The Importance of Pricing in Whitelabel SMS Marketing

The importance of white label SMS marketing towards the growth of a business is steadily growing and becoming relevant. While the number of direct leads that can be contacted is very high, still it requires knowledge of key areas in advertising, message relevance and time sensitivity.

White label SMS marketing can help you utilize your business’s unique product or service without investing in infrastructure or technology creation, so you can focus on building your brand and selling your services while simplifying the conversion path for your customers.

To fully profit and take advantage of white label SMS marketing, you need an active list. And a great way to build a list of contacts is to use a short code, and a SMS keyword. Shortcodes are 5 or 6 digit phone numbers that you’ll be assigned by your SMS provider in order to build your list of subscribers, these are easy-to-remember numbers that customers text your keyword to in order to sign-up for further messages.

As with shortcodes some companies will charge you per keyword, while others let you have unlimited keywords, it all depends on the pricing structure.

Keywords on the other hand are the perfect tool to grow your white label SMS marketing contact list that you can advertise on posters, direct mailers, emails, adverts, your website and on social media.

It’s important that you find the right white label SMS marketing company that can be able to track the use of your keywords and also allow you to track customers that opt in and opt out to your white label SMS marketing campaigns.

To get started with white label SMS marketing, you need to hire a text marketing service; they will provide you with access to a short code for your white label SMS marketing campaigns.

To get a short code for your white label SMS marketing campaign, you either follow one of two ways to get the short code:

1. You can either share a short code provided by your SMS marketing service, where the marketing service has one short code that is shared by all its clients and you use your keywords to identify various campaigns.
2. Get your own white label SMS marketing short code from your SMS company used only by your customers. This gives you much more flexibility in choosing keywords; you own your short code, so you basically own all the possible keywords for that code, as well.

This option is far more expensive, typically costing $1,000 a month or more to lease from your SMS provider. So how do you start up a white label SMS marketing outfit? Well, a minimum of $5,000 is required. This is to cover the cost for buying text credits and having a site running under the white label SMS platform. This also covers for the purchase and development of a responsive website for your white label SMS marketing business where you can login to your dashboard, view your audience, manage campaigns through an online dashboard easily and effectively.

Then another $5,000 would be utilized in organizing a white label SMS marketing sales staff to help boost sales efforts to businesses locally and nationally with cold calls, face to face meetings and increase your social media presence.

Here are some white label SMS marketing best practices to remember:

1. Make Sure You Have a Clear Call To Action. Campaigns fail when prospects either don’t understand the incentive or don’t know what to do to get it—or both.
2. Keep your SMS short and sweet. You only have 160 characters, so get to the point in a few words.
3. Spell Out the Requirements. If customers need to use a coupon code to get the offer in the store, make sure that is clear.
4. Only send exclusive content. Think of your subscribers as a special VIP club and treat them accordingly.
5. Use Urgency to Your Advantage. One of the most attractive things about SMS marketing is its immediacy—90 percent of your messages will be opened and read within three minutes of receipt. Smart SMS marketers leverage that to create a sense of urgency.
6. Don’t be afraid of MMS. MMS has several advantages over SMS, not the least of which is a 1,000 character limit as opposed to just 160 for SMS.
7. Time It Right. Avoid late night and early morning text blasts unless it’s necessary for your offer (a Midnight Madness reminder, maybe) or you’re targeting an audience segment you know won’t mind.
8. Establish a Schedule. Pick a schedule and stick to it; every good marketing campaign has its own rhythm and it’s important to find one that works for you and your subscribers.
9. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate. Get in the habit of promoting your short code and keyword(s) across all of your marketing channels and in all of your print campaigns to grow your subscriber list.
10. Provide an exit. Your subscribers need to know that they can opt out of your text messaging campaigns at any time.