There are multiple reasons why different small businesses may want to send PDFs to their customers and contacts. So, can you deliver a PDF through a text message?

You definitely can. However, there’s a certain way to do it that makes the most sense for your business while keeping your contact list safe. What you don’t want to do is text people PDFs as an attachment. We’ll explain why…

Why you should not send PDFs as an attachment

There’s a good chance you’ve sent PDFs as email attachments. So, why should you avoid doing the same thing with an SMS or MMS message? There are a few reasons:

• Security concerns for your contacts
• Limitations of text messaging
• Costs for your business

Security concerns with PDF attachments

Even though attaching a PDF to an MMS message might be a possibility, it is not recommended. That’s because bad actors sometimes use PDF attachments to trick message recipients into downloading malware. For example, a scammer may indicate that a PDF attachment is a customer invoice but the recipient actually downloads malicious software when they click it.

While PDF attachments in peer-to-peer (P2P) email communications are common, you’ll rarely ever see PDFs sent as part of email marketing efforts. That’s for the exact same security concerns PDF attachments create. If you want to make sure your contacts trust what you’re sending, don’t attach PDFs to mass text messages (or bulk emails). It looks spammy and suspicious. Many people will be wary of those messages and may choose not to engage with what you send them.

PDFs and file size limitations

Another reason sending an entire PDF through a text message is problematic has to do with the size of these files. If you’re sending a multi-page document, there’s a good chance it’s just too big to text.

MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) can handle files such as jpegs, pngs, and even short videos. However, MMS isn’t ideal for large PDFs. While you can upload files to SimpleTexting that are up to 10 megabytes (MB), those files will be resized to a maximum of 1MB. This might work fine for an image or graphic, but it could seriously degrade the quality of a PDF.

Note: Mobile carriers have different file size limitations for MMS as well.

In general, text messaging may not be the best channel for sending PDFs at all. Many PDF documents are not designed to be viewed on mobile devices. If you’ve ever opened a PDF on your smartphone and had to pinch and zoom like crazy to read anything, you know exactly what we’re talking about.

PDFs and the costs of text messaging

Because of the large file size, sending PDFs in an MMS message can also increase your costs as a business. This will depend on what business texting platform you choose to use and their pricing structure. In general, SMS messages are a bit more affordable than MMS. And there is an easy way to deliver PDFs via texts using SMS.

How to text a PDF from SimpleTexting’s platform

When you do need to send a PDF through text messaging, the best way to do so is through a link to the PDF document online.

If you’re using a mass texting solution like SimpleTexting, there are a couple of ways to make this happen. You can upload a PDF to our platform and link to it in an SMS message. You can also upload it to your own website or another location and link to that. The only difference is – if you upload a PDF to SimpleTexting – we are hosting the PDF. If you upload the file to your own domain, then you host it.

Either way, your recipients get a link rather than an entire file. They’ll open the PDF in a web browser and can either view it there or choose to download the document. Let’s take a closer look at how it works and how it looks in an actual SMS message.

​​How to send a PDF via text with a link

This method of sending a PDF via text message works well for mass texting use cases.

For example, use this method if you’d like to text a new PDF menu for your restaurant to an exclusive text club to get feedback before rolling it out in your business:

When the recipient clicks, they’ll open the PDF:

1. Begin by logging in to your SimpleTexting dashboard and choosing Campaigns on the left-hand side. Make sure you select SMS as the message type.
2. In your message box, select the media icon.

3. Select Upload, and then choose and upload your desired PDF. You can also upload it by pasting in the URL. Once your PDF is added to your message, select it and press the blue Include button.

4. Your PDF will show up in your message as a link that, when clicked on, will redirect recipients to the document online.

4 examples of when to send a PDF via text messaging

We’ve gone through the how of texting a PDF, but why would someone want to send PDFs through text in the first place? 

Beyond the convenience of writing and sending them, texts get impressive open and response rates. It’s why thousands of organizations across the country have transitioned their communications to SMS.

Attaching a PDF to a text is just another way to tailor your business services to a mobile-based market and make sure your customers get the documents they need instantly.

Here are a few examples to help you put them to work in your own business:

Monthly reports

Analytics and reporting software often exports data in the form of PDF reports. If you need to distribute that to your team or to clients who prefer communicating over text messaging, you can send them a PDF linked in an SMS.

Invoices

Texting is an ideal way to deliver transactional messages like order confirmations. It may be especially useful for freelancers, contractors, consultants, and others who send monthly invoices to their clients. In the example below, a home services contractor sends a follow up message, which can include a link to the PDF invoice online.

Travel itineraries

Let’s say you’re a travel agent or you are managing an event for your company. A text message linking to a PDF itinerary would be a good way to deliver the schedule and other important information.

Menus

Restaurants often publish their menus on PDFs. It’s convenient because you can both print hard copy PDF menus and view them digitally. A local restaurant may want to send a PDF link to their menu for guests who’ve made a reservation or diners who are waiting for a table to view on their devices.

Frequently asked questions about texting PDFs

This article was originally written on August 4, 2021, by Meghan Tocci. It was significantly updated on July 10, 2023, by Dani Henion. Nathan Ellering contributed to this piece. The article was significantly revised in December of 2024 by Kasey Steinbrinck.

The post The best way to text PDFs to your customers and contacts appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

I spoke with some online retailers about their plans to drive more sales with SMS and decided to follow up and find out how their e-commerce text message campaigns in previous years.

I reached out to Ryan Turner, founder of Ecommerce Intelligence, and Jeff Moriarty, marketing manager at Moriarty’s Gem Art to hear how their campaigns fared and what insights they uncovered to help other online stores succeed during the holidays.

Check out the Q&A from my interviews with these two experts and get some ideas for enhancing your own holiday SMS marketing.

Ryan Turner on how to generate holiday sales with VIP discounts and text-only messages

How did your clients’ SMS holiday campaigns perform? Did they meet your expectations?

Overall, SMS was a great channel for our brands during the holiday season. 

This year, we were working with much bigger SMS lists than in previous years, as we’d put more effort into growing them. So, that definitely paid off.

We encouraged people to sign up for texts in the weeks leading up to BFCM, so they’d get notifications as soon as deals were live. That was a big driver of list growth. 

In terms of our overall strategy, we always focus on pushing early access to deals via both email marketing and SMS, as that’s always highly effective. This year was no different, and the VIP segments were a huge success. 

Outside of that, we essentially mirrored our email marketing strategy on the SMS channel over the BFCM week, but didn’t send quite as many texts as we did emails. 

What, if anything, would you change for the next holiday season?

One thing I would change next time is focusing more on text-only SMS campaigns, rather than using MMS campaigns with images and GIFs. 

Carriers can struggle with deliverability for media messages during the busiest sending times, but that doesn’t happen as much if you’re using all text. 

Some clients were adamant about including graphics, but I think next time we’ll try and encourage them not to. 

Are there ways retailers can encourage more click-throughs without using images?

Just include a short and to-the-point message with a clear CTA, really. If you’re pushing a strong offer, people don’t need any more information. 

The strength of the offer is enough, so don’t distract people with other messaging — just focus on getting the click. This can be done very successfully without using any images at all.

Jeff Moriarty on encouraging contact opt-ins and nurturing them all year long

How did you advertise/encourage SMS contact sign-ups?

We have an opt-in to our list on the checkout page, in a post-purchase email, and in a pop-up on our website. We also push people to sign up during our live online shows.

Do you have any plans to nurture the contacts who signed up for the holiday sales throughout the year?

We plan on sending marketing messages to that list for monthly sales and our live shows — one to two messages per month. Then, when the holidays hit again, we will increase it to one to two messages per week.

More holiday SMS inspiration

It’s one thing to read about text message marketing concepts, and it’s another to see real-world e-commerce campaigns and their results. Get your fix of year-round SMS inspiration with our collection of success stories. 

Looking for more holiday SMS tips and strategies? Check out these guides:

• 12 Holiday SMS Ideas to Increase Revenue
• Your Ultimate Guide to Black Friday/Cyber Monday Texting
• How to Send Abandoned Cart Text Messages (With Examples)

When’s the best time to start planning your next Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) marketing strategy? Honestly… as soon as this season is over. The holiday shopping season is a great time to start building a list of customers and contacts who opt in to hear from you via text messages. Start using SimpleTexting today and discover all the tools you available to help you engage with the people you want to reach.

The post Two e-commerce pros share their holiday SMS marketing results appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

The closer we get to the holidays, the busier those customers become. At that point, it doesn’t matter how incredible your promotions are if no one hears about them. This means that retailers need to find creative ways beyond traditional channels like email and social media advertising to get eyes on their campaigns.  

To avoid being overshadowed by big box stores, SMB retailers are using text message marketing more than ever to boost their holiday sales. 

We spoke with several companies to find out about how they’re using SMS to

The SMS advantage for holiday marketing

2024 research from Sinch found that most consumers (78%) want to hear about Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals through multiple channels. While the traditional channel of email topped the list of preferred ways to hear from brands, more than 43% said text messaging (SMS) was an ideal channel for promotions.

If you’re already doing email marketing, text message marketing is the next logical step for most small businesses looking to scale their customer communications strategies.

Beyond marketing, SMS communication is also an efficient way to deliver transactional messages and have direct conversations with customers throughout the holidays. When you use a mass texting solution like SimpleTexting, you’ve got a tool to reach a large number of customers with promotions, send personalized transactional messages, and have back-and-forth conversations that make small business customer relationships more meaningful.

How retailers and small business use SMS for BFCM

So, what are retailers doing to incorporate SMS into their BFCM strategies? We asked five e-commerce professionals for their take on holiday text message marketing strategies.

Kate Backdrop

No photo op is complete without a fun background, which is exactly what Kate Backdrop provides. 

David Zheng, CEO of Kate Backdrop, shared how the company uses SMS for its BFCM campaign by focusing on sales announcements.

“We usually send out messages like ‘Black Friday sales are now open! Get 15% off for new arrivals!’ to remind customers that they should take advantage of our great sales during this time,” said Zheng. “We also plan to send texts to our new customers and include a call to action like ‘Stay tuned for our BFCM sales!'”

The company saw a sizable increase in customers by using SMS, so they are doubled down on their efforts the following year.

Ecommerce Intelligence

Ecommerce Intelligence is a full-service growth agency that focuses on email and SMS. They understand how important these channels are for each of their clients and plan to implement SMS in this year’s e-commerce holiday campaigns.

“In the weeks leading up to Black Friday,” explained founder Ryan Turner, “we heavily promote SMS sign-ups via email campaigns and website popups to grow list sizes. We’ll be running early access promotions for VIP customers this year via SMS. This will give the most valuable shoppers a chance to get everything they want with Black Friday price reductions before everyone else.”

The company has found that SMS is an effective strategy for their clients because it cuts through the noise of overwhelming promotions and comes with a 98% open rate. 

