Best Practices for Text Message Marketing | Business

Text messages can be annoying when you’re getting bombarded with them faster than you can unsubscribe. On the other hand, text messaging can be brilliant when your favorite restaurant texts you about a last-minute table available on a packed Friday night. When done well, text message marketing can increase client loyalty and drive valuable repeat business.

Read on to find out why text message marketing works so well in the age of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Then, learn how your business can use text message marketing to increase sales.

Is text message marketing effective?

There are several reasons why text message marketing is effective.

It creates a sense of urgency.

When your phone beeps or vibrates to tell you that you’ve got a text, you open it and read it right away. That’s why people open 98 percent of text messages, compared with just 20 percent of emails, according to Subtext.

People trust text messages.

We trust texts far more than email, although spam texts are increasing. Text messages have a click-through rate of 20 percent, compared with just 3 to 5 percent for email, Sinch reported.

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Facebook Finishes Its “Secret Conversations” Encryption Rollout to Messenger Users | WIRED

LAST SPRING WHATSAPP pushed out code adding a new layer of security to a billion users’ apps, creating the largest end-to-end encrypted messaging network in history. Now WhatsApp’s parent company Facebook has finally given people who use its other massively popular chat app the chance to catch up.

A Facebook spokesperson tells WIRED the company just finished rolling out “Secret Conversations” to all 900 million Facebook Messenger users in the past few weeks. The opt-in feature allows users to encrypt their messages so that no one can read them except the two people on either end of a conversation—not even Facebook or law enforcement or intelligence agencies. “Your messages are already secure, but Secret Conversations are encrypted from one device to another,” states a description in the app when users initiate their first encrypted conversation.

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