Harness the power of location-based SMS marketing

Two-thirds of the world have a mobile device glued to their fingertips, which makes location-based mobile marketing a no-brainer for businesses.

When you start filtering and categorising customers by location, it becomes easy to personalise SMS campaigns, improve customer experience, and create a connection between your customers and your physical locations.

Here’s how location-based SMS marketing makes all this possible.

What location-based mobile marketing offers you

Location-based SMS marketing dramatically improves the quality and relevance of your marketing messages.

Here’s an example: if you’re a business with multiple branches, it wouldn’t make sense to send a bulk SMS to your entire customer database about a sale that only applies to your Sydney stores.

At the same time, you don’t want to take a scattergun approach to your promotions as this doesn’t account for local contexts.

For example, running a nationwide sale for the Queen’s Birthday holiday will be ineffective, and may actually confuse customers, as the holiday is celebrated on different days in different states and territories. Variables like daylight savings also require a similarly tailored approach.

Location-based SMS marketing allows you to tailor promotional messages based on where your customers live, as granular as suburbs if you choose to.

The results speak for themselves. In a recent report, a whopping 85% of marketers who use this strategy see growth in their customer base, 83% see higher customer engagement rates, and 83% experience higher response rates.

Personalising ads using audience location also offered 91% of marketers a better understanding of their audience, improved the customer experience for 87% of customers, and resulted in a more effective campaign in 84% of cases. All of this translates into very tangible benefits for the business, as we break down below.

Location-based SMS marketing in action

Let’s imagine you own a cafe chain with multiple locations across the country.

Your Bondi location is approaching its first anniversary, and you want to run a special promotion. With location-based SMS, you can send this promotion just to your Bondi customers, who are now more likely to swing by your cafe.

Alternatively, you might want to extend the deal to all your Sydney customers in the hopes of winning new customers from other parts of the city.

The end result of this? Your marketing dollars go further.

How to start using location-based SMS marketing

To start location-based SMS marketing, you’ll first need to access and organise your customers’ locations.

Burst SMS makes this task simple, as you can ask for the customer’s location when they first sign up on your mobile landing page. From here, you can upload separate customer lists into Burst SMS to keep your data organised.

If you’ve already got a master list of customers and just need to figure out their locations, Burst SMS offers a built-in “update contact form” link feature which can be activated when sending out a campaign.

It leads to an online form hosted by Burst SMS where they can update their details. All you need to do is make sure to add a custom contact field to store this information before sending the campaign.

The receive SMS feature can also be used to prompt customers to text your virtual number with an SMS keyword based on their location.

For example, if a customer texts the keyword BONDICAFE, their data will be sorted into the Bondi customer list. If instead, they text BARANGAROOCAFE, they’ll become part of your Barangaroo list.

Get on board with this strategy to refine your ad targeting, promote localised offers, and improve customer experience.