They tried SMS over the holiday season with a few client brands and learned that each SMS contact was worth about seven times as much as an email subscriber in terms of revenue generated per message.

Faruzo

E-commerce jewelry and accessories store Faruzo is using text messaging to harness the power of personalization. Focusing on the consumer experience, the company is investing its efforts for the first time into SMS to drive sales and build customer relationships.

The goal is to curate personalized messages with limited-time offers. And when customers are in the area, they will receive an incentive via SMS to visit the store.

Supplement Warehouse

Supplement Warehouse, a national brand with over 20 retail locations and an online store, also uses SMS to drive sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping.

The company takes an omnichannel approach to BFCM promotions by sending SMS campaigns with complementary email promotions to ensure customers don’t miss out on the promotions. After analyzing the results from past years, Supplement Warehouse noticed it’s cost of sales from SMS was 30% lower than email. That prompted the company to roll out its SMS strategy across all store locations.

Moriarty’s Gem Art

Online jewelry store Moriarty’s Gem Art has learned the effectiveness of SMS marketing in the past and went full force for the holiday season.

The store plans on using SMS for its entire BFCM campaign, which runs the Monday before and ends the Tuesday after Cyber Monday. They will be sending out sale reminders throughout the week to pique interest and help drive sales.

Previously, the company spent $150 on one SMS campaign during BFCM, and it resulted in over $8,000 worth of sales.

Why should retailers use SMS in holiday campaigns?

For starters, SMS marketing is extremely easy to set up, and you can quickly create and launch campaigns with just a few clicks.

Secondly, text messaging is one of the most convenient marketing channels for holiday shoppers.

Consider this… More than half of all holiday spending (53%) now takes place on mobile phones. If your business has an ecommerce store for online shopping, a text message is one of the most effective ways to drive people to your website.

Even when people aren’t checking out sales on mobile, their phones aren’t far away. We surveyed 1,300 people and found that 1 in 3 consumers checks their text notifications within one minute of receiving a text. On top of that, 70% of consumers opted in to receive texts from businesses. 

The takeaway? Your customers probably want you to text them, and they’re going to see your message soon after receiving it.

Put holiday SMS tips into practice

As you plan your holiday text messaging campaigns, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Personalize your messages. People love knowing that the message they’re receiving is just for them. You can use data gathered from past purchases or demographics to tailor your offers and increase engagement.
• Keep it short and sweet. People are busy and don’t want to read a novel when they receive a text. Keep it concise (160 characters or fewer), and make sure the message is clear.
• Leverage existing relationships. If you already have an SMS contact list, use them as your main source of BFCM promotion. But don’t forget to promote your SMS list to new customers — you never know who will join!
• Test different offers and strategies. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to SMS marketing. Try out different offers, message styles, and timing to see what works best for your audience.

Check out our Ultimate Guide to Black Friday/Cyber Monday Texting for more helpful tips!

Make the most out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

There’s still time to start using text messaging as part of your BFCM strategy this year. As long as you’ve got a list of customers who opt in to hear from your via text, you can start communicating with them today.

Even if you don’t have time to make a Black Friday SMS strategy for the 2024 season, text marketing will improve your ability to reach people and enhance the customer experience all year long. SimpleTexting was built to support independent retailers and small businesses owners and local businesses with easy-to-use yet powerful tools. That includes everything from two-way text messaging for conversations with customers to customizable SMS autoresponders that automate communications to increase efficiency and save time. You’ll even find AI-powered solutions to help you generate texts and adjust the tone of your messages.

Give your business a gift this holiday season. Sign up for a free trial with SimpleTexting and explore our platform for yourself.

The post 5 retail businesses reveal their Black Friday SMS marketing strategies appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

Texting a GIF to personal contacts is pretty easy. Most smartphones let you select and add a GIF from inside the messaging app. But if you can’t find the one you want, you could also follow these steps to add GIFs to texts from an iPhone or Android device:

• Copy GIF from a GIF app or website like GIPHY.
• Open your text app.
• Paste the GIF.
• Text the GIF.

Told you it was easy. I mean seriously, your cat could do it.

But what if you want to add a GIF to a mass text message? Sending MMS marketing campaigns to your list that include fun and expressive animated visuals can increase engagement and deliver a personality through your text marketing.

Let’s find out how you can use a solution like SimpleTexting to add a GIF to a text.

How to Text a GIF for Your Business

With SimpleTexting, adding a GIF to your text message is easy. It only takes four steps.

1. Go to the Campaigns tab and create a new campaign.
2. Choose MMS as the message type.

3. Click the paperclip icon above the message box and upload your GIF. Select the GIF from your upload library and press the blue “Include” button.

4. Type out and send or schedule your campaign as you normally would. Your recipient will receive the full-size GIF in the body of their text message.

Here is an example of what your recipient will see when you send a GIF via text message:

Thanks for your order! We’ll notify you when it ships. -Chewy Team

When to Use GIFs in Business Text Messages

When deciding whether or not to put a GIF in a text, ask yourself the following questions.

1. Is this primary or secondary communication?
2. Are you reinforcing your brand messaging?
3. Are you telling a story?

1. Is This Primary or Secondary Communication?

If you’re adding extra flair to a text, a GIF can be a great tool for emphasizing your message. However, you don’t want to use a GIF as your primary (or only) form of communication. 

Way back in 2015, YouTube made this mistake when they responded to a reporter with a GIF instead of a more professional “no comment” response .That rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

GIFs are excellent decoration, but expecting them to communicate your entire message is a bad idea.

2. Does the GIF Help You Reinforce Your Brand Messaging?

If you’re looking for a way to bring emotion or emphasis to your brand’s style or vision, GIF it up.

Try out GIFs from different sources and use different tones to see what your audience responds to best.

3. Are you using GIFs to tell a story?

Storytelling is the perfect type of text to send a GIF with. It’s an extra visual that makes material more memorable for readers and an easy way to practice “show don’t tell” content creation.

Other compelling ways to use a GIF include:

• Spicing up a graphic or infographic
• Demonstrating how a product or service works
• Adding some personality to an email or text (where appropriate — letting someone know their order was delayed won’t be made easier by including a “hang in there” GIF)
• Interacting with customers on social media

What are the benefits of using GIFs in your business Text?

Okay, so, we know there are plenty of applications for sending GIFs in texts. But why do it in the first place?

• They’re eye-catching. Let’s be honest, most of us get many, many texts every day. Unfortunately, your customers can sometimes zone out when they open your message and miss the point. GIFs help add a striking visual element that’s hard to ignore.
• They’re current. GIFs are all over social media, blogs, and text messages at the moment. Using them gives your audience the impression that you’re up-to-date on trends.
• They communicate more than words can. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and so is a GIF. They can set the tone of your message, add humor, and even illustrate things like your products or services.
• They’re universal. Break language barriers and connect with a global audience.
• They simplify the complex. Make intricate ideas easy to grasp with engaging visuals.
• They boost engagement. Grab attention, spark conversations, and leave a lasting impression.

Where to Find GIFs to Text for Your Business

Because GIFs are so common lately, you can find them online in a lot of different places, but the top 3 sites for convenience and selection have to be:

• GIPHY
• Tenor
• Imgur

On these sites, you can find a large selection of GIFs from the serious to the silly and even occasion-specific GIFs. From there, you can download the ones you want to add to your texts.

How to Create GIFs to Text for Your Business

Creating GIFs is pretty simple, and GIPHY even has an entire guide on how the process works.

The basics are:

1. Upload your video to a GIF-making service (in this case, GIPHY) either from a file on your device or from a URL.
2. Choose how long your GIF should be and the start/end times within the video.
3. Add a caption if you’d like.
4. Add tags and a source link (optional).
5. Create your GIF and share it.

Examples of How Real Businesses Added GIFs to Text Messages

Having a tough time visualizing GIFs in real-life business texts? No worries. Here are three examples directly from my own text inbox. 

DragQueenMerch

Although GIFs are a frequent sight in this retailer’s texts, one recent example caught my eye in particular.

DragQueenMerch often launches and advertises collections based on a particular performer, and they sent me a text a little while back naming the collection and showing a GIF of the queen who inspired it.

This mattered not only because it was a gorgeous visual, but also because I wasn’t familiar with that performer beforehand. If they’d simply said the name, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Seeing that the queen in question made great art piqued my interest.

Vegamour

I associate the brand name Vegamour with two things: fabulous hair care and an immediately identifiable aesthetic.

As you can see from this example, they included their signature pink-and-green colors and iconic bottles in the accompanying GIF and added some helpful information about the upcoming sale. 

Be The Match

Although it’s not a retailer or other sales-focused business, nonprofit Be The Match still runs a thriving text program with informational resources for donors, fundraising opportunities, and more. 

They also send out a text to wish me a happy birthday every year, complete with a sweet GIF to make the whole message prettier. 

The important thing to note here is that Be The Match isn’t trying to sell me anything or get me to take action. They just reached out to let me know they appreciate me, and that matters.

Best Practices for Sending GIFs in Text Messages From Your Business

You’re almost ready to start sending GIFs in your text messages. Before you do, though, here are a few best practices to keep in mind.

• Keep in alignment with your brand’s voice and your audience. If you’re a life coach with a reputation for being deep, empathetic, and thoughtful, maybe a GIF from a silly sitcom isn’t the way to go.
• If you’re just starting out texting GIFs, consider sending a test message to yourself to get a good idea of how the process works and what the final product looks like.
• Keep it on topic. Don’t pair your goofy Minions GIF with a sincere fundraising request for the local animal shelter.
• Avoid inappropriate sources. Even if the GIF you’re using is appropriate in itself, do your due diligence and make sure it doesn’t come from an overly vulgar TV show, movie, or other source. That could definitely give your subscribers the wrong impression.
• Do not use GIFs for primary communication. Enhance your message, don’t let GIFs overshadow it.

What is a GIF?

GIF is short for “graphics interface format,” a type of low-resolution format. Although we think of them as moving images, GIFs can also be still images. It’s the low quality and formatting of the image (not the motion) that defines it.

That said, for this discussion, we’re focusing on the well-loved GIFs found on almost every messaging and communication platform.

So, what’s behind the immense popularity of GIFs, and why should you be taking advantage of their casual, fun energy in your marketing messages?

Why Are GIFs in Texts so Popular?

As we mentioned, GIFs typically involve some slight motion accompanied by text.

As anyone who has poured weeks into developing a short video knows, it takes time to create that form of content. While photos are much easier to come by, they don’t usually reach the level of engagement video achieves.

So why are GIFs so popular? Because they’re the easy, beautiful combination of the two mediums.

The GIF’s movement adds a dimensional element that static images just don’t have. And creating them is easy and quick, oftentimes requiring no technical ability at all.

Why Do GIFs Work?

