11 SMS Marketing Use Cases to Explore for Your New Text Marketing Program

Oftentimes, business owners and marketers sign up for an SMS marketing platform to send sales announcements and product updates. 

This is a fantastic start, but there are so many more ways to increase sales and keep customers coming back with text message marketing.

I’ll share 11 SMS marketing use cases to get the most out of your text messaging platform and hit your revenue goals. 

11 popular SMS marketing use cases:

1. Welcome texts
2. Promotional texts (sales, deals, and discounts)
3. Two-way texts
4. Polls and surveys
5. Contests and giveaways
6. Shopping cart abandonment
7. Drip campaigns
8. SMS alerts
9. Automated responses
10. Customer review requests
11. Mobile recruitment

A welcome text is the first message customers receive from you, so it’s your chance to set expectations and make a good first impression. 

Welcome texts can include:

• A thank you for joining
• How often they’ll receive texts from you
• How to unsubscribe
• An invitation to ask questions
• A coupon code or special offer
• A call-to-action, like a link to your website

Make your welcome text even more special by personalizing it with the contact’s first name, which can increase click-through rates by 71%. 

If you don’t have their name in your SMS marketing platform, you can ask them for it with data collection, which gathers and stores the information automatically.

Then, when you send a mass text, you can add a custom field to the message to insert each contact’s name automatically.

Who doesn’t love a good deal? Sending promotional messages via SMS will almost guarantee that your contacts will see it and act on it. 

Promotional text message ideas:

• Sale announcements
• Exclusive discounts
• Limited-time offers
• Product launch alerts

If you offer a wide range of products and services, consider segmenting your contact list by customer interests (using past purchase data or by asking them to opt-in via a keyword). Doing so can help improve your SMS campaign performance and keep contacts from unsubscribing.

Use two-way text messaging to provide one-on-one support, close deals, and connect with customers. It’s a convenient way to incorporate conversational commerce into your strategy, which can lead to more sales. 

That’s what one company, Shower Door Experts, discovered when they text-enabled their phone number. Thanks to the convenience that texting provides, SMS now accounts for 10% of their lead volume.

SMS Text-to-vote polls are an engaging way to learn more about your audience’s preferences. 

For example, if you’re a pastry chef, you could ask your customers to decide what new pastry-filling flavors they’d like to try. With this data, you’ll know what your customers are interested in and will be less likely to stock something you can’t sell.

With SimpleTexting, it’s easy to launch a text-to-vote poll—simply create a keyword like “FLAVOR” and ask your customers to text it to your phone number.

Then, announce the winner to everyone who voted and let them know when the product will be available. On the day of the launch, send them a promo code to encourage sales.

💡 Here is a step-by-step video and guide to running a Text-to-vote Poll.

Are you using contests, sweepstakes, or giveaways to generate leads for your business? From product raffles to viral Instagram photo contests and beyond, this form of marketing can effectively increase brand awareness. 

Text messaging is one of the easiest ways to run a contest. All you have to do is promote a keyword that participants can text to your number to enter, and you select a winner from the participants.

By combining a Text-to-win sweepstakes with our Autoresponders feature, you can send a series of texts to entrants with offers and information about when the next competition will be.

According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate continues to be 69.57% across most industries. Recouping these lost orders is a massive revenue opportunity, and SMS makes it simple.

Abandoned cart SMS reminders are texts that send automatically after an online shopper adds products to their cart but leaves without finishing their checkout.

These messages encourage customers to complete their orders and are less likely to get ignored than emails, which can land in spam folders.

One-off campaigns are great for product announcements or time-sensitive offers. But, wherever possible, we recommend automating your messages.

Set up a drip campaign, which is an automated series of messages, to nurture leads and keep your brand top of mind.

You can create drip campaigns with:

• Valuable blog articles
• Weekly tips and tricks
• Information about your brand’s story
• Product suggestions

Creating a text alert system for your business lets you send urgent and non-urgent messages to individuals or large groups of people simultaneously.

For example, businesses may use text alerts to:

• Notify customers of changes in operating hours
• Send order status updates
• Increase conversions by alerting salespeople of a new lead
• Provide account access information

Responding quickly to their questions can help nurture leads and prevent customer frustration. 

One of the easiest ways to answer frequently asked questions is to automate responses with triggers. Triggers are keywords that send autoresponder messages.

For instance, you could create the trigger HOURS, which would prompt a message with your business hours.

Customer reviews aren’t just a confidence booster. They can help increase your business’ visibility and influence sales.

People are more likely to leave a review when prompted, so setting up an automated SMS review campaign that sends after a purchase can help you get more feedback (which can help attract prospective buyers).

It’s how the beauty brand Matykos successfully collects reviews.

Following the survey, we also find lots of other interesting facts about our products. Over time, this has helped our production to get better and better. –Matykos Beauty Representative

While recruiting isn’t exactly marketing in a traditional sense, promoting job openings to qualified candidates is all about targeting the right people and getting them to take action.

To attract relevant and qualified applicants, you can set up specific keywords for your open positions. 

For example, if you’re hiring call center agents, you can ask applicants to text AGENT to your number for more information on your open call center positions.

Advertise the keyword on your website, social media, posters, and anywhere else job seekers will see it.

You can then automate a text that contains a link to more details about the job. The best part is that you now have a database of candidates you can text the next time you have a job opening.

This piece was originally published August 13, 2023. It was refreshed May 30, 2023. Drew Wilkinson and Dani Henion contributed to this piece.