Francisco (catch the recap here) and New York events!

Chris shared how Zillow views their product and services as “Job to Be Done,” focusing on what they can do for customers. For instance, a coffee shop can see “enjoying a beverage” or “escaping a noisy office” as a job to be done, while a real estate app can see “understanding the value of a home” or “buying a home” as its jobs to be done. This view allows brands to be customer experience-centric, rather than product-centric.

When asked about how Zillow manages their data and analytics, Chris shared how even though they have their own in-house team they partner with Airship on using data to understand when to deliver their messages. This kind of partnership allows Zillow to offer the best product by knowing when to send their messages.

Learn more about our Optimal Send Time AI solution.

How AccuWeather Gets the Opt-in for Location-Sharing and Messages

I had the pleasure and privilege of moderating the fireside chat with Matt Vitebsky, Director of Flagship Products at AccuWeather. AccuWeather may be best known as a weather app, but it is much bigger than that! It has one of the most popular APIs in the world serving over 65 billion requests per day.

Most users have more than one weather app, so being the first to send an important notification matters, a lot. Speed was very important in determining which messaging partner to work with and after using an independent study to compare send time, they found that Airship beat the competition. With Airship, AccuWeather’s app is faster than 93% of its competitors on iOS and 100% on Android. As Matt said, when there’s a tornado coming your way, those extra twenty seconds can mean life or death.

Obviously, location is very important and AccuWeather uses geolocation in two main ways: to give users the most accurate weather data and to create contextual messages. Taking GDPR very seriously and applying it to their global services, AccuWeather put together an opt-in strategy with a transparent approach on how they use the permitted location data. Matt shared how they found that by explaining to their users how and why they use location data with an educational prompt even before the opt-in request, users feel more comfortable opting into other things.

The next Customer Engagement Forum will be in London on June 26. Get more information and register here.

The post Accuweather and Zillow Share How They Work with Airship at the Customer Engagement Forum in New York appeared first on Airship.

We strongly believe in the opportunities that Mobile Wallet can offer to marketers and so we recently hosted a webinar, “Make Mobile Wallet Your Secret Weapon to Acquire, Retain & Grow Your Customer Base” to show what Mobile Wallet can do (with examples from brands like Alaska Airlines, REI and Cost Plus World Market) and how brands can use it throughout a customer’s engagement lifecycle.

Acquire: Bring Customers into the Digital Experience

Mobile Wallet is an excellent tool to tie together a digital experience with real-world experience.  Having a presence in both, in a seamless and personalized way, can help a brand stay on top of mind of their customers and bring in new users.

A great example of this is Cost Plus World Market and the way they use mobile wallet for their in-store treasure hunt. Cost Plus World Market uses their mobile wallet item to alert and update their customers with clues to locate coupons (last year they were called “Golden Llamas”). Not only is this campaign fun for their customers, but it encourages downloads, purchases and active engagement.  

Retain: Keep Content Fresh and Engaging

So, once you’ve acquired a customer on mobile wallet, what’s next? It’s very important for brands to update their mobile wallet items and keep content fresh, to continue engagement. One of the ways to do so is through loyalty programs. You can deliver loyalty cards to customers on any channel they prefer (through Adaptive Links) and then use the pass to send important notifications, like a loyalty status change. You can also segment customers based on their primary location or indicated interest to deliver notifications or promotions that are super relevant to them.

Another great way to use mobile wallet is through delivering boarding passes, tickets, coupons or gift cards with personalized information directly into the mobile wallet, and then let them know of important updates like a gate change or flight delay, or that their coupon is about to expire. Alaska Airlines does a great job of keeping their mobile wallet content relevant and personalized with alerts, tickets, and information that are important to their customer.

Grow: Engage and Upsell at Relevant Moments

Mobile wallets can help you cross and upsell by sending real-time notifications for upgrades and sales. Use tagging and segmentation to send personalized offers, like seat upgrades for boarding and ticketing passes or a timely coupon to invite a purchase. With our External ID feature, you can even keep track of the items when they’re shared between devices and control how many times the item is shared and how long it lasts.

