Using SMS marketing to send appointment reminders or announce sales is a great start — but that only scratches the surface of what this channel can do.
Given text messages’ sky-high open rates and mind-blowing ROI potential ($71 in revenue for every $1 spent, according to G2), it’s in your best interest to tap into SMS messaging for more than just the basics — especially in an era of ongoing budget constraints and ever-shifting consumer behaviors.
To get the most from your enterprise SMS platform, it’s time to think outside the box and explore a few more SMS marketing use cases. To help, we’ve rounded up several examples, tips to jumpstart your creativity, powerful testimonials, and other insights to support your strategy.
What Can You Learn From SMS Marketing Use Cases?
As a marketing leader, it’s easy to feel strategically tapped — especially when audience expectations and preferences are changing at breakneck speed. Just when you feel like you’ve mastered one channel or tactic, you’re faced with an overnight algorithm change or the next new, impossible-to-ignore social platform that flips everything on its side.
Fortunately, SMS marketing is much more steadfast and predictable, and works exceptionally well across generations, industries, and audience types. And that’s precisely why it’s wise to find new ways to leverage creative SMS marketing across initiatives and campaigns.
While not all SMS marketing use cases will apply to your organization, understanding how other successful businesses apply SMS is a great way to uncover new ways to use mass texting to reach your marketing goals. No matter what you want to achieve, there’s a way to fit SMS into the mix.
10 Practical SMS Marketing Use Cases for Business
Whether you’re looking for new ways to scale the ROI of your mass texting service and prove its value, or you’re creatively stumped and hoping to gather inspiration, these popular SMS marketing use cases can put you on the right path:
Promotions and Flash Sales
One of the most practical and common ways to use SMS marketing is to share time-sensitive deals or exclusive offers. For example, a sports team might use SMS to boost ticket sales by running a flash sale on season passes, while a software company might run limited-time pricing on a new add-on feature. By creating urgency with language like “Today only” or “Ends at midnight,” these messages can help drive fast conversions.
Appointment Reminders and Confirmations>
Sending automated texts to confirm bookings and remind customers about upcoming appointments can help reduce no-shows and streamline calendar management. For example, a university might use this type of message to make sure students don’t forget their academic advising sessions, or a CPA firm might send reminders to help eliminate the revenue and time lost to missed appointments.
Event Invitations and Updates
As any event marketer can attest, sometimes the most difficult parts of managing an event are sending invites and keeping on-site attendees informed on what to do and where to go. SMS is an excellent way to solve both of these issues by helping you communicate essential details in a quick and highly consumable format. For example, a tech company hosting a user conference can use mass messaging to sell tickets, share “know before you go” information, and provide real-time updates about sessions throughout the event.
Emergency Alerts and Notifications
One of the greatest benefits of SMS messaging is how quickly you can reach your audience — especially if you use a solution like TrueDialog, which offers short codes and long codes, and unparalleled delivery. And this speediness makes it the perfect medium for communicating time-sensitive information. For example, a university might send an SMS alert to notify the campus community about a safety issue, or a soccer stadium might text ticket holders if a match has been postponed due to severe weather.
Internal Communications and Updates
Mass messaging is a helpful tool for sharing non-emergency-related internal communications, too. For example, a large company might use SMS messaging to keep employees informed about facility updates — like changes in on-site security, parking, or maintenance issues.</span
Loyalty and Reward Program Updates
From university students and sports fans to business clients, everyone likes to feel recognized and special. Because using an enterprise SMS platform like TrueDialog makes it so easy to segment by audience, texting can be a convenient method for strengthening relationships with specific, high-value contacts. For example, you might use texts to share early access to promotions for VIPs or keep rewards program members aware of special benefits.
Customer Feedback and Surveys
Are you curious whether your customers are satisfied? Or looking for user feedback to help inform new products and services? Text messaging is useful for sending quick pulse checks or gathering customer insights after a key interaction (like a purchase or appointment). While surveys can get lost in messy email inboxes, SMS messages are harder to miss and more likely to yield higher response rates.
Shipping Notifications and Order Tracking
Making it easy to track shipments is an easy way to boost loyalty and satisfaction. Best of all, order tracking can be a low-lift effort if you use a solution with a powerful SMS API — like TrueDialog — so you can set up custom workflows that trigger a text when a product ships. While this SMS marketing use case is common in retail, it’s also useful for sports franchises selling fan merch or university bookstores mailing textbooks and course materials.
Lead Nurturing and Drip Campaigns
Sometimes, a personalized, well-timed text message may be the push interested prospects need to finally convert. From one-off lead nurturing efforts to multi-touch drip campaigns, SMS marketing helps keep your brand top of mind. Successful B2B software companies and financial services organizations often leverage this channel to follow up after contacts fill out a form, request a demo, or download content.
Educational Reminders for Higher Ed and Training
College students often juggle numerous obligations and sometimes struggle to stay organized. By sending reminders about financial aid deadlines, academic advising sign-ups, course enrollment, and other time-sensitive events, universities can help students stay on track. Meanwhile, organizations can use the same method to nudge professionals about training program requirements.
Creative SMS Marketing That Stands Out
When it comes to engaging your audience via SMS marketing, fast delivery is only half the battle.