Sometimes they’re silly, but on a psychological level GIFs pack a surprisingly powerful amount of influence. In a small amount of space, GIFs do a few important tasks:

• They draw the viewer’s eye with motion and color.
• They often lift the mood and bring a fun emotional element.
• They frequently make connections to a recognizable element like pop culture or familiar visual branding that viewers can grasp instantly.

Sending a GIF also demonstrates something concrete about the identity of the sender. Are you hip, funny, clever, quirky? Expressing yourself with a well-chosen GIF makes you relatable and exciting to your audience.

Another reason GIFs are a great communication tool is because they are inherently shareable. You want to create bite-sized elements for customers that will encourage them to share. Adding on a GIF is a fun and easy way to create material that is far more engaging and thus likely to be shared.

How to Use GIFs in an iMessage

If you have an iPhone, Apple has made it incredibly easy to send out GIFs with your messages.

1. Open up your iMessage app and create a new text message.
2. Select the blue app store icon next to the text message box.
3. Tap the pink magnifying glass icon, and use the search bar to find images related to your message. If you change your mind about a GIF, you can hit the ‘x’ in the top right corner to remove the GIF from your message.
4. Type out your own message, and hit send to send them together.

Why can’t I send a GIF in a text message on my iPhone?

If GIFs aren’t working on your iPhone, try fixing it by removing and re-adding the Images app in iMessage.

How to Use GIFs on an Android

Much like on iMessage, GIFs have become a must-have feature for native android messaging apps. Finding and sending a GIF couldn’t be more simple.

1. Open your native messaging app and write your text message.

2. Select the smiley face, then in the bottom right of the screen, tap on GIF.

3. Search for a GIF using the search bar, or browse the most popular ones that automatically pop up.
4. Select the GIF you want, and hit send to send your message.

Using a GIF Successfully Comes Down to Audience

The number one thing that matters when sending a GIF is who you’re sending it to. Whichever platform you send it on, your audience is your priority.

Just as you tailor messages to different audiences, your GIF needs to align with who is receiving it. 

Start by asking yourself a few key questions:

• What demographic are you trying to reach and which media might they be familiar with?
• Does your GIF add to the point you’re communicating or distract from it?
• Does your audience need to see a niche, extremely specific GIF pertaining to one topic, or a more general GIF related to your industry?

It also helps to know who your audience is to begin with, along with what they need from your brand. With the above answers and a clear audience persona in mind, you’re all set to GIF like a pro.

This article was originally published April 24, 2019. It was significantly updated July 11, 2023. Meghan Tocci contributed to this article.

The post How to Text a GIF: Find, Create, and Send GIFs From Your Business [Plus Examples] appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

You’ve probably heard a lot about using generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) to help reduce your workload. The right AI tools can help you brainstorm new ideas and engage with your customers while saving you time. You just have to know how to use it. While you can use tools like ChatGPT to generate SMS messages for your business, you can also use custom AI-powered solutions that are built to do that specific job.

In this blog post, I’ll explain how to use AI text message generators to make your job easier while staying true to your creativity. Plus, you’ll learn about a new AI SMS tool you can try for free.

Two ways to use AI and text messaging

While there are many ways to use AI-powered SMS marketing, most people stick to the most well-known two options: brainstorming and chatbots. The first helps you come up with and refine the messages you’ll send to contacts. That’s where AI text message generators come in. The second use is more technical, it involves powering the entire conversation with artificial intelligence.

1. Use an AI assistant for text messaging ideas

AI assistants can write examples of texts for you or provide ideas of what to write about, depending on what prompts you give them. They do some of the “thinking” for you to give you more ideas to work with and save you time. The prompts you give the AI impact the results you get back. So, at the very lest, be sure to describe your business, your customers, and what you want your text messages to accomplish when you write the prompt.

Free and low-cost generative AI tools like ChatGPT are popular picks for this tactic. But, if you have a text messaging service with a built-in AI solution, you can skip a few extra steps. SimpleTexting and its AI Assist feature is one example.

Using an AI assistant in SMS marketing goes beyond simply asking it to write the text for you. You can also:

• Come up with new angles on an existing text campaign
• Find benefits or customer pain points to emphasize in your texts
• Think of selling tactics to use in your messages (such as fear of missing out)
• Generate multiple messages and combine their best elements
• Change your text’s tone for your target audience or campaign

Marketing consultant Nora Sudduth shared her process for creating SMS campaigns with generative AI for a business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. Before diving into the steps, she shared an important takeaway:

“AI is great for quickly brainstorming lots of different ideas around messaging and angles. Then you need to use your industry knowledge and expertise to pick and choose and refine.”

Nora Sudduth, Marketing Consultant

She took these actions to build a campaign for her client:

1. Start with a strategy: Nora and her client established the goals for the campaign, as well as details about the audience, tone, and offering.
2. Bring AI into the mix: Then, she input what she learned from the strategy session into a generative AI tool. “AI offered a variety of messaging options around time savings, ease of integration, increased productivity, and exclusive early-bird access,” Nora says.
3. Choose and adjust: After choosing the most effective options from the AI, Nora adjusted the AI output and rewrote texts to suit the client’s audience. Using data from customer surveys, she tailored each text to resonate with the audience’s needs.
4. Test (and test again): With the texts ready to go, Nora A/B tested different calls to action and customer pain points. Nora says, “Based on our conversion data, we continued to refine those messages until we hit numbers we were happy with.”

The results were texts like this one:

2. Develop an AI-powered SMS chatbot

AI can also automate simple one-to-one customer interactions. Building an AI-powered SMS chatbot is more complex than brainstorming with AI, but it offers a way for you to help your customers when you aren’t available. So, the extra work definitely pays off.

You can create an SMS chatbot without generative AI, such as how you can use Zapier to create a basic chatbot in SimpleTexting. This type of chatbot is built to recognize different questions or requests and then reply to people with a pre-defined answer. When building an SMS chatbot, you’d map out “conversational paths” that include auto-generated responses like this:

Chatbots built with generative AI can improve this process with more flexibility and personalization. That’s because they’re able to generate unique responses based on a “knowledge base” from which they are trained. The chatbot’s knowledge base could be anything from your support documentation to product manuals to your menu and hours of operation. If you’re worried that customers will be turned off by the experience, don’t be – 80% of customers told Sinch they’re open to using AI chatbots.

Already using Zapier? You can try out new features that allow you to create custom, AI-powered chatbots built on OpenAI’s technology. Train the AI on a specific knowledge source and connect it with SimpleTexting to start generating replies to texts from customers and contacts.

Be aware that genAI chatbots do have risks. As Sinch points out, generative AI sometimes provides incorrect information or “hallucinations,” completely nonsensical statements.

Meet SimpleTexting’s AI assistant for text messaging

Not every small business is ready to start building chatbots powered by generative AI. It’s new technology and even the biggest brands in the world are still figuring things out. AI text message generators, however, are an easy way to start taking advantage of generative artificial intelligence. For example, SimpleTexting’s AI Assist is an easy-to-use tool for text message generation and refinement.

AI Assist is built into every SimpleTexting plan – even the free trial – so you can use it whenever you need to write or improve a campaign text.

Using AI Assist’s text message generator

When you’re building a campaign and you need ideas that get your message across, SimpleTextings AI text message generator is there to help you brainstorm without ever leaving our platform.

Click Generate message under AI Assist when composing a campaign. A dialogue box will pop up where you enter a prompt describing the kind of text message you need for the campaign. Click Generate a message inside the window and SimpleTexting’s AI Assist will generate five options for you to review and choose from. Not quite what you need? Click Refresh suggestions for a new set of options, or try rewriting your prompt for different results.

Once AI Assist generates a text message you like, just click Select message and it will be added to the campaign building workflow. Of course, you can still change the text to meet your needs. For example, maybe you’d rather use an emoji at the end of your message than the hashtag the AI tool suggested.

Speaking of emojis in SMS campaigns… AI Assist can help you with that too! There are a lot of ways to use our AI text message generator as a creative partner in your customer communications and marketing. Here’s how a tax advisor might use our tool to keep in touch with clients during the holidays:

Using AI Assist to refine and rephrase your text messages

One of the most useful ways to take advantage of SimpleTexting is one-to-one communications and SMS conversations with your contacts. Our users do this directly from the Inbox where they can text back and forth with customers and clients without using their mobile device.

But finding the right words and striking the right tone isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve added AI Assist to the Inbox as well. You can use the AI Assist Rephraser Tool to refine your message. Just click the lightbulb icon after you compose a text. Then, you can choose from one of four tone adjusters:

• Short and sweet: Get the same message across with fewer words. This option can come in handy when you’d like to save message credits on longer messages.
• Expand: Ask the AI to elaborate on what you’ve already written to get more detailed with your message.
• Friendly: A user favorite – add a friendlier tone to your message to connect better with your customers.
• Formal: When it’s time to get down to business, you can choose this option to make your message sound more formal.

Get creative with AI and text messaging campaigns

AI can go even further than brainstorming, writing, and chatbots. Check out how these businesses use AI text messaging to create unique campaigns.

1. Blue Barn’s custom pet poems

When Blue Barn asked for our help on the Shoestring podcast, we were happy to oblige with plenty of text message marketing ideas. One of these suggestions combined AI’s image analysis and generative writing abilities.

Our campaign idea involved asking customers to text a cute photo of their pets to receive a text back with a custom poem. ChatGPT would analyze the pet in the photo and their surroundings, then reply with a fun poem based on that analysis. Here are a couple of examples:

Blue Barn used this creative AI-driven marketing strategy to accomplish two things:

1. It helped them encourage existing customers to opt in to their SMS marketing list.
2. It provided basic customer data for personalization because it indicated what type of pet the contact owns.

2. Window Factory’s personalized quotes

Home services businesses involve a lot of custom quotes, which can add time to the texting process. Window manufacturer and installer Window Factory saved time and increased quote requests by 25% by crafting personalized quotes with AI. General manager Nick Marshall and the Window Factory team used an AI tool to generate custom quote texts like this one:

3. Helix Sleep’s sleep quiz responses

AI can integrate texts into interactive processes like quizzes to create a full experience for customers. Helix Sleep, a mattress company, increased its conversion rate by 18% by sending AI-generated mattress suggestions to customers who took a sleep quiz. Here’s an example of one of those texts:

4. MagicProCleaning’s timeframe-based reminders

Services that should happen at regular intervals, such as healthcare, maintenance, or cleaning, can bring customers back through reminders, but the tone of those reminders is key. MagicProCleaning, a cleaning service provider, used tone suggestions from AI based on customer data to strike the right balance between urgency and value and saw a 20% increase in bookings within a week. Let’s look at an example text:

Try an AI text message generator for yourself

If you’re already using SimpleTexting, be sure to give our new AI Assist tool a try. And if you’re not taking advantage of our platform yet… AI SMS marketing is just a few clicks away!

