I am sure you must be saying “but mobile text messaging is old school” as far as new technologies in Nigeria is concerned. Yeah! I quite agree with you, because the western world has been dazzling us with flashy smartphones (Blackberry, samsung galaxy tab, iPad) and apps that let you download music, watch videos on youtube, snap pictures and upload on facebook, pull up RSS feeds, find information and location via google maps etc.
But the truth is sms marketing is still a very important part of our mobile lives here to stay. More especially here in Nigeria where the penetration of normal feature phones (Nokia 1100, 3310, ericsson) far outnumber smartphones and every user is capable of sending and receiving text messages.
That doesn’t mean that mobile apps are useless in Nigeria, afterall Gtbank launched a mobile app recently for its customers to download and its been a success. But as a small business owner who is on a tight budget, you need to find a way of introducing your services or products to a larger base of audience who don’t own internet-enabled smartphones through the use of sms marketing.
Here are some reasons why sms marketing for local Nigerian business is here to stay:
- Small Nigerian Businesses Can Reach A broader Consumer Base In Seconds: Nigeria has a huge population of mobile phone users and this is where nigerian business owners can nail down their sms marketing strategies and open up a whole new world of opportunities via reaching as much of this population as possible. Afterall, the big banks and our own facebook utilize this medium in notifying their customers and members about product and status updates, credit alerts etc.
- Location-based sms marketing: Some bulk sms solutions company have a database of active phone numbers based on the location or state in Nigeria. Therefore business owners can easily send text ads to consumers based in a particular location.
- The mobile phone is an intimate technology to Nigerian mobile users where the possibility of text messages being opened and read within the next 15 minutes is high. But that doesn’t you should start bombarding people with sms blast at will without first building a mobile phone mailing list and obtaining the mobile users’ permission to send them text messages in the future. That would irritate them. The whole science of opt-in list and permission-based email marketing applies to sms marketing as well. Thanks to the strategic alliance between smshulk.com and getresponse.com, the issue of opt-in list building and permission-based sms/email marketing is solved. All you have to do is simply integrate your getresponse account name with smskulk’s API, then copy and paste the code on your webpage for capturing contact info on autopilot.
- The ability to customize your sms ads with your business name for easy recognition by customers.
I hope I have been able to convince you why sms marketing for location Nigerian business is here to stay.
