Imagine spending tons of time crafting a visually appealing and well-written email, sending it to your list of interested customers, and then receiving a dishearteningly low number of interactions and responses. This scenario is happening more and more as people become increasingly selective about opening the e-mails in their inbox. If the results of your email campaigns have been less than thrilling, trying text message marketing (or SMS marketing) might be the perfect move for your brand.
While consumers only open around one in four emails, 98% of text messages are opened and 70% of consumers say they are a fan of SMS communication from businesses. Like all other forms of marketing, text marketing has its own set of best practices that will help ensure that your outreach is successful. Here are our suggestions for how homebuilders can maximize results from text messages:
Don’t Blow Up Anyone’s Phone
Similar to email marketing, sending more text messages will not help you win friends and influence people. Sending too many promotional texts (aka spamming) will actually inspire customers to opt out from receiving your SMS messages. Since people tend to address texts soon after they receive them, too many texts from one company can begin to feel like a disruption to their day. Our suggestion is to only text customers two to five times a month in order to keep your messages feeling like a pleasant surprise, rather than a nuisance.
Select Texts Wisely
While there may be all sorts of information and opportunities you would like your customers to be aware of, reserving texts only for the most important or exciting messages is the way to go. For instance, letting your customers know about a big event like a grand opening, phase release, open house, or last chance opportunity is a great reason to shoot out an SMS reminder.
Avoid Too Much Text-Talk
While plenty of us understand text shorthands better than many of the words in our native language (looking at you, effect and affect), not everyone has an encyclopedic knowledge of these abbreviations when new ones are popping up all the time. To connect with — and be understood by — a wide audience, you might want to avoid all lol’s, fyi’s, and ttyl’s in favor of clear, simplistic, and concise language when texting customers.
Text When the Time is Right
Although this one is obvious to anyone who has received a text past their bedtime, there are absolutely right and wrong times for texting your customers. People may be thrilled to hear about a new phase release in their area, but might be less happy about learning that info from a text that wakes them up before their alarm goes off. In general, companies should send texts out during normal business hours, while making sure to take timezones into consideration.
If you’re excited for your brand to launch a text message marketing campaign, Get Community has some great news for you—our texting services are easy to use, deliver great results, and won’t break the bank! And if you’re a homebuilder, you can sign up for our exclusive short code to connect to your clients. Head to GCText.com today or email us to begin mastering the art of SMS communications.