717 – Using text messages the right way: Tom talks Text Marketing

Episode 717 – Text Marketing
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 717 of Screw the Commute Podcast. Today, we're going to give you a primer on text marketing. And usually I tell you about something I've made a lot of money on. Well, not this time. In fact, I quit doing it rather quickly years ago. Now, that does not mean that this is a bad way to market in the right circumstance, and I'll probably in this episode reveal some of the things I think I did wrong back then. But text messages, listen to this, have an open rate of up to 98%. All right. And on average, 95% of the messages are open within 3 minutes. So this is a powerful form of advertising and marketing and community building and all that. All right. So hope you two missed episode 716. That was a Q&A session, a potpourri of all kinds of stuff. And episode 715 was ten email marketing tips, emails still where the money is. Even though I'm going to talk about text today and episode 714 was the Tor browser. If you need some super high security when you're browsing any time you want to get to it back episode, you got to screwthecommute.com, forward slash and then the episode number. All right, follow me on TikTok. tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and always pick up Make sure you pick up and tell your friends about a copy of my automation e-book that'll just save you hundreds of hours of time into the future. If you took time to read this book and you get that, it's through screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:02:04] All right, let's get to the main event. Listen, I don't know where they get these estimates, but there's 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world, right? And. I like I said, 95% of texts that people get on those things are open within 3 minutes. Now, when you're doing text messaging, you try to keep the message below 160 characters. It's like the old Twitter. I mean, if you go over 160, it breaks it up into multiple messages, which is kind of a no no. Which might make people mad. So so it's a short, short form stuff. Now, is it right for your business? While a lot of the stuff I got today is from podium.com or some other places I'll tell you about today And and you always have to take things with a grain of salt because they're one of the most expensive I think places to have a service to does text marketing. I forget if there are $289 a month or something, but don't worry, there's all kinds of places where you can do it relatively cheaply. Oh, got to turn off the phone. I'm fighting with my dog's paws bleeding like crazy, and I've got him right here with me and I forgot to turn my phone off.

[00:03:25] So I'm going to do that right now. All right. Let's see. So, yeah, a lot of it came from podium, so. So the thing about is this right for your business? Well, local businesses totally make sense to me. In fact, they say that 21% of people are more likely to opt in to a local business text promotion over some big business. So that's something to know if you're a local business and they're 45% more likely to opt in. To a local business other than an e-commerce business like I run, right? So but that doesn't mean it's it doesn't work if you do it right. It just means that it's not as big as for local businesses. And just to give you an example, I remember talking to a guy about a shoe store and the technology is such I don't know how they I guess they use the GPS locating stuff, but. But they knew if somebody was downtown within a mile of their store. So they texted those people, which cost very little money to text the number of people within a mile of your store and gave them some discount coupon only good for a certain amount of time. So this is very powerful. And then people flocked in and bought shoes. I mean, the guy was telling me is shoes. When he did that, shoes sales went up like crazy. I mean, some ungodly amount. So that does make sense.

[00:04:56] And a lot of restaurants and bars are using those kinds of things, too. So very powerful for them doesn't mean it can't work for most people like us. But again, those are real examples of super high returns on your investment. Now, still to this day, like I've always preached, is that. Most of the people interact with your business through phone or email, and that's the way it is. But they kind of say that the reason is because people a lot of businesses don't have text marketing capabilities, so people don't even have a choice but to use phone or email. But they let's say they say nearly 67% of the people polled said they would increase the convenience of dealing with that business if there was text messaging. All right. So all kinds of good stuff here now. But here's the other side of it, All right, Because email has gotten a little bit slack on spam laws. You know, email's been around for a 3 million years, right. So the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, tcpa it's a federal law that requires businesses to get express written consent from consumers using mobile devices before sending them marketing text messages. Now, I highly suggest you look into that act. If you're going to do this, make sure whatever service you use is compliant with that. And most of them, the reputable ones, are, because this is serious stuff. I mean, people get really mad with if they're getting texts that they didn't want to get.

[00:06:36] Of course, there's spammers infiltrate all these systems and then they disappear, Right? I get that. But if you're a legitimate business, they'll come after you. Okay. So. So make sure you read about the how you're supposed to opt people in and they have to text a yes or or they have to you have to give them an opt out thing. You know, tech stop if you don't want messages anymore and you actually comply with that. Like I said, spammers are going to infiltrate anything. And I'm sure you've all gotten texts that you didn't want and never solicited. But that's a big no no for legit businesses because they're sitting ducks for the feds to come after them. Okay. So first of all, let's talk about bulk messaging versus SMS marketing. Well, I think this is where the mistake I made is I just bulk messaged everybody that agreed to get texts from me. I remember vividly one guy was really pissed off because he said I was just getting on a plane. Tom and I got your text. I had to stop and read it and and, you know, missed my place in line. I mean, he's just really mad about it. He says, You're bothered me. Get quit doing this. And I got a few of them like that. And at the time I didn't care that much because people weren't totally enamored with their smartphones like they are today. So I'm not opposed to trying it again, but to be smarter how I do it.