Sign up for a free 14-day SimpleTexting trial to give all of our features a spin, including our AI Assist. And if you like what you see, we’ll offer flexible credit-based plans and guide you through the number registration process.

The post How to use an AI text message generator for SMS marketing appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

With all those Cyber Week deals flying around on different channels, it’s easy for your business’s promotions to get lost in the clutter. Text messaging is an excellent way to make a connection with your customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire holiday shopping season.

Not only do SMS and MMS communications help you spread the word about what you have to offer, they also open up lines of communication with customers while delivering an ideal customer experience that keeps them informed during a busy time of year. New Black Friday consumer research from Sinch sheds some light on what’s most important. Let’s take a look…

New research on Black Friday and Cyber Monday communications

Sinch surveyed more than 1,200 global consumers to learn more about how they prefer to hear from brands ahead of Black Friday and beyond. Here are some Black Friday messaging statistics that matter to businesses like yours:

Nearly 57% of consumers want to hear about BFCM deals at least a month ahead of time. That means they want to start planning well before the big shopping weekend. So, don’t wait until the last minute to let customers know what’s in store for them. A preview of your holiday deals not only builds anticipation, but it helps them budget and make decisions on where to make holiday purchases.

Email is the most preferred channel, but messaging channels are also important. 45% would chose a mobile messaging option for receiving BFCM promotions. Keep your audience in mind. Targeting a younger crowd? SimpleTexting’s State of Small Business Marketing study found Gen Z shoppers are much more likely to prefer text messaging and social media than older generations. (Shocker. Right?)

If you aren’t using SMS or MMS for text message marketing, now is a good time to expand and diversify your communication strategy. The Sinch survey found 78% of consumers prefer more than one communication channel for Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. You can take advantage of a free trial with SimpleTexting to find out if texting customers will work for you (no credit card required).

Personalizing holiday promotions are an excellent way to provide value. But it should go beyond using a customer’s name. 80% of consumers find personalized recommendations to be helpful or relevant during the holidays, and to do that, you need data. That’s why SimpleTexting offers a Data Collection feature to help you build personalized text message campaigns.

SMS may be most beneficial for informational and transactional messages during the holidays. From order confirmations and delivery notifications to shipping updates and inventory alerts – there’s a lot to keep track of. That’s why more than 94% of consumers say transactional messages are important to the holiday shopping customer experience.

Explore more of Sinch’s BFCM survey findings

Black Friday and Cyber Monday text message ideas

Text messages can be a great way to cut through the noise on Black Friday and reach shoppers directly in their message inboxes. Here are some ideas you can steal to promote your BFCM campaigns via SMS:

1. Flash sales: Announce the start of your BFCM flash sale via text with a link to specific products or landing pages.
2. Discounts: Share discount codes in your text messages to encourage shoppers to buy.
3. Coupons: Send individual coupons with unique codes to different customer segments.
4. BOGOFF: Promote a buy one, get one free offer for people who make a purchase via your text message link.
5. Earlybird deals: Launch your BFCM campaigns early to existing customers via SMS.
6. Freebies: Reward shoppers with a free gift when they make a purchase through your text message link.
7. Abandoned cart: Send shoppers a text to remind them they have a product in their cart.
8. Loyalty campaigns: Continue to BFCM love after the event by encouraging shoppers to sign up for your loyalty or rewards program.

7 real-life BFCM text message examples

Black Friday’s just around the corner, which means it’s time to start planning your BFCM text message campaigns. Here are some examples of brands that have used SMS to promote their holiday deals and discounts.

1. Marleylilly: Promoting a rewards program

Marleylilly uses Black Friday as a springboard for nurturing long-term customers. It uses its Black Friday text messages to thank customers for shopping during the sale and invites them to join the rewards program to continue unlocking perks. 

2. Rough Cut Social: Creating a sense of urgency

Axe throwing entertainment venue, Rough Cut Social, created a sense of urgency around its Black Friday SMS campaign in the final hours. It reminded shoppers they had a limited time left and reiterated the code they could use to get money off.

3. Crossnet: Using social proof to sell

Crossnet leverages a bit of recent social proof in its Black Friday text. Name-dropping brands like Target instills trust and credibility with shoppers who may not be as familiar with the brand. 

4. Filippo Loreti: Promoting a limited-time freebie

Watch brand Filippo Loreti adds something special to its Black Friday SMS campaign with a free gift for shoppers who use the code at checkout.

5. Print Fresh: Earlybird special for VIPs

Print Fresh rewards its best customers on Black Friday with an early bird special and 25% off. This nurtures long-term customer relationships while boosting its BFCM sales early on.

6. SkinTe: Starting the celebrations early

SkinTe launched its Black Friday deals early via MMS. Advertising its 30% sitewide discounts, the brand encouraged an early swathe of sales before the main event began.

7. Hybrid Racing: Using scarcity to sell

Hybrid Racing uses scarcity to encourage some last-minute Black Friday sales. It includes a visual prompt in its text messages and encourages shoppers to take advantage of the discounts before they disappear.

Why retailers should use SMS and text messaging in BFCM campaigns

For starters, SMS marketing is extremely easy to set up, and you can quickly create and launch campaigns with just a few clicks.

Secondly, text messaging is one of the most convenient marketing channels for holiday shoppers.

Think about it this way: 43% of holiday shoppers make purchases from their phones, so texts are a natural extension of their shopping experience.

Even when people aren’t checking out sales on mobile, their phones aren’t far away. We surveyed 1,400 people and found that 80% of consumers check their text notifications within five minutes of receiving a text. On top of that, 71% of consumers opted to receive texts from businesses.

The takeaway? Your customers probably want you to text them, and they’re going to see your message soon after receiving it.

And one last thing: Businesses that text their customers are 217% more likely to report that their marketing is successful (compared to businesses that don’t text customers). And 90.09% of businesses that text their customers report that their marketing is successful.

Get it right: Black Friday and Cyber Monday texting tips 

BFCM weekend only comes once a year, so we want to help you make it count. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you build your holiday SMS strategy.

1. Attract new contacts

First, if you intend to send out texts to your shoppers, you’ll need shoppers to text. That means you’ll need to grow your text list. 

You have several options to grow your text subscriber list:

1. Text-to-join keywords
2. QR code to text message
3. Link click to text message
4. Web signup forms and mobile website forms
5. Checkout data capture

You can set up a text-to-join keyword that new contacts can text to your number to receive your messages, then advertise it on your site or on your storefront.

You can also use QR codes to send text messages like text-to-join keywords: You can create a QR code and put it on advertisements like posters. When someone scans the QR code, a text message with automatically populate in their native message app. All they need to do is send the message to opt in to your text contact list.

Alternatively, you could set up a web signup form or mobile widget that helps visitors to your website or mobile site easily join your text list. Take Got Bag, for example. They reward shoppers with 10% off if they share their mobile number and opt-in to receive text messages.

You can create a form through SimpleTexting that asks shoppers for their mobile numbers and first names. When they supply this information, you can then start sending them text messages about your BFCM campaigns.

2. Use your auto-confirmation message

When new contacts join your list, they’ll receive an automatic confirmation message from you. 

This is a good opportunity to create some excitement and let customers know you’re grateful to have them on your text list. Plus, the aim of any good brand is to form personal relationships with each customer. A well-written confirmation message can help.

Take advantage of this customizable message to thank them for signing up for your texts and offer them a text-exclusive promotion at the same time.

Use the Autoresponder feature to create an automatic welcome message that goes out to shoppers when they give you their mobile number. You can choose whether you want the message to go out straight away or after a delay.

3. Get a head start on the holiday

You don’t want to wait until Friday morning to start sending texts about your sales. Start at least a week ahead to let shoppers know that deals are coming. 

This is a good time to double down on the value of your text lists. Let contacts know that these deals are exclusively for those who’ve signed up for texts. 

You could even start a countdown to Black Friday and send out messages a couple of times in the week leading up to the big sale.

Part of this tip also includes planning out your texts in advance. Decide which days of the week you want to send your texts and what time of day they’ll go out. Then schedule your texts.

Be sure you plan your messages with sleep schedules in mind. You don’t want to wake anyone up, so be sure you plan for the middle of the morning or later.

You can even automate your texts during this step so you can set it and forget it.

To do this, go to the “campaigns” section of the dashboard, create a new campaign, and write out the message you want to schedule. Then, choose the date you want it to go out.

4. Vary your content

Of course, there’s a caveat to the above tip. While your contacts will appreciate hearing about Black Friday deals and receiving coupons, they’ll appreciate a break from those things even more.

Send out a few messages with helpful content related to your brand or the holiday. That could mean including useful tips for online shopping during Black Friday (as in using services like Honey for extra coupon codes) or recipes for Thanksgiving leftovers.

This ensures that your text contacts don’t get tired of hearing from you. More importantly, it protects the trust between you and your customers. Phone numbers are personal, and you want to respect your contacts by not overloading them with sales pitches.

Use the scheduling feature to line up a mixture of text messages for your audience. You can send a combination of tips, offers, and how-to guides, or ask questions to encourage a conversation. All of these will spark a deeper connection with your customers and help you get to know them better (which is always a bonus for future offers and promotions!).

5. Segment your contacts

Of course, not every product on your website or in your store will appeal to every single customer. 

We suggest setting up segments — that is, contacts who have something in common with each other — to make sure each customer only sees the information they’re interested in.

It could be anything from product categories they’ve purchased in the past, store locations they’ve visited, or any other criteria that you think will be helpful. 

Pro tip: You can easily collect this type of information from your contacts by using the Data Collection feature and taking advantage of our SMS integrations.

Not only will this keep customers from getting annoyed or tired of your texts, it will also make them feel more seen and cared for (which will do wonders for your brand’s reputation).

Use the segments feature under the “contacts” tab to create segments to match your different customers. You group together contacts based on the date they signed up, any links they clicked, and how they found out about you among other things.

6. Check the numbers from Black Friday before Cyber Monday

To make your future SMS campaigns better, you need to know how your last messages performed. 

Through your SimpleTexting account, you can check all the analytics from your Black Friday texts, including how many responses you got, who clicked on any links you sent, whether anyone unsubscribed from your texts, and more.

Go through all this data and use it to tweak your Cyber Monday messages to make sure you get all the engagement you need. 

7. Tease your upcoming promotions

One excellent way to get customers excited for your big Cyber Monday sale is to give them a sneak preview of what you have to offer. 

That could mean a blurb about new products you’re launching over the holidays, teasing a big promotion, or just letting contacts know that they’re in for special benefits now that they’ve agreed to receive your texts.

8. Prevent abandoned carts

There’s nothing worse than seeing customers who start to place an order but then vanish before they complete their purchase, especially on one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

Fortunately, you can help them come back to finish their shopping.

Set up a text that triggers when someone who has opted into your text list abandons their shopping cart. This message could simply remind them to come back and finish their order, or you could add a discount to sweeten the deal.

