SMS, MMS, Text messaging, etc...

Before you start spending your hard earned money in ads, you ought to think about a new way of attracting new customers, and bringing back your existing ones, using the one thing they always have with them – their cell phones. And the new way to communicate with customers is to use SMS/Text Messages.

If your business has not yet begun to use SMS marketing, you are probably giving away quite a bit of business to your competitors who do use it.

Ads in newspapers, magazines and coupon paks like Valpak are not only costly but, for the most part, a waste of money. Email ads rarely work anymore because of the abundance of spam, not to mention spam blockers. Text messages, however, are opened almost 100% of the time, and most of them within the first few minutes! So, if you are not using SMS to promote your business, you are not getting your information (offers, discounts, etc.) in front of your customers.

Offer incentives and discounts for the consumers who opt-in to your business SMS. Promote your SMS program on your social websites, in your business with signs and placards, on your website, etc.

Think about how powerful would it be to send out text incentives to your customers to tell them about your extra discounts and the perks they will get. You could literally drive more traffic to your business.  Most of our customers are seeing over 400% ROI on their SMS marketing investment.

Interested?

A business that texted me would lose my business permanently. It's just more spam. My number's unlisted and I don't give out my cell number like that. It's about my convenience, not yours, particularly as a business.If you sponsor my cell phone for me, then we can talk about my accepting your texts.

Texting???????

I left highschool about 25 years ago and never looked back.  According to my teenage kids 99.9999% of texters are under 19 years of age.

Coupon paks are for eejits--both the customer and the intended business.

Offer discounts and you have "trained" the customer to buy only when discounted, or when somthing free is offered.  You can artificially inflate your prices to cover for this, but you're not being honest to "bread and butter" customers.

For those who want such a feature, there should be a way to turn the RSS feed from the site into such messages. I suspect there's a freebie service for this but haven't looked into it.

As to creating posts from incoming messages. I don't know anything about that.

I would have to disagree with that.  Many of the people (including myself) I know use texting regularly.  We may not text 100 times a day like teenagers, but we do use on a regular basis.