[00:08:01] So that's bulk messaging. Now, SMS marketing, some of these services have the ability to do customization of the emails, and I'm sure you've gotten stuff from places like maybe your bank or something or Verizon or places that that are saying, Hey, your bills do. And so, you know, so many days and this and that. While those are customized messages and they don't go out to everybody that's bill isn't due right right. So so I think being more smart about it is not only cheaper because you'll be sending out less messages. This isn't most of these services aren't unlimited texts unless you pay a lot of money per month. So, you know, some of them are per message and I'll get to that in a minute. But anyway, customization is going to get less complaints and more response from people. Now, there's another thing you should recognize is transactional test text messages versus promotional text message. Transactional is just like I mentioned with Verizon, Hey, your bill is due in three, three days, blah, blah, blah. Click here if you want to pay online, whatever that's transactional promotional is. Hey everybody, I got this new be a great podcast guest thing coming up. You know and there's only ten slots left so that's a promotional message going on. It's more like the bulk messaging kind of thing. So transactional is where it's very specific to their account and promotional is something that obviously you're marketing something. All right. Now I'm going to have a link to podium and their ultimate guide to SMS marketing, where it got a lot of this stuff at podium. Com. But here's some other things. And again, also keep in mind they sell this stuff. So there these figures may not be totally accurate. I'm not sure where they got them, but but anyway, some of them are very believable because I know just the way I operate my phone and you probably operate your phone the same way. So it says they say text has a 209% higher response rate than phone, email or places like Facebook. They say that 65.6% of consumers think texting makes working with local businesses more convenient. Consumers are twice as likely 1.8 times to prefer texting to any other communication method. 40. And again, that depends on the age of the customer, too. I had a guy the other day on the thing. I've known him for years. He just got his first smartphone last week. All right. Never texted in his whole life. So the older generation may not be true to these figures. It says 40.5% of consumers say they're likely to switch to a different business because they offer text messaging to communicate. 75% of consumers are okay with receiving SMS messages from brand. I'm going to explain and do a little glossary here for you of what these terms mean. Sms from brands and of course this is their OC receiving after they specifically opted in to get the messages and consumers redeem SMS delivered coupons ten times more than other types of coupons.

[00:11:38] And this is one of the best practices to get people to sign up is offer them a discount coupon. So I'm thinking I'm going to give them a permanent discount coupon on anything I offer and including my mentor program. So that's a big incentive as long as they stay on the list. All right. So anyway, those are all from podium, so take them with a grain of salt. Now, let me just talk about some of the terms here. And a lot of the terms are the same click through rate and this and that of email. But so I just took out the ones that are mostly text based, so. Sms stands for short message service and this is just text with no media mode. Mms is multimedia messaging service. That's a text message that can include pictures, videos, gifs, links and all that kind of stuff. Sms. Keyword. This is a word or phrase that customers texture business to opt in to your text marketing messages from your brand. You've probably heard people even on television say text, you know, screw the commute to to. And then they gave you to a certain number or something. Quick response code. That's a QR code. This works for lots of stuff. But anyway, you can use an image that when people scan it with their smartphones, it'll take them to your SMS signup page, texting service software. This is just the whatever company you get that helps you with this.

[00:13:14] Normally, this is not from your I don't even know if you could do it from a piece of software on your computer. I don't know. Maybe it could. But mostly these services are what you sign up for Tech servicing software. Now, short codes, This is like a 5 to 6 digit number used to send either MMS or SMS messages, but they're short codes are pretty expensive and it may not even be worth it. They're like $500 plus per month to have a shortcode, and it's hard to get them. And it's usually one way. Bulk texting. I know. I get him from the political candidates all the time. But the problem is, is that you can tell it's a it's some bulk thing like that because it's a short code. A long code is a standard ten digit number. Kind of looks like a phone number. And it looks like it's coming from a person and not from an automated system. So there's no reason for most people to get the shortcuts. And personalisation variable. This is where they can reach into your s, your or your CRM and pull out individual information. Like I was saying with Verizon to say, Hey, your bill's due in a couple of days. So that's personalization kind of thing. I got another link for you that's got a really looks to be an honest review of about 13 different services and gives you the prices and gives you what they're best known for. Because if your business may have needs that or you may not need a fancier service so they can get a simple, easy to use service and maybe you have really fancy things you want to do.

[00:15:07] So there's a different service. So it's a really good review. So that's businessnewsdaily.com. And just to give you an idea, prices range from either a per message of like the cheapest I saw was 0.07 $0.05 per text. I think that means it would be $7.50 per thousand messages sent. So that's relatively cheap. Even with me, I'm not sure I get 1000 people to sign up just if I emailed my 100,000 people. And I don't know if they want them from me. And then I think this one I was telling you about is $289 a month. So it can be pretty pricey for the super fancy services. And, you know, a lot of them are geared towards big companies, so you probably don't need that kind of stuff. Anyway, it's worth a try to look into this. And so I would read the the marketing guide from podium and then I would look at the reviews of the all the different services that this other link business News daily and decide if it's something you want to give it a try. I mean, especially if you have small numbers. If you get the right service, it won't cost much at all. And you might you might say, Hey, I really like this. It's just an alternative way to reach people that's going to get through and the high open rate.

[00:16:28] So and then the Tcpa, I think is called again will tell you, you know, you really need to tell people how many messages roughly you're going to send per month and what to expect from you and make it easy to opt out and you and you can't send a text message to say, oh, this is the big no no. I mean, the fines for this is $18,000 and plus a $18,600 per occurrence. So if you send two texts to get people to opt in, that's two different occurrences. All right. That's 36,000 in fines. So don't text people to ask them to opt in, email them if you want, and tell them what to do to opt themselves in. That's totally cool. But don't text anybody to ask them to to to opt into your text. No, it's a big no no. All right. Well, there's a little primer on text messaging. I think it can be very lucrative and inexpensive to give it a try. And if you're the right kind of business and yet you do the right thing, it could really, really give a whole new way for you to reach your prospects and customers. All right. That's my story. And I'm sticking to it. If you need help with this kind of stuff and everything else it takes to be successful online, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingtraining.com. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.