It may also help to offer a direct line to your support team in case of any questions or concerns.

Use one of SimpleTexting’s many integrations to set up your abandoned cart text messages. A tool like Zapier or Shopify will automatically trigger a text message when someone leaves an item in their cart.

7 tips to get the most out of your Black Friday text messages

As you plan your holiday text messaging campaigns, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

1. Personalize your messages

People love knowing that the message they’re receiving is just for them. You can use data gathered from past purchases or demographics to tailor your offers and increase engagement.

2. Keep it short and sweet 

People are busy and don’t want to read a novel when they receive a text. Keep it concise (160 characters or fewer), and make sure the message is clear. Don’t overwhelm recipients either. Stick to one outcome and one call-to-action for each text so that customers know exactly what to do next. 

3. Leverage existing relationships 

If you already have an SMS contact list, use them as your main source of BFCM promotion. But don’t forget to promote your SMS list to new customers — you never know who will join!

4. Test different offers and strategies

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to SMS marketing. Try out different offers, message styles, and timing to see what works best for your audience.

5. Start early

As well as planning your Black Friday text message campaign in advance, you should also start warming customers up before the event. You can send reminders about your upcoming discounts or offer an exclusive earlybird deal for VIP shoppers. 

6. Create a sense of urgency

Black Friday is a limited-time event. Shoppers know they have to take advantage of discounts while they’re available, but there’s no harm in reminding customers that the clock is ticking.

7. Go beyond BFCM

Black Friday is a great opportunity to reconnect with existing shoppers and attract new ones. Keep the momentum going after the event is over by continuing to send nurturing texts to shoppers. You can send social proof, product or service recommendations, or simply check in to see if there’s anything you can do to help.

The wrap on Black Friday and Cyber Monday text messages

Everyone is competing for consumers’ attention as Black Friday and Cyber Monday get closer. 

Lucky for you, texts are in high demand, with 71% of consumers opting to receive texts from businesses in 2023.

That means it’s a great time to send valuable, exciting texts to your contacts ahead of the major shopping holidays. Put these tips to work in your holiday SMS strategy for your best-ever Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

This article was originally published October 13, 2022 by Lizzie Davis. It was significantly updated September 27, 2023 and October 31, 2024. Lily Norton and Nathan Ellering contributed to this piece.

The post Your guide to Black Friday and Cyber Monday text messages in 2024 appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

With social media algorithms constantly changing, more businesses are adding newsletters to their marketing mix. That’s because it gives more control over content distribution. Newsletters are an excellent way for small businesses and independent creators to stay in touch with the audience they’ve built.

While the newsletter world tends to focus on email, texting can also have a part in the mix. Sinch’s study on customer connections found that email and messaging are two of the strongest channels for communicating with customers. So, why not combine their powers?

Let’s explore the possibilities of SMS newsletters, whether you use texting as the main vehicle for your newsletter or to distribute your email newsletter.

Why should you create a text message newsletter?

SMS newsletters come in all sorts of forms that you can adapt to your business’s content strategy. Whichever type of newsletter you send, you’ll reap the benefits of business texting. Our 2024 report demonstrates the usefulness of sending texts to your customers:

• Many of your customers want to get text messages from you. Seventy-nine percent of consumers opted into a business text in 2024 – that’s an 11% increase from 2023.
• And that desire translates into growth for your business. Ninety-one percent of businesses have higher conversion rates when they integrate SMS into their marketing campaigns.
• Specifically, the most common response businesses had about their average SMS conversion rate was 21-30%, with 28% reporting that metric. And two groups making up 22% of the mix each had an average conversion rate of 11-20% and 31-40%.

SMS newsletters vs email newsletters

While email and text messaging are two effective channels for newsletter distribution, they have some clear differences. Because of that, you’ll want to carefully consider your newsletter strategy, such as what content you include, how often you send newsletters, and who you send them to.

Many email newsletters are sent to subscribers on a weekly or monthly basis. They’ll usually include a collection of items such as the latest articles from a blog, events, upcoming promotions, company news, and more. There will be images, call-to-action buttons, as well as logos and other branding.

With an SMS newsletter, you’ll be more limited. SMS stands for Short Message Service. Texts sent via SMS are restricted to 160 characters per message. While you can include links in an SMS newsletter, you can’t include images or graphics.

Despite these limitations, a text newsletter has some advantages. Because texts tend to have higher engagement than emails, your SMS newsletter will likely see higher open and click rates. Text message newsletters are also less common than email newsletters. It’s tough for email newsletters to stand out in crowded inboxes but receiving a text newsletter is somewhat unexpected.

3 options for text message newsletters

Since you can’t exactly send a monthly SMS newsletter with five different stories, a bunch of images, and multiple calls-to-action, you’ll need to think things through. Here are three effective ways to send text newsletters:

1. Send a link to your email newsletter via SMS

Most email newsletters include a version subscribers can view in their web browser. The easiest way to distribute your newsletter through SMS is to simply send a link to the web version of your email newsletter.

This way, your contacts have a similar newsletter experience on both email and SMS. Plus, you can schedule sends at the same time with the same newsletter frequency. Just send a brief text message to notify people when your latest newsletter is out.

2. Send more frequent SMS newsletters

Since SMS is limited to 160 characters, the channel is better suited for informing your audience about one topic at a time. Rather than an email newsletter featuring several pieces of content, your SMS newsletter features a single item – but gets sent more often.

For example, if you’re publishing blog posts on your website, you can notify subscribers via text every time a new article is published. If that seems like too much, a weekly SMS newsletter could deliver the most important piece of blog content that week.

You could also use text messaging to deliver other sorts of content such as regular tips and advice – anything that’s easily communicated in a short message with a link to learn more works great with SMS.

3. Send a concise MMS newsletter

If visuals are important to your newsletter experience, you can use MMS to include pictures, graphics, short videos, emojis, and a significantly higher character count. MMS allows for up to 1600 characters.

While you won’t exactly replicate the complete email newsletter experience, an MMS newsletter gives you more to work with. Get creative with this option. It’s a less formal way to deliver a newsletter than email. So, you may want to keep things light and conversational.

6 real examples of SMS newsletters to inspire yours

While text newsletters can contain just about anything you’d like, the huge range of possibilities can make it tricky to zoom in on one idea. Here are some real-life SMS newsletters that demonstrate what you can do with this channel.

1. Food and Meat Co-op

The Food and Meat Co-op consists of consumers in Utah and nearby states who order local produce and meat in bulk. It needs members to know order and pickup times to run smoothly, so it runs an SMS newsletter with updates on order sales and pickup events. As the newsletter  sign-up page puts it, “[We] want to make sure you don’t miss a thing because these good deals go FAST and if you don’t receive notification, you miss out.”

One example of messages the newsletter sends is this heads-up about a restock on certain products:

The Food and Meat Co-op newsletter shows that your texts don’t have to be intricate – they just need to communicate what your readers need to read.

2. Toby Prussman

When real estate agent Toby Prussman noticed his listing emails going to spam, he gave an SMS newsletter a shot. Thanks to this initiative, his customers could get alerts as soon as new properties went up on his website.

As a result, Toby’s clients felt happy and included again. If you’re having trouble with email deliverability, you can use texting as a second solution as you get your email working. And apps like SimpleTexting have automations you can use to send immediate alerts like Toby.

3. WLRN

WLRN, a public radio and television organization in South Florida, wants to keep its listeners and viewers informed on all news topics. As part of this mission, it sends out an environmental news SMS newsletter with the latest topics on our planet’s health.

For example, one of its September 2024 texts raises awareness about the pesticide paraquat:

This text linked out to an article on Earthjustice, the organization that runs WLRN’s text newsletter. You can use weekly texts to highlight your most important news or content just like WLRN and Earthjustice do.

4. Natural Born Organizers

Your text newsletter can become an integral part of your business – take it from Natural Born Organizers. Founder Tanisha Porter created a subscription program where clients get an organization prompt every day.

The instructions to text photo proof help subscribers stay accountable. Two-way texting lets you include these kinds of interactive elements in your newsletter, too. Thats an advantage text message newsletters have over email… they can be conversational!

5. Sydney McDonald

If that last example has you excited about monetizing your text newsletter, here’s another example for you. Sydney McDonald, a social media coach and strategist, uses an SMS newsletter to get thousands of dollars every month.

Every day, Sydney sends prompts for TikTok content based on the latest trends. Here are snippets of two such text newsletters:

Like Sydney, don’t be afraid to spruce up your texts with emojis. As you can see, you can use them to break up your text like you would with bullet points.

6. Mountain High Outfitters

E-commerce businesses can also get in on the fun. Mountain High Outfitters’ text message newsletter provides information on the latest discounts and inventory releases.

This welcome text shows that you can give new subscribers a warm welcome just as you can with an email newsletter or regular text list. Mountain High Outfitters sends an MMS message with a discount to start you on a high note.

Design your newsletter’s welcome text just as carefully as you create its other messages. This first text will help you make a good impression if you can nail it.

How to build and grow your text message subscribers list

So, how can you make a newsletter like the ones you saw above? The backbone of a successful text message newsletter is no different from that of a successful email one–you need an engaged subscriber list.

If you’ve been collecting phone numbers from your email subscribers and have not obtained express written consent to text these folks, we have some bad news: you can’t send these people an SMS with your newsletter out of the blue.

The good news is that it’s easy to build a list of engaged SMS subscribers. You can steal the following playbook to start your newsletter and grow your subscriber list in no time. Just follow these steps:

1. Determine your newsletter strategy

Before you think about sending your newsletter, create a plan to follow. Ask yourself these questions to build a basic strategy:

• Will you create an original text newsletter, or will you use your texts to distribute your email newsletter? The right answer depends on whether you already have an email newsletter and the length of content you’d be sharing.
• If you’re making an original text newsletter, what topics will you cover? Our 2024 business texting report found that customers subscribe to texts to get information on subjects like promotions (58%), new product/service offerings (23%), and event invitations (22%).
• How often will you send your newsletter? The same report shows that 48% of customers prefer to get texts every other week and 36% want to receive them every week.

2. Create a keyword

With your strategy ready to go, you can create ways for people to join your list. Keywords are a good starting point.

Let’s say we want to promote a newsletter focused on a roundup of all news related to startup funding rounds.

We could create a keyword called “DEALROOM” and–where it makes sense–include a call to action that goes something like, “Text DEALROOM to (833) 222-3059 if you want to receive a weekly roundup of all startup and VC funding news.”

When someone texts it into your number, they’ve subscribed to receive future updates.

This is the approach that The New York Times offers. Its readers can text the word “DAILY” to 63937 for a report that provides context, analysis, and thoughts on some of the biggest news stories. They promote it on their website and social media channels.

This is also the approach that America’s Beauty Show takes with text newsletter subscriptions. Beauty industry members can text the word “SIGNUP” to its number to get information on its events and offers.