REI does an amazing job of keeping their mobile wallet items updated and convenient to drive more sales. They alert their customers when an offer is set to expire and automatically update their mobile wallets with new coupons when they are available. Try doing that with a paper coupon!

Feel like you missed out on an awesome webinar? No worries, you can watch a recording of the webinar here and check out more of our great resources on Mobile Wallet.

The post How to Acquire, Retain, and Grow Your Customer Base with Mobile Wallet appeared first on Airship.

As mobile wallet adoption grows, more brands are taking advantage of this marketing channel to better engage with their customers. I recently co-hosted a webinar, “Make Mobile Wallet Your Secret Weapon to Acquire, Retain & Grow Your Customer Base,” with Kaitlyn Hogue and we shared how brands like SXSW, Alaska Airlines and REI use mobile wallet to create seamless experiences customers rave about. If you missed the webinar, no worries. You can watch the recording here and keep an out for a recap post coming soon.

In the meanwhile, I wanted to highlight one of the major opportunities with mobile wallet: creating mobile loyalty.  

How Mobile Wallet Helps Boost Mobile Loyalty

Mobile wallet adds another persistent messaging channel on your customer’s smartphone. That’s huge as you look for more and better ways to earn attention and engagement on mobile.

Wallet passes — which can include loyalty cards, coupons, membership cards and more — can be updated in real-time, are location-aware and can message customers on their smartphone lock screens.

69% of consumers are more likely to use a mobile loyalty card when it is on their phone.

73% of consumers are more likely to join loyalty programs if points and rewards are automatically updated and visible on mobile loyalty cards.

Interestingly, the biggest problems with loyalty program participation — a user forgetting they’re members (40%) or forgetting the card (43%) — can be solved by using mobile wallet passes for loyalty membership.

Optimizing mobile loyalty through mobile wallets is simply another way to position your business to get ahead and stay ahead in fostering customer loyalty by creating mobile moments that matter.

Explore Mobile Marketing Opportunities With Mobile Wallet: 5 Mobile Loyalty Use Cases

1) Next Level Rewards

Notify users when they make it to the next level of your loyalty or rewards program. With updatable fields on your mobile wallet pass, you can change a user’s tier or status as they move up the ranks in your loyalty program. And when they hit a new status level, you can easily update their pass and issue a change notification, which can occur on a lock screen, in the Notification Center, or as an alert.

2) Offer Extra Perks

Mobile wallet passes allow you to cross-promote your marketing programs, all while recognizing and rewarding your customers. Showcase special events or promotions, such as early access to your big annual sale on customers’ mobile loyalty cards.

3) Showcase Special Promotions

Create a customized, branded strip image on your wallet pass, highlighting your latest promotion, such as “VIP Members ONLY: pre-sale event starts tomorrow” to drive traffic in-store or online. Link to your website on the back of the pass to take your customers to the desired destination.

4) Always-On Rewards

With a mobile wallet pass, customers can quickly access and monitor their loyalty rewards. Notify a user when they have a new rewards gift available by updating their pass.

5) Maximize Redemption

Remind customers to use points when nearby. You can even use location awareness to trigger a user’s pass at their nearest store.

The Extraordinary Potential of Mobile Wallet Marketing

With smartphones always at our sides, and the ability for mobile wallet passes to send notifications (expiration reminders, loyalty updates, location-aware information, etc.), there is tremendous potential to change long-standing consumer behaviors.

Consumers already see the benefit of using mobile wallet passes. Combine that interest with even greater benefits such as integrated loyalty updates.

Mobile wallets go beyond campaigns to form a sustainable messaging channel to customers with lock screen notifications and passes that update dynamically. There’s never been an easier way for businesses to gain a persistent, personalized and proactive mobile connection to customers.

