Is Texting Really an Effective Marketing Strategy? When starting a business, you’re going to be put in front of a lot of marketing avenues. These include content marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing – the list just goes on and on. One of the most prominent – but not often talked about – avenues that you’ll likely be tempted towards is text marketing. According to recent statistics, around 55% of businesses use texting as a marketing tool, but with most consumers utilising social media for contact in 2024, does it really still work?
To cut a long article short: yes, it does still work. Or at least, it works, and it’s soon going to work even better than ever before. This is because of a little invention called AI, which has been doing the rounds over the last two years – and the last 12 months in particular. With AI texting becoming more popular amongst businesses, texting as a marketing scheme is steadily changing face, transforming away from ‘just another marketing strategy’ to one of the best marketing strategies out there.
Is Texting Really an Effective Marketing Strategy
The Numbers Behind Text Messaging
Before we get into AI, however, let’s crunch down some numbers. In a study undertaken in 2023, it was discovered that text messages had an open rate of around 99%, with 71% of consumers opting to receive text from businesses in the same year.
To put that in perspective, email marketing – used as a marketing strategy by 80% of industry experts, compared to 55% with texting – only achieves an open rate of 31%. Text messaging, as a practice, is a lot more popular today than people think. In the last year, it’s been revealed that 78% of consumers prioritise text messaging over any other smartphone activity – with social media on 66% and emails on 50% – and there’s a very clear reason why this is good for businesses.
A Source for Potential
While the global number of email users sits at around 4.26 billion, around 320 billion spam emails are sent every day, so in a strange sort of way, the market for marketing has become incredibly competitive. Not to mention, email remains one of the most popular avenues for cyber attackers, making it understandable why many consumers choose not to click on professional-looking emails that are sent to them.
Spam messages sent over text, however, amount to around 475 million every day. While this still might sound like a large number, in the grand scheme of things, 475 million is minimal compared to 320 billion. For this reason, consumers are more assured and trusting of text messages and, as mentioned previously, they actually want to communicate with more businesses this way.
AI to Lead the Way
That’s the situation right now, but if you’re frantically coming up with your text messaging marketing strategy, we’d urge you to take the time to consider. Let’s go back to AI texting. One of the reasons text messaging is such an exciting marketing prospect going forward is because AI technology is making it so easy.
The company known as Meera, for instance, has the ability to sync with a CRM to send human-like text messages, helping to automate 80% of a company’s campaign with pretty extraordinary results. Using AI technology, texts are automated and scheduled, with the ability to boost connection rate, connect with relevant information, and turn expired leads into active customers again. This ability to make text messaging simple, easy, and fast, will undoubtedly catapult it as a marketing strategy even further in the next few years. So if you’re in the midst of organising your campaign, take this on board, add SMS to your list of marketing avenues, and just wait to see the results.