3. Build a sign-up form

One of the tools marketers use to drive growth in their email newsletter subscribers is a simple sign-up form. You can apply a similar approach to growing the number of people signed up to receive your text message newsletter.

You could use Morehouse College’s approach and create a form for people to sign up for both your email and text newsletters.

SimpleTexting’s web form builder makes it easy to help your customers sign up for one or both of your newsletters. Add Contact field as one of the fields in your form to get both text and email signups. Once you finish, you can link to the web form from your website using the code SimpleTexting generates.

If you send both email and text newsletters, you could plug your text newsletter in its email counterpart. Include a graphic or line of copy that says something like:

“Hey, do you love our newsletter, but find it gets lost in your crowded inbox? You can sign up for the SMS version of our newsletter here: https://website.com/form”

Get the URL to your form by copying and pasting the full “app2.simpletexting.com” URL into your link,including the “webFormID” part of the URL that has a string of numbers and letters. In the above example, we direct someone to a web form, but you could also give your subscribers the option to text in your keyword.

4. Distribute your newsletter

Whether you choose to use your text newsletter to promote your email newsletter or run it as its own publication determines other ways you’ll distribute it.

The easiest way to promote your text message newsletter is to take the link to your email newsletter and include it in a text message.

If you’re entirely scrapping your email newsletter, you could create blog posts or web pages to host longer content.

If you want your texts to promote your email newsletter, you could integrate your email marketing platform and SimpleTexting.

For example, where you currently collect email addresses, you could add a field asking for a phone number and a checkbox asking for consent to send notifications when a newsletter goes out. Then you can send out a blast letting your subscribers know they should check their inbox.

Combine your email newsletter with a text newsletter

To drive the most ROI, your brand should offer your audience the option to sign up for your newsletter via email and SMS. As we’ve demonstrated, it’s easy to tailor the message to fit the channel.

By leveraging both the broad reach of your email lists and the high engagement of SMS, you can use both channels to turn your newsletter into a cornerstone of your marketing strategy.

One low-fuss way to use this strategy is to automatically send a text when your email newsletter comes out using SimpleTexting and Zapier. It just takes a few steps:

1. Connect your email newsletter app and SimpleTexting to Zapier.
2. Click the Create button in the upper-left corner of the Zapier dashboard and choose Zap.
3. Choose your newsletter releasing through your email app as the trigger for the Zap.
4. Make sending a SimpleTexting campaign as the action for your Zap.

If you don’t want to send the text at the same time as the email, you can add a step in between the trigger and action that uses Delay by Zapier to delay when the text sends.

Give text message newsletters a try

Text messaging is an excellent way to build on your email newsletter strategy. It’s likely there are contacts and customers who’d prefer hearing from you through text messaging. If you don’t have a newsletter strategy yet, consider starting out with SMS or MMS updates. Text messaging is an effective channel for distributing content – whether that’s an aritcle you wrote, a recipe you want to share, an upcoming promotion, a helpful tip, or the latest news from your business.

You can start sending text message newsletters to your subscribers today when you sign up for a 14-day free trial (no credit card required).

The post How to start sending a text message newsletter in 2024 appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

With a 98% open rate, text messages are one of the most effective ways to share information regularly. 

And with a text messaging service like ours, you can automate the process to avoid having to write and send your messages each day manually. 

At SimpleTexting, you can send daily reminder texts in three different ways depending on your messaging and estimated frequency. We’ll walk you through them one step at a time and include some relevant real-life examples you can use as inspiration.

• Use cases for daily text reminders
• Examples of real-life daily text messages
• Send the same reminder text daily
• Send a unique reminder text daily
• Start a daily drip campaign

But first, let’s have a look at a couple of common use cases for daily text messages.

Use cases for daily text reminders

There are endless opportunities to leverage this type of text messaging strategy. So next, we’re covering some of the most popular examples and also taking a look at unique ways to use daily text reminders with your audience.

News and trends 

Sending daily reminders ensures that your audience stays up-to-date with the latest news and trends in real time. Text messages are easily accessible on mobile devices, making it convenient for people to receive updates wherever they are without needing to actively seek out information.

Sydney McDonald is a social media coach with 165k+ followers on TikTok who uses text messaging to send TikTok trends to her subscribers every day. Every day, Sydney forwards three TikTok trends to hundreds of entrepreneurs and content creators. Once the subscription is set up, she mentioned that it only requires 10 to 15 minutes of her time daily to curate content and manage the subscription list. That’s a pretty good return on investment.

“I believe that I’ve had so much success with this because I am because I am texting my customers instead of emailing them. Honestly, I think email stresses people out, and we just get too many every single day to go through.”

Sydney McDonald

Owner, Sydney on Socials

Events

Regular event reminders help keep the event top-of-mind, increasing the likelihood of attendance as people are less likely to forget about it. You might also have to make changes in schedules, venues, or additional details. Daily reminders will allow for real-time updates, ensuring attendees have the latest information. 

But text reminders don’t end with the pre-event stage. You can use them during or after the event to engage attendees and prompt them to respond to your calls to action. 

One idea is to use daily texts before, during, and after an event you’re hosting. You can simply schedule texts to send at specific times so you don’t have to do it on the fly. Then, just monitor your Inbox for questions and replies as needed.

Forecasts

Forecasts naturally tend to change a lot, so daily reminders ensure that recipients have the most current information. Whether it’s weather forecasts or market trends, daily reminders will keep your clients and prospects prepared for potential changes or opportunities.

Cale Pallas, one of the co-owners of Pallas Seeds, a family business that sells corn and soybean seeds to local farmers reads between the lines of economic grain volatility and translates that into text messages their audience understands. 

“Our customer engagement has gone up dramatically. We’re able to disseminate information and get it to our growers very quickly. That helps us to create some greater conversations about what their specific needs are and how they can grow their operation.” – Cale Pallas

Bible verses 

We see lots of churches in our user database turning to daily text reminders to send daily Bible verses. These can provide inspiration, encouragement, and comfort to individuals, offering a moment of reflection or motivation at the start or end of the day.

Text reminders provide an easily accessible format for receiving verses, allowing people to engage with the content conveniently on their mobile devices.

Emotional support 

For mental health consultancy or small businesses, daily reminders can serve as a reminder to practice self-care or stress management techniques. 

Think of the exact ways in which your clients are expecting support. This could be a series of daily tips or updates on their progress. Alternatively, you can use daily texts to share resources, links to articles, or techniques for coping with stress, anxiety, or burnout, providing valuable information to support them.

Trivia

The focus of your business matters the most when choosing what type of text reminders to send your audience. 

Let’s take Snapple for example. This tea and juice brand was looking for an innovative way to entertain its subscribers. So they opted for daily trivia messages to offer a chance for continuous learning and knowledge expansion in a fun and bite-sized format.

Sharing trivia daily is also a great way to foster a sense of community among recipients who enjoy exchanging knowledge or competing in quizzes.

Inspiration 

Send daily inspirational messages to help recipients start their day on a positive note or overcome challenges. These reminders can prompt recipients to reframe their perspectives, adopt a growth mindset, and take on new opportunities with a more optimistic outlook.

Tip: Remember to test different formats and content types by segmenting your audience. This will allow you to see what inspires your clients or prospects so you can ultimately get better engagement rates.

Action items

A fun way to get your audience to remember you is to start a challenge that will get them to interact with you on a daily basis. To do this, you need to ask them to do something.

Professional Organizer Tanisha Porter turned daily texting into a business that relies on action items. Through her virtual organization program, customers can buy a year-long subscription for her program, receiving a daily action prompt each day.

“The goal is, if you follow my prompts every day of the year, then you’ll be able to de-clutter and have an idea of what to do in order to control your spaces.

I wanted it to feel like you hired me and I’m your girlfriend who just happens to be a professional organizer, tapping you on the shoulder, helping you get a little more organized.”

Tanisha Porter

Owner, Natural Born Organizers

Daily text reminder examples

With a broader understanding of where daily text reminders can fit into your messaging strategy, let’s dig into a couple of examples brands and individuals are using. You can use these as templates to guide your own texts but remember it’s best to stay original.

Snapple Real Facts

The “Snapple Real Facts” are fun and often surprising snippets of information printed on the underside of Snapple beverage caps.

Each Snapple cap features a unique real-life fact that ranges from science, history, and world trivia so the brand decided to share these via messages too. These facts are meant to entertain and inform consumers as they enjoy their drinks. They’ve now become a trademark of the brand, adding an element of entertainment and curiosity to the brand experience.

Key takeaway: Consider what people love about your brand and double up on that.

Backcountry’s 10 Days of Deals

If you don’t want to send your audience a text message every single day but still want to stay top of mind, why not come up with a couple of creative campaigns?

Backcountry opts for regular sales campaigns where every day is dedicated to promoting a different kind of deal. No need to get extensive with these. Simply naming your product and deal like Backcountry does in these examples will work with audiences that are already familiar with your general offering.

We also love how Backcountry sent an introductory message to make sure they’ll only be sending texts to people who want to receive them. Not everyone will want to take part in your campaign, so work with your initial message to further segment your audience.

Key takeaway: Get to know your customers and their activity so you can deliver the exact content they need (and will be highly responsive to).

Smokefree.Gov’s Practice Quit daily text program

Smokefree.gov makes use of its website to get people to join their program to quit smoking. All of the instructions for joining this free program are clearly outlined on the website under a “How does it work?” section.

Whenever they’re ready for the challenge, people simply have to fill in a form with details such as their location and smoking habits. This automatically signs them up for a short five-day series of daily text messages to support them in quitting smoking.

Key takeaway: Make joining a list for daily text messages voluntary by allowing people to choose exactly what and when they’ll receive something.

How to send the same reminder text daily

You can set up a message to send automatically regularly by starting a recurring campaign.

If you plan on sending the same message every day, this is the approach for you. 

Recurring campaigns are perfect for: 

• Sending daily reminders
• Longitudinal survey questionnaires and other daily research messages 
• Sharing appointment, billing, and scheduling reminders 
• And more!

The best part about recurring campaigns is that once you set it, you can forget it! Here’s how it works. 

Setting up a daily reminder text as a recurring campaign 

1. On the left-hand side of your dashboard, select Campaigns. Then, the blue New button at the top of the window. 

2. Proceed as if you were creating a standard one-off campaign — give your campaign a name and type your message in the text message box. Then, select the audience you want to send to from the dropdown.

3. Scroll down and under Send on, select Recurring from the menu.

4. Select what date you want your campaign to start sending, then specify the time you’d like your message to go out. For example, if you wanted to send your message every day at 8 AM, you would enter 0800. 

5. Under Repeats, select Daily.

6. If you have a set time for your daily text messages to stop sending, select the Ending date button and pick a date from the calendar below. If it’s open-ended, choose Never. 