Ready to Get Started?

Our Mobile Wallet marketing solution makes it easy for marketers at any size or type of business to quickly launch wallet campaigns without writing any code. Learn more about our mobile loyalty solutions, and request your free trial today.

The post Mobile Loyalty: The Power of Mobile Wallet appeared first on Airship.

In our State of Mobile Wallet report, more than 50% surveyed said they wanted to use mobile wallet for boarding passes and event tickets. We also found that 67% of Millenials, 51% of Gen X and 28% of Baby Boomers have already adopted mobile wallet.

So it looks like consumers are already on board with mobile wallet. What about your brand?

Make sure you’re not missing out on all the possibilities and opportunities of mobile wallet in our upcoming webinar, “Make Mobile Wallet Your Secret Weapon to Acquire, Retain & Grow Your Customer Base.” In the webinar we’ll go over:

• How brands like SXSW, Alaska Airlines and REI use mobile wallet to create seamless experiences customers rave about
• The unique capabilities of mobile wallet, and why it’s now a must-have, not a nice to have — especially for retail and travel brands
• Ideas for mobile wallet campaigns you can have up and running in just a few weeks

See for yourself how to make mobile wallet a key part of your brand’s digital transformation — and create simpler, better mobile experiences your customers will love. Register today!

The post Upcoming Webinar: Make Mobile Wallet Your Secret Weapon appeared first on Airship.

In the webinar, Urban Airship’s Jonathan Rueda and Google Pay’s Bon Mercado talked about how brands can leverage the unique features of Mobile Wallet to make tickets and passes come to life. Looking at numbers and the use cases, they came to the same conclusion: Tickets and passes belong in mobile wallets because they offer the best customer experience.

Here are three reasons why you need to put your tickets and passes in a mobile wallet to offer the best customer experience for your customers.

Give Your Customers What They Want: Mobile Wallets

Customers want to use mobile wallets for their ticketing experiences—and it’s not just millennials. 51% of Gen X and 28% of Baby Boomers surveyed have already adopted mobile wallet (along with 67% of Millennials). Beyond generations, 55% survey said they want mobile wallet for boarding passes, and another 52% said they wanted for it for event tickets.

At Urban Airship, we’re seeing tremendous statistics and usage around boarding passes and event tickets. Boarding passes and event tickets make up almost  80% of all wallet item types that flow through our platforms. We expect adoption and demand to grow as more brands come to understand what a better customer experience ticket and passes on mobile wallets offer. Mobile Wallet is the channel that provides all the information that users need to enter an event or board a plane, and the numbers are showing that customers are getting on board.

Do Away with the Screenshots

During the webinar, Bon Mercado pointed out that fraud protection is a top priority for airlines, ticketing companies and consumers. With that in mind, Google made sure that their mobile wallets had fraud-prevention features, such as disabling screenshots.

Not only are there security liabilities associated with screenshots or even printing out important passes like airplane tickets, but it’s also just really bad CX. Print-outs can get lost and both print-outs and screenshots can get outdated at any moment during the check-in process and become a hassle when handling multiple tickets. Apps can offer more convenience and security, but often are reliant on connecting to the cellular network, which is not always available at airports or foreign countries. Mobile wallet can help alleviate those pain points.

Mobile wallets can offer real-time security with moving images and are easily updatable so that your user has the most up-to-date information at their fingertips. Users can easily store and organize multiple tickets, and be programmed to stay at the top of the screen while its needed.

Go Cross-Channel with Mobile Wallet

We often get this question, “I already have an app, do I really need a mobile wallet?” To which, we ask a question of our own: “Do you want to provide the best user experience?” If so, then there are clear benefits of not just having both, but having the two of them work together.