Sure, most recipients read their SMS messages nearly immediately (90% of people read texts within three minutes of delivery, according to some sources), but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll take action. Whether you’re launching a new product, announcing a promotion, or attempting to re-engage an inactive audience segment, you need creativity to captivate your contacts and drive them toward conversion.
Here are a few tips (with examples) to help make sure your SMS marketing campaigns stand out:
- Tell a story
Instead of simply communicating information, build it into a narrative.
Last season, our kicker scored in the last minute and earned us the cup 🏆
Now it’s your turn. Text WIN by 6PM for your shot at free season passes. - Use emojis as appropriate
Well-placed emojis are great for grabbing attention and increasing opens. (But stick to one or two per message — no need to overdo it.)
Ready to take the next step toward retirement?
🏖️ Schedule your mid-year review today: [LINK]
Our advisors are here to help you stay on track.
- Personalize whenever possible
In addition to including recipients’ names, consider referencing recent activity (or lack thereof) to make messages feel more tailored and less like a generic mass message.
Hi David, we noticed you haven’t logged into your dashboard this week.
Need help getting started or have questions? Our team is here for you → [LINK] - Encourage interactivity
Transform one-way interactions into an opportunity for recipients to engage directly. For example, you can ask them to reply with a word to trigger a specific response or workflow.
🎓Fall open house is next week! Want a reminder the day before?
Reply YES, and we’ll text you the details + parking info.
Real Results: SMS Marketing Testimonials
If those SMS campaign examples still aren’t enough to convince you about the power of SMS marketing, or you need a little help getting buy-in from senior decision-makers, consider these sms marketing testimonial snippets:
- “In today’s world of spam calls, having that text notification go out will increase your connection rates on telephone by 60%. That was one of the reasons behind us adding text as a communication channel. It’s simply the most effective way of getting a response, and I can’t preach it enough.”
– Larry King, Founder, ShapeNet Software - “Implementing a unified SMS platform is one of the things that we attribute to meeting and exceeding our enrollment goals. I don’t spend a lot of time with tasks in TrueDialog. It’s mostly automated, and the API is simple to use. It’s just straightforward and does the job. We’re really happy with it.”
– Jay Steele, Unified Communications Administrator in Higher Ed - “When we look at this year’s campaign, we saw a return on ad spend related to text messaging of 1,200%… Beyond the actual return on ad spend, we saw better conversion rates for text messaging than we did even for email. So email averaged 0.03% total transaction conversion, whereas the text messaging was 0.16%, which is 433% higher.”
– Bryan Hafemeyer, Director of Digital Analytics, The Minnesota Wild - “TrueDialog allows us to deliver content-rich messages, including MMS. And even emojis, which are becoming so popular these days. The platform helps us maintain full deliverability and engage in direct two-way communications with our customers.”
– Eric Reamer, COO, LCO Financial Services - “I am surprised at how many more text messages we get responses on and how much more interaction we have with students. Texting is a much more efficient and effective way to communicate, and now we have a single system to manage student data and student communications.”
– Kristi Hill, Senior Application Programmer Analyst
Choosing the Right Platform for Your SMS Campaigns
Without the right SMS marketing solution, sending mass messages can be a massive headache — especially if you choose a solution that hinders your growth or lacks key functionality necessary within your industry.
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you weigh your options:
Will the SMS platform integrate into my tech stack?
An SMS solution can quickly become useless if it doesn’t connect with the tools you rely on every day. (Or requires cumbersome setup processes or third-party integration apps like Zapier to work as intended.) Always take a moment to ensure a provider integrates with your CRM and marketing suite and has an API to support more specialized use cases.
For example, TrueDialog natively integrates with Salesforce (Sales and Marketing Cloud), HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, and more.
Is the platform built to scale as my organization’s needs grow?
It can be frustrating when you invest in a service only to discover it lacks the feature-rich experience you need to support high-volume messaging. For example, products like HubSpot SMS can be useful for small businesses, but their pricing structure and functionality aren’t the best fit for large organizations that have to send thousands (or millions) of messages at once.
On the flip side, TrueDialog is designed specifically for enterprise-sized needs and offers unmatched deliverability no matter how big your contact lists become.
Is the SMS solution’s pricing fair and transparent?
Some providers reel in customers with low pricing but make up for it with carrier markups, fees for adding new users, or unexpected charges to add on features that should come standard. At TrueDialog, we keep SMS pricing transparent. Our customers don’t have to deal with hidden fees or unexpected costs, and we include dozens of premium-level features even in our lowest-cost plan.
Does the provider prioritize security and compliance?
Before signing a contract with an SMS platform, make sure it has the infrastructure and processes to protect your data, mitigate security risks, and keep you compliant with industry regulations.
Because we work with highly regulated industries like higher ed and financial services, we use leading security protocols, like single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA), meet regulatory standards set forth by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), and use ISO 9001 and TX-RAMP certified infrastructure.
Final Thoughts on Using SMS Marketing to Drive Engagement
Unlike many other channels, SMS marketing gives you a direct line to your audience — and a proven way to boost engagement, conversions, and long-term loyalty. By using mass texting strategically and creatively (and exploring a wide range of new SMS marketing use cases), you can make sure your messages reach contacts fast, resonate, and drive measurable results.
