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A Guide on How to Schedule Mass Text Messages

So, you’re trying to run a text message campaign. If you run a small business, you might handle it yourself. If you’re working for a larger company, you probably have a team for that. Regardless, you need to send texts to your customers at the right time.

For example, suppose your eCommerce store is offering 20% off for the next 24 hours. It doesn’t do any good to send a text message tomorrow afternoon or sometime next week. Along the same lines, if you’re planning a future sale, scheduling a future text message makes sense.

Thankfully, scheduling text messages is surprisingly easy. With a quality online platform, anybody can set up mass, scheduled texting in just a few minutes. Here’s a quick overview.

Why Use Automatic Scheduling?

So, why would you want to automate your scheduling? To illustrate why let’s imagine you like to send an important text at five o’clock this evening. How would you make sure you did it?

Without any kind of automation, you’d first need to write the message somewhere safe. You could type it up in your notepad application or even write it on a piece of paper. Then, you’d have to set a timer in your phone for the appropriate time. Then, at five o’clock, you’d have to copy and paste the message into a blank text and send it to the right contact.

That’s a lot of headaches just to send a single message. As you can imagine, it becomes nearly impossible to manage if you’re dealing with more than a few clients.

With an automated texting platform, you can set up texts in advance and forget about them. You can use templates for common types of texts like appointment reminders. And you can send a mass text to multiple customers without creating a group on your smartphone. It’s so much easier than manual texting that it hardly bears comparison.

Decide When to Send Your Messages

With any kind of marketing, timing is everything. For example, many businesses, even small eCommerce platforms, are international. If you send out a message at 9 AM to your California customers, your east coast customers get the exact text at noon, a perfect time. UK customers would get it at 5 PM, which is a bit late in the day, but not unreasonable.

Now let’s say you have a customer in Mumbai. They’d receive your message at 10:30 PM, and there’s a good chance they’d opt out of future texts. So make sure your customers are getting texts at the appropriate time.

If you’re having a sale along the same lines, try sending out an alert a few days beforehand. If you announce a month in advance, the chances are good that no one will remember. If you promote the day of the sale, many people won’t buy because they’ll feel rushed.

Decide How Often to Send Texts

For most types of mass texts, you’re only going to send the text once. That said, there are times where you might want to send texts regularly. In that case, consider how often you wish to send them.

  • Annual texts are great for memberships and other subscriptions. They’re a great way to remind your customers that it’s time to renew – or to notify them that they’re about to auto-renew.
  • Monthly texts are another useful option for subscriptions. For example, you could send them a monthly reminder that their account is being debited if you bill your customers monthly.
  • Weekly texts are helpful for clubs and organizations. For instance, if you own an apartment complex, you can send a weekly mass text to remind everyone about trash day.
  • Daily texts are too intrusive for most marketing purposes. But there are times and places where they could be helpful. For example, residents of an assisted living facility could receive daily medication reminders.

Make Sure Your Customers Opt-In

Under US federal law, unsolicited text messages are illegal. So if you want to send texts to your customers or clients, you’ll need their permission. Fortunately, most online texting platforms include features that make it easy to have your customers opt-in. But, remember, this doesn’t just apply to new customers. You’ll also have to convince existing customers to give you their permission to send texts.

Conclusion

As you can see, scheduling your mass text messages is a massive part of running a successful campaign. If your messages are going out willy-nilly, you’re going to get lackluster results. But with discipline, you can build a successful campaign that sends the right messages to the right customers at the correct times. All it takes is the right texting platform and a good understanding of your customer base.

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