A mobile app is a great way to engage with customers, but the competition to take space on a user’s phone is fierce and users are not always able to download the app for various reasons (phone is not compatible, storage is not available, etc.) There’s also no guarantee how long your users will keep your app before removing it. Mobile wallets are already included in most Android phones, and Google Pay wants to provide the best user experience outside of your app for your customers while continuing to drive your business goals.  

You can use your app and mobile wallet together, for a more complete customer experience. Google Pay has features that allow brands to point users to your app (or other channels), and you can do vice-versa with your app. One of our large movie theater customers have been using both, and 75% of their mobile app users have added tickets into their mobile wallet.

Don’t limit yourself to just the mobile app and mobile wallet combo; mobile wallet also works great with SMS and email, especially for those customers that may not have your app installed. You can still provide those users with a seamless real-time day-of event experience through a mobile wallet item delivered through other channels outside of the appl. No matter what multi-channel strategy you use, our Digital Growth Platform gives you the capability to get the full view of your customers across all your different engagement channels. With data from the platform, you can target, orchestrate, and segment to give your users that personalized, tailored experience.

Want more? For more insight and examples, watch the replay of the “Unlocking the Upside of Tickets & Boarding Passes With Mobile Wallet” Webinar.

The post Why Tickets and Passes in Mobile Wallets Offer the Best Customer Experience appeared first on Airship.

The limited number of mobile messaging channels means you can’t afford to ignore one. When three of the direct channels are app-based, that leaves a gap for those customers who don’t (or can’t) download the app. The best way to reach those customers and meet their real-time communication expectations on mobile is to utilize SMS with your other channels. So what’s the best way to include SMS into your messaging strategy without overwhelming your user or overspending?

Take a look at these recommended strategies for coordinating SMS with your other marketing channels to find out what works best for your brand.

The Fan-Out Strategy

SMS can be a powerful addition to your fan-out strategy. The fan-out strategy notifies users across all of the communications channels and should be only be used for important messages, especially when timing is a crucial factor. Order confirmations, boarding passes, game tickets, and account balance notifications are some types of messages that have real-time information your users want or need. Sending out the message via email, web notification, app notification, and text message will increase the odds of the message being seen at the right moment.

The Brand-Preferred Strategy: Engagement Optimization

Not all messages are crucial and sometimes you need to be selective on how you get your message across. When you have multiple channels to choose from, how do you decide which channels to prioritize and where does SMS fit in? There are two approaches that we recommend.

The first one is to prioritize by engagement. Which channel delivers the best results, the one that has the biggest audience and/or the best engagement rates? By prioritizing the channel that makes the most sense for your audience and only falling back to other channels if a customer has not opted-in, you’re not overwhelming the customer with multiple or repetitive messages. While it is a great priority channel, SMS can also play the important fallback role by reaching customers who do not have your app.

The Brand-Preferred Strategy: By Cost Optimization

The second way to prioritize your channels is by cost, with the most cost-effective channel being first in your martech stack. However, keep in mind that a low cost doesn’t mean the channel is better to use. App notifications may be more cost-effective than text messages, but they are limited to users who download the app, and thus have a smaller reach.

On Urban Airship’s platform, you will be able to intelligently orchestrate your text messages, sending a text when it is the best option based on the situation, the customer’s preferences, and the brand priorities. This will also decrease your chances of sending duplicate messages, cutting down costs. SMS can play the crucial fallback role in this strategy, as well, reaching customers your other channels can’t.

User-Preferred Strategy

At Urban Airship, we’ve known for a while that giving users the ability to dictate their experience can have a very powerful return. Giving them the choice leads to higher opt-in rates and higher retention rates within those opt-ins. The User-Preferred Strategy gives the power of choice to the user. Many of our clients use preference centers to not only give the user options on which channels they want to receive notifications on but also what types of messages they want to receive and on what channels.

For instance, a customer can dictate that they only want to receive important messages like shipping and order confirmations through text, but for sales and offers they prefer email or web notifications. Urban Airship’s platform can also automatically detect the channels the user is opted-in and prefers and send the message to those specific channels.