7. Select Next.

8. Review your scheduled text messages, and if everything looks good, press the blue Schedule button. You’re done!

Ending your daily recurring campaign 

If you selected Never as your daily campaign end option, you can stop the series at any time. 

1. Go back to the campaign dashboard and select Scheduled from the dropdown. 

2. Select the campaign you want to end and select the Archive icon at the top of the campaign. 

3. If you only want to cancel one campaign in the series, select Archive only this campaign. If you wish to cancel the recurring series altogether, select Archive all future campaigns.

How to send a unique reminder text daily

Alternatively, if you plan on sending different daily reminder text messages to your audience each day, you have the option to schedule them ahead of time. 

While this approach does require manual intervention, it still helps you save valuable time by allowing you to set up your messages days, weeks, and months in advance.

Scheduling a text can be done in four simple steps:

1. Navigate to Campaign, then New. Give your campaign a name, select your intended recipients, and compose your SMS message.

2. Under Send on, select Scheduled. Choose the date when you want your message to be sent and the time you’d like your message to be delivered. Then, click Next.

3. Preview your campaign and when you’re ready, click the blue Schedule button.

How to start a daily drip text campaign

Last but not least, you can create the equivalent of a text message drip campaign with our autoresponders feature. When someone joins a list, you can send them a series of automated text messages.

Here’s how to set one up:

Alternative methods to schedule daily reminder text messages

If scheduling your daily reminders directly through SimpleTexting doesn’t work for you, we still have a few tricks up our sleeves.

SimpleTexting is also integrated with Zapier. This makes it possible to integrate our texting platform with thousands of popular apps. 

For example, if you’re using a tool like Google Calendars, you can use Zapier to trigger SMS reminders each day.

Looking for fresh ways to connect with customers daily? Try our two-week SimpleTexting trial —absolutely free! No credit card is needed.

Meghan Tocci originally authored this piece. Alexandra Cote contributed on 2/12/24.

The post How to send daily text messages and reminders appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

The fact is, 89% of job seekers prefer texting to emails or calls.

If you want to stand out among the thousands of near-identical job postings on Indeed or LinkedIn, sending your posting straight to your candidates’ text inboxes is a sure bet.

Not only that, you can conduct almost the entire recruitment process through text, from first contact to hiring paperwork. 

Intrigued? Well, let me introduce you to the hiring phenomenon known as text-to-apply. Let’s get into it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What is text to apply?
• A text to apply example
• Why use text to apply services?
• How to set up text to apply
• FAQs

What is text-to-apply?

Text-to-apply is an SMS process that allows job applicants to text a keyword to a phone number and receive an automatic response with:

1. A direct link to a job application,
2. a document outlining the role or position,
3. or a link to more information as they decide whether to apply.

Text-to-apply is also known as text-to-hire and text-to-apply software.

Typically, text-to-apply starts with an advertisement posted by the employer. The advertisement’s call to action is to text the business’s phone number with a specific word or phrase. When a candidate texts the number, they receive an automated response with more information.

A text-to-apply example

Here’s an example of it in action.

This is an example from Casey's, a gas station and convenience store that hires with a simple text-to-join keyword posted on their parking structures.

When candidates text the keyword to their number, they receive an auto-confirmation message with more information about open positions.

Recruiters may also use text-to-apply to gather additional information directly from candidates' text messages.

Why use text-to-apply software?

More than 18 billion text messages are sent every day, so it’s hardly surprising that 81% of Americans report using texting daily.

That’s why text-to-apply is so convenient for jobseekers — they’re already texting all the time. With no special app to download, the application process stays simple for both sender and recipient, and qualified hires are just a text message away.

The prevalence of texting isn’t the only reason you should be using SMS for recruiting. It’s also:

• Fast and personal: When someone texts in your keyword, you can respond immediately (instantly if you use an auto-confirmation message) and continue to communicate one-on-one with them.
• Modern: SMS is an excellent way to show job candidates that your company is technologically up-to-date, responsive, and efficient.
• Low-pressure: Filling out a lengthy job application can seem like more trouble than it’s worth. Texting, on the other hand, is a quick and “business casual” way to send in job applications.

Texting is extra useful for hiring processes where:

• People aren’t always at their desks, such as in retail or hospitality. 
• Hiring managers are doing high-volume, competitive, or rapid recruitment.
• Recruiters have existing access to print and advertising budgets, signs, billboards, and subway ads to post keywords or QR codes.

How to set up text-to-apply

Text-to-hire is straightforward to set up and works in the same way as text-to-join. Here’s the breakdown. 

1. Choose a business texting service

You'll need a business text messaging platform to start. As you've probably guessed, SimpleTexting meets that definition.

SimpleTexting customers use our service to send mass texts (to staff, customers, volunteers, etc.) and converse with individuals one-on-one.

Our tool works well for independent businesses that want a simple, effective way to recruit talent. The use case that works well for our software is for quick-hire positions, like in the service industry, where competition is fierce and talent is tech-savvy.

When you sign up, you'll get a free trial that allows you to send a text message to your own phone number to see how it works. When you buy the software, you'll choose your business's text-enabled phone number. Then you'll be ready to rock with setup for text message recruiting.

2. Create a text-to-apply keyword to use in your "now hiring" advertisements

A keyword is a short, memorable word or phrase that jobseekers can text to your phone number to agree to receive future texts from your team.

For example, a coffee chain might ask jobseekers to text the keyword “BARISTA” to their number.

To make sure that ad works, you'll set up a keyword in SimpleTexting.

Just log into your account and click Keywords in the left menu. Name the keyword and create a list where you'll add people's numbers.

3. Draft your automatic text replies for applicants

After a candidate texts the keyword “BARISTA,” they’ll receive an automated response. There are several different ways that you can approach your auto-confirmation message.

The option(s) you choose will depend on the role you’re hiring for, your hiring process, and how quickly you need to hire. For example, your confirmation message could simply ask for a reply for basic information:

Here are four ways to collect information via text-to-apply:

• Ask for candidates to reply with key information like role interests, full-time or part-time, and number of years.
• Send a link to an online application (check out that Casey's example above to see what this looks like).
• Share a link to schedule a phone interview.
• Send a PDF via text with more information on the role.

4. Optional: Screen candidates with text message questions.

Pre-screening candidates through text messages could be helpful to collect enough information to make an interview decision quickly.

You can screen candidates by text automatically using our custom fields and data collection features.

First, write down the screening questions you'd like to ask. SimpleTexting offers several default fields to collect the basics like:

• What is your name?
• What is your email address?

But you may want to also ask several other questions related specifically to your business and open positions:

• Are you authorized to work in the United States?
• What position are you most interested in?
• At what location would you like to work?
• How many years of experience in the industry do you have?
• Why would you like to work for us?
• What is your superpower?

You'll create custom fields for these sorts of questions. It's as easy as logging into SimpleTexting, selecting Contacts, clicking Custom fields, and tapping the New custom field button.

Next, you'll set up what we call data collection to actually ask these questions via text messages and get the information you need from each candidate.

In SimpleTexting, navigate to Apps in the left menu, select Data Collection, and hit the New data collection button. Name the data collection and select the Keyword to collect data from (I like naming the collection the same as the keyword).

Now you'll see Prompts. This is where you'll select the default and custom fields, then write your questions for the applications to reply to.

Let's pretend our full list of prescreen questions are:

• Let’s start with the basics. What is your first name?
• Great. What's your last name?
• Thank you, %%firstname%%. What's your email address?
• Are you legally authorized to work in the United States? Reply “Yes” or “No”.
• What position are you applying for? Reply "Server", "Bartender", or "Cook".
• We value our %%position%%s around here! Where would you like to work? Reply "546 Main Ave" or "846 1st Ave N".
• How many years have you worked in the service industry, %%firstname%%? Reply with digits like "1".
• Sweet. Two more questions, that's it! Why would you like to work for us? Reply up to 160 characters.
• OK, last question (just for fun): What's your superpower? Reply up to 160 characters.
• Thanks, %%firstname%%! We'll reach out via text within 2 business days with next steps. Text us if you have questions!

In Data Collection, you'll Add question for each, choose the SimpleTexting field, then simply copy/paste these questions into each Question field.

Then add that last Follow up message and hit Create data collection. You're done!

5. Advertise your text-to-apply keyword

The more places you advertise your keyword, the more applications you’ll receive. 

The rule here is to show off your keyword anywhere interested candidates might see it. You can promote your keyword on social media, in physical locations, on your website, and anywhere candidates interact with your brand.

Text to apply FAQs

I hope you’ve got a good idea of how to get your SMS recruiting program up and running. For a little bonus, here are some additional questions recruiters often ask. 

If the answer you’re looking for isn’t here, the SimpleTexting team would be more than happy to help. Just use the chat icon at the bottom of your screen.

Get started today with text-to-hire

A smooth, efficient hiring process can make all the difference in drawing candidates to your business. Hopefully, you’ve got a good headstart now on setting up text recruiting — you’ll have your job postings filled in no time.

Not yet a SimpleTexting customer? You can get started here with a free trial. Send a text to yourself today to see how it works.

The post How to set up text-to-apply for your job openings appeared first on SMS Marketing & Text Marketing Services – Try It For Free.

The same principle applies to your texts. The most important step in the SMS marketing process is getting people to read your messages in the first place.

Just as the filmmaker might invite people to see their first screening, you can encourage others to join your SMS list with a text-to-subscribe service. Let me walk you through this technique.

What is text-to-subscribe?

Text-to-subscribe, sometimes called text-to-join or text-to-sign-up, is an easy way for your audience to opt in to your SMS messages or emails. They send a text to your number to automatically join your SMS or email list.

In a few simple steps, you’ll effectively increase your mass texting and email marketing lists and set yourself up for future success in communicating with those contacts.

Check out this example of what it looks like when someone joins a text-to-subscribe program:

How does text-to-join work?

Text-to-join programs are simple to set up and convenient for your audience to use.

Here’s what a typical text-to-subscribe campaign looks like:

1. You create your text-to-subscribe keyword.
2. You promote your keyword.
3. Your customer texts the keyword to your number.
4. They receive an auto-confirmation message that includes compliance information.
5. You send your first SMS campaign to your subscribers.

1. You create your text-to-subscribe keyword

A keyword is a word or phrase that customers text to your phone number to sign up for your SMS messages. It can consist of multiple words, but it’ll be written as one word (e.g., “join us” becomes “JOINUS”). Make it easy to spell and remember so your audience can easily message it to you.

For example, Holiday Stationstores uses the keyword HOLIDAY in its gas pump ads, making it a cinch to join its list:

2. You promote your text-to-join program

After creating the SMS keyword for your text-to-subscribe program, you’ll want to encourage customers to subscribe. 

Invite them via social media, email, and other marketing channels to text your keyword to your number, and watch your text-to-join mailing list grow before your eyes! This is also a great opportunity to use physical media, like Holiday’s gas pump ad above.

