SMS can be used in a number of different ways. I will share with you some of the most common use cases to give you a better idea of what you can do with SMS and how it might help your business.

Short-term promotions for retail or ecommerce businesses
Coupons and promotions are an excellent way to drive more people to your store or website. If you are conducting a limited-time sale or promotion, you obviously want as many people to hear about it as possible.

SMS marketing campaigns are a great channel to communicate these offers, especially if you want to let customers know while they are on the move. That way you can be sure that they don’t miss out because they didn’t get the message in time.

Urgent updates about events or customer orders
There are a lot of moving parts that go into planning and executing an event. The more people you have attending the event, the more challenging it becomes to communicate the necessary information to everyone.

With SMS, you can easily communicate any changes, cancellations, general information, or updates with better real-time engagement than email or other channels.

Appointment reminders
If your business runs on scheduled appointment times, then you know the frustration of having clients forget appointment times and show up late. Even more frustrating, clients fail to show up at all.

Not only does this throw off your schedule, it wastes your time. It means that you may have turned down other appointments because that appointment slot was taken.

Sending reminder text messages is a fantastic way of making sure that people don’t forget their appointments. Simply use marketing automation to set up an automated text to follow up each appointment booking.

Internal alerts
If you have a large number of employees, it can be hard to communicate urgent messages (office closures, emergency updates, etc.) to everyone all at once.

You can send them an email, but they may not see it (I know I don’t check my work email too often outside of work). SMS is a great way to guarantee that everyone receives your message on time.

There are two message types you can send with SMS marketing:

1. Campaigns: Campaign messages are the classic “one-to-many” bulk text messages. They are typically used to communicate promotions (coupons, sales, etc.), or general information (event details, updates, weather alerts, etc.).
2. Transactional: Transactional messages are “one-to-one” messages that are triggered by a certain event or behavior. An example of this would be an order confirmation or shipping notification for an ecommerce purchase. These messages communicate relevant and timely information to an individual.