If you want to see how these strategies play out on our platform, you can watch me go through the steps on sending a text message in the SMS Product Demo Webinar: 5 Ways to Integrate SMS into Your Customer Engagement Strategy. I show how SMS plays an important role in a multi-channel strategy, with examples like sending personalized coupons and offers through SMS and mobile wallet. You can watch the webinar here.

For more SMS reading, check out “SMS Regulatory Compliance: What You Need to Know About Text Messaging” and “SMS: Top Ten FAQs (And Answers)”

The post How to Make Your Engagement Strategy Even Smarter with SMS appeared first on Airship.

SMS is a valuable marketing channel with the highest open and response rates of any mobile channel —  but not enough brands are taking advantage of this opportunity to engage with customers.

Luckily for those ready to make the most of text message marketing, Urban Airship will be hosting a live webinar demonstrating how SMS can be used as a powerful marketing channel. In this demo, I will be showing you five ways to use Urban Airship’s Digital Growth Platform to make your SMS strategy more integrated, coordinated and intelligent.

Join the Webinar and You Will Learn:

• When and how to set SMS as a priority engagement channel

• How to set up SMS as a fallback engagement channel when you’re not able to engage users on other channels

• The role of SMS in a “fan out” multichannel engagement strategy

• How to deliver a “no-app-required” CX for sending personalized coupons & offers

• How to use SMS to seamlessly deliver tickets and boarding passes in mobile wallet
   

Ask Questions & Get Answers:

If SMS is a new channel you’re exploring, you’re bound to have some questions. We’re leaving time to ask us anything about how to make the most of SMS as a marketing channel.

Sign Up Today!

Don’t miss out – reserve your spot today!

CTA: Want to learn more about SMS? Check out our Top Ten FAQs (And Answers) for SMS and our previous SMS Webinar: “Getting More ROI Out of SMS.”

The post Learn How to Integrate SMS into Your Customer Engagement Strategy with SMS Demo Webinar appeared first on Airship.

With compliance and engagement measures on their minds, marketers have questions on how to get the most ROI from SMS. Here are some frequently asked questions (and answers!) on SMS to help make the most strategic decisions in utilizing this channel for your marketing stack.   

1) What are average open and read rates for SMS?

SMS has incomparable open and read rates: A 98% open rate and a 90% read rate within the first three minutes. It is because of these numbers that make SMS a crucial marketing tool.

2) What is the difference between text messages and push notifications?

Push notifications are sent through an app to users who have your app, and have opted in to receive notifications. For SMS, an app is not needed. That also means that far more people can receive SMS notifications — not all smartphones can download specific apps, but the vast majority of smartphones can receive texts.

To learn more about SMS and how many people it is capable of reaching, check out our “Getting More ROI from SMS” Webinar Recap. 

3) Do compliance requirements make SMS difficult to manage?

It is a highly regulated channel, but with the right partners and guardrails in place, brands can be very effective in using this channel within the regulatory requirements. It’s important to work with your internal legal and compliance teams to make sure your SMS opt-in process is compliant. We are more than happy to provide information to or talk with your legal and compliance teams about Airship’s SMS solution.

4) How long does it take to get up and running with SMS?

It varies. Generally, it takes three to four weeks to get set up with a long code, and it takes an average of about eight to twelve weeks to send out the first campaign.

5) What is the difference between a long code and a short code?

A long code is a standard phone number that is ten digits long. Although it is longer, there are benefits, such as a shorter time to market, that can make this code ideal for the right use cases.

Short codes are also phone numbers, but only five to six digits long. These are better suited for marketing messages and can also be customized, a vanity short code, for the brand.

6) Can I personalize SMS messages?

Absolutely, and marketers should customize text messages to better get their point across. With Airship, you can customize the audience, send time, and frequency as you would any other supported channel, using audience selectors.  Create truly personalized campaigns by uploading audience lists and leveraging merge tags to pass along customer data into your message.