3. Your customer texts your keyword to your number

Now, the ball is in your customer’s court. They’ll send a message to your number that includes your keyword, which will trigger the signup. I wanted to see how Holiday Stationstores’ program works, so I sent “HOLIDAY” to the provided number.

4. They receive an auto-reply confirmation and compliance information

As part of your text-to-subscribe program, you’ll set up an automatic reply to confirm that someone has joined. In Holiday Stationstores’ case, they have an extra step for confirmation.

Here, you should also share information about what your customers should expect from your SMS program to comply with mass texting regulations. Mention who you are, what text content the recipient is signing up for, and opt-out instructions.

5. You send your first text marketing campaign

Once people sign up for your texts, you’re ready to send your first SMS marketing campaign: A single message or series of messages with a marketing goal behind them.

These campaigns can contain anything important or valuable to your contacts, so feel free to get creative! For instance, Holiday Stationstores’ main text campaign involves weekly deals.

Need inspiration? Bookmark these 16 SMS campaign ideas for later.

How to set up text-to-join

Now that you know how a text-to-join service works, how do you set one up in the first place? 

First, you’ll need an SMS marketing platform. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for SimpleTexting free for 14 days to test drive our text-to-subscribe service.

To set up a text-to-subscribe program:

1. Create your SMS keyword

Begin by creating your keyword using the text-to-join service of your choice. We’ll use SimpleTexting in this walkthrough.

Hover over the Keywords option in the left-hand menu of your SimpleTexting dashboard and click the + icon that appears. It’ll take you to the New Keyword page.

Let’s pretend that we’re creating a text-to-subscribe program for a pet grooming service called Fluff Stuff Grooming. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll make the keyword FLUFFSTUFF. So, we’ll enter FLUFFSTUFF into the Keyword name field, where you name your keyword.

Then, we’ll decide what list a person will join when they text that keyword. In this example, we’ll create a new list by choosing Add to new list and entering Fluff Stuff Grooming into the New list name field. But, you can also add to an existing list if you want to create separate text-to-join campaigns for the same list.

2. Write an auto-confirmation message

In SimpleTexting, you create your auto-confirmation message at the same time as your keyword, so you don’t have to move windows for this next step. Go down to the Auto-confirmation message and Free compliance message fields to continue the process.

In the Auto-confirmation message field, you can write up to 160 characters of text and include emoji, shortened links, and media. Use as much of this space as you can to share compliance-related information like the content of your upcoming texts and opt-out instructions.

Under Free compliance message, you’ll see the free compliance message that comes with your auto-confirmation text. We already set it up for you, so you just have to determine how many messages you’ll send per month. This message will cover opt-out instructions and a data rate disclaimer, so you’ll only need to mention your identity and what kinds of texts to expect in your auto-confirmation message for full compliance.

Recommended reading: Welcome text messages tips for new customers

If you’d like, you can set up a series of autoresponders to create an onboarding drip SMS campaign. Go to Autoresponders in your left-hand menu and click the + to make a new one. You’ll have similar options to the New Keyword menu plus the time you want to send it relative to when the recipient joined your list.

One best practice to follow when you set up your text-to-subscribe welcome experience is to share a contact card. Your recipient will get a text they can click on to automatically add you to their contacts so they know it’s you messaging them.

Set up a contact card in SimpleTexting by clicking the Settings option in the left-hand menu of your dashboard, then Numbers underneath. Click on Edit to the right of the number involved in your text-to-subscribe program, then select Edit in the upper-right corner of the Number settings box. Scroll down to the Contact card section to fill out your name, email, number, and other contact info.

3. Share your keyword with your audience.

Promote your keyword anywhere your customers will see it so they can easily sign up for your texts.

This article on ten places to advertise your keyword should give you some ideas, but for starters, consider placing your keyword on:

• Your website
• Your social media
• Your storefront
• Any paperwork you hand out to your customers
• Your business cards
• Direct mail
• Physical ads like billboards

Here’s what a flyer with the FLUFFSTUFF keyword could look like.

Note the compliance disclaimer at the bottom of the flyer. Any place you share your keyword should include the following details:

• The keyword and number to text it to
• A statement that the recipient agrees to receive text messages when they text the keyword
• The types of content you will include in your texts
• How often the recipient will receive texts
• A disclaimer that message and data rates apply
• Your terms and conditions and privacy policy (or links to them, as you can see in the flyer)

4. Analyze your success

After you run your new text list sign-up program for a little while, check your text-to-join service’s analytics to see how effective your marketing efforts are. SimpleTexting links analytics directly to keywords, so it’s a snap to see the connection between your keyword and results.

Click Analytics in SimpleTexting’s left-hand menu to find your SMS messages’ stats. You’ll see tabs for analytics on messaging and subscribers at the top.

Go to the Detailed breakdown section of your preferred tab and click Keywords to analyze performance by keywords.

5. Send marketing campaigns to your new subscribers

Now that you have a list full of subscribers, start sending texts to your new and improved text list. They should fit the description you gave in your compliance messages, but otherwise, your creativity’s the limit.

Send a new campaign in SimpleTexting by hovering over Campaigns in the left-hand menu, then clicking the + that appears. After you name your campaign in the Campaign name field and choose whether you want to send an SMS or MMS message, write the content of your message in the Text message field. Choose the list linked to your keyword and schedule the time you want to send it.

Recommended reading: 11 SMS marketing use cases

Collect email addresses with text-to-subscribe

Now that you know how text-to-join works, let’s look at how you would gather your contacts’ email addresses as well. You have two options in SimpleTexting: The data collection app and email integrations.

How to collect emails with data collection in SimpleTexting

SimpleTexting’s data collection app adds another message to your auto-confirmation sequence that asks the subscriber for information. Set your requested info as an email address, and SimpleTexting will store it in the contact’s information. Read our Help Center guide to get the full rundown. 

Tip: You can get more than just phone numbers or email addresses from new contacts who sign up using your text-to-join program. You can also collect customer details like first names, last names, zip codes, or even specific product preferences through the data collection app.

How to collect emails through SimpleTexting’s email integrations

SimpleTexting’s Zapier integration allows you to add new text message contacts to your favorite email marketing platform, like Constant Contact and Drip. We also have a native Mailchimp SMS integration. 

Here’s how a text-to-join email integration works:

1. Your customer texts your keyword to your number.
2. They receive a confirmation message requesting their email address.
3. Zapier or Mailchimp automatically adds their address to your email marketing platform

What to prepare before implementing text-to-subscribe

Before you start your text-to-join program, check these tasks off of your list:

• Brainstorm what you’ll send: Create an idea bank in advance for more consistent texting in the future. Filter our success stories by the Text to Join use case for inspiration.
• Create a schedule or calendar: Build a calendar for your texts so you can schedule them in advance.
• Choose your text-to-signup platform: Get a texting platform that fits your business needs. Here are some good choices for small businesses.
• Set up your business texting number: You have a variety of number formats to choose from, including short codes, A2P DLC, text-to-landline, and toll-free.
• Understand the essentials of business texting compliance: Brush up on our guide to text message compliance to ensure you’re following the law.

3 text-to-join examples from real business owners

Need some inspiration for your text-to-join program? Here are three real-world examples of successful text-to-join campaigns:

1. Artist Couture

The team at Artist Couture noticed that though they received a substantial amount of website traffic, most didn’t follow them on social or subscribe to their email list They needed a convenient way to keep in touch with potential customers.After setting up a text-to-subscribe keyword, the team added a mobile sign-up widget to collect sign-ups.

A day after a contact subscribes, they receive an automated message with a 10% off coupon. The result? Artist Couture’s SMS subscriber list grew by 670% and generated $4,000 in sales.

2. Mendocino Farms

Mendocino Farms searched for an easy way to announce the launch of online ordering across its 27 restaurant locations. 

Their biggest question, though, was how to let all of their customers know when online ordering was available at their favorite location.

The team created text-to-join keywords for each location and invited customers to subscribe. Then, new subscribers received an automated message asking for their email address. The whole set-up process only took the Mendocino Farms team a day to complete.

3. Blu Moon Design

After moving her children’s clothing business from eBay to a dedicated website, Kristi Brady of Blu Moon Design wanted her marketing to stand out from other online stores.

Kristi knew that her primary customer base — busy moms — almost always have their phones close by, so she turned to SMS marketing. 

To build her list, she created the keyword “blumoon” and invited people to text it to her number to learn about upcoming sales and promotions. She offers new subscribers a 10% off coupon to boost sales, and she’s seen a 15% redemption rate.

7 real examples of text-to-subscribe programs

Since you can share a keyword, a number, and compliance information over any medium you can think of, SMS marketers can get creative with their promotions. Here are seven real-life examples of text-to-subscribe program promotions to inspire yours.

1. Holiday Stationstores window cleaning station ad

Your storefront covers wherever you do business. For Holiday Stationstores, that makes its gas pumping area fair game. It posts this ad for its truck fleet fuel card above its window cleaning station:

2. Holiday Stationstores bathroom mirror notice

Your indoor spaces work well for advertising your text-to-join keyword, too. Holiday Stationstores posts this text-to-subscribe notice in its bathrooms to give human trafficking survivors discretion when they ask for help:

3. Fargodome display

As you learned in the previous example, not all text-to-subscribe programs need to be promotional. Fargodome has a text-to-join function for people who need to report an incident at its stadium, which it promotes in its hallways:

4. Bob Bentz’s book presentations

Bob Bentz, the CEO of the mobile-first marketing agency Purplegator, regularly performs public speaking to promote his books on mobile marketing. When he talks about his newest book, he asks the audience to text “Relevance” to the number he provides for a chance to win his book.

“This not only gets the audience engaged in my presentation, but it also gives me a database that I can market to later. Moreover, it promotes the book signing that I will be doing after the presentation,” Bob says.

5. Smartify’s social media promotions

At the smart tech company Smartify, the marketing team promotes their text-to-join keyword everywhere their customers interact with the brand. On top of packaging and receipts, Smartify also promotes its keyword on social media. Here’s a carousel image sharing its text-to-subscribe list for customers interested in a home visit:

6. Blume’s Instagram post

Sharing your keyword on social media presents a conundrum: How will you split the information you need to share between your image and caption? Blume strikes a good balance in this Instagram post promoting its giveaway. This skincare brand gets a gold star for highlighting the most important info in its image and listing all of the necessary compliance details in its caption:

7. DC Batman’s tweet

A touch of meta humor never hurts. DC’s Batman parodies the text-to-join signup process in this Tweet promoting the keyword for the DC Community:

Start your text-to-join program in minutes

Not ready to commit to a text-to-join service just yet? We get it. That’s why we offer a risk-free trial of SimpleTexting.

It’s completely free for 14 days — no credit card or contract needed, so you can try out a text-to-join campaign for yourself.

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