7) Should SMS be connected to other marketing channels?

Yes! Many marketers still treat SMS as an entirely separate channel. But to get the most out of it, SMS needs to be coordinated seamlessly with other engagement channels.

Airship’s Orchestration solutions can not only connect SMS to the other channels but also give marketers the option to set it as a Priority Channel (use SMS instead of other channels) or use it as a Fallback Channel. Coordinating SMS with email, push notifications, and mobile wallet passes can increase the reach and effectiveness of any campaign or promotion.

8) Are very many brands using SMS?

Given the effectiveness of this channel, it’s surprising that 61% of marketers haven’t tapped into SMS as a marketing channel — yet. But there are many influential brands who are successfully using SMS as part of their marketing strategy.

For example, Abercrombie is using SMS as part of their holiday campaigns to reach customers who don’t have their app. Express and Subway use SMS to increase in-store traffic by sharing coupons through text. These are just some of the ways brands are strategically using SMS.  

9) What are the advantages of using SMS over Facebook Messenger or other message apps?

SMS allows marketers to use an “owned” direct channel to reach users, rather than relying on a third-party app. For each Like SMS, messaging through Facebook or WhatsApp comes with a cost, but it also means they own your relationship with the consumer.

10) What is the best way to use SMS?

There are many ways to use SMS to fill some crucial needs in a marketing stack — particularly if you don’t have an app, or if your app isn’t working as well as you wish it were as a direct messaging channel. It’s also a great channel for immediacy (to deliver important, time-sensitive notification), to increase reach (especially for those app-less consumers), and to foster loyalty (texts can make the relationship between brands and consumers personal). Airship’s SMS strategists can help your band find the best way to get the most ROI from SMS.

To learn more about SMS, watch our “Getting More ROI from SMS” webinar or read the highlights in the recap blog post.

Have more questions? Are you ready to boost your marketing stack with SMS? Our SMS experts can help you create a strategy that maximizes your audience potential and engagement. Connect with us today and let’s talk!

The post SMS: Top Ten FAQs (And Answers) appeared first on Airship.

To get the most out of SMS, here are three highlights from the recent Urban Airship “Getting More ROI from SMS” webinar.

1) SMS Needs to Be Done Right

Consumers primarily use SMS to communicate with their friends and family, making it a very personal channel, so it is crucial for marketers to use this channel carefully and strategically. There are some unique challenges, such as compliance and permissions, but when SMS is done right, it can greatly increase reach and foster loyalty.

2) SMS Isn’t Just for Transactional Messages

While most marketing text messages are transactional, there is substantial potential for brands to use SMS for promotional messages. In fact, 75% of Millennials prefer SMS for promos and surveys.

In the retail vertical, more brands are using SMS to drive campaigns to increase in-store traffic because this is a great way to reach those who opt-out of push notifications or app downloads. For example, Top Golf sent a timely promotional SMS to engage with their customers for Father’s Day.

3) SMS Has Huge Reach

The value of SMS is being able to increase your addressable audience size. Mobile users are forecasted to reach 4.68 billion on a global scale next year, with the number of smartphone users in the U.S. to increase to 247 million.

Not all those handsets will download an app, but most of those handsets can receive SMS. With no need to download an app or to worry about the connection strength, and the opt-in is easy to do, gives SMS a low barrier of entry. 

That low barrier of entry, along with the excellent open and read rates, gives brands incomparable opportunities to not only reach more people but create more loyal customers from an untapped app-less group.

Is your brand maximizing the opportunity from SMS? For more insight, use cases, and best practices, watch the webinar here and make sure to subscribe to our blog newsletter to get the best of Urban Airship straight to your inbox.

SMS Marketing

Our SMS experts can help you create a strategy that maximizes your audience potential & engagement.

Connect with us today and let’s talk!

The post Getting More ROI from SMS – Webinar Recap appeared first on Airship.