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SMS on Omeda: 7 use cases for media companies

Last updated: July 12, 2024

Media brands need more direct ways to reach and engage their audience. And your audience expects you to engage them wherever they are, whether through email and your website or social and mobile via SMS. 

Deliver a smooth omni-channel experience and you’ll win your audience’s trust: 92% of audiences say that “it’s important to have a simple way to interact with companies across channels,” according to research from Broadridge. 

That’s why we’re adding SMS as another high-impact channel to reach and engage your audience (Opt into SMS on Omeda here). Once it’s active, you’ll be able to use SMS to drive subscriptions, renewals, registrations, and more. 

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Read on for the key benefits and use cases of SMS marketing for media companies — then steal some ideas for your own company. 

What are the benefits of SMS marketing? 

SMS helps you reach your audience more quickly and directly. And it also reinforces your message for greater impact. So it’s best-suited for time-sensitive offers, like subscription renewals, as well as breaking news updates or event reminders. Some other benefits include: 

• Reach your audience more quickly and directly: I’ll spare you the “we’re all addicted to our phones” monologue and just say we check our texts more frequently than our email. So if you need to reach your audience immediately, or you’re trying to reach them on the go, text is the better bet.
• Counteract the Promotions tab: Most senders will land in someone’s Promotions inbox from time to time. To some extent, it’s just the cost of doing business (some email experts will tell you how to game the Gmail algorithm in your favor but we strongly discourage this — more on that here).
  
  So you encourage recipients to put your emails in their main folders, or remind them to mark you as a recognized sender, and you move on. But sometimes, you really do need someone to see a specific email. Texting them ensures that they’ll at least see your message.
• Attract and identify your most loyal audience members: For better or for worse, we’ve become accustomed to exchanging our email addresses for personalized content, offers and messages.
  
  But we give out our phone numbers a lot more selectively. So when someone allows you into their phone, you can count them among your most loyal, engaged audience members. (Granted: there’s some nuance here depending on your specific publication and content mix, but for most general or niche publications, this is a safe bet.)
• Provide immediate updates: Compared to email, text is more conducive to providing breaking updates, like emergency alerts, road closures, school closures, etc.
• Complement and enhance your email and marketing automation strategy: The rule of seven states that someone needs to interact with your brand seven times before a purchase takes place. So limiting your outreach to one or two key channels is pretty inefficient. Spreading them across multiple touchpoints increases the chances that your recipient will see and respond to any one of them. You can achieve similar success with less messages — and that’s a formula everyone can get behind. 

SMS on Omeda: 7 use cases for media companies  

1. Promote subscription and renewal offers 

As Gmail and other ISPs refine their inbox filtering mechanisms, your emails are bound to end up in secondary folders sometimes. You can counteract this by encouraging senders to mark you as a contact, but to some extent, it’s just a cost of doing business. 

That’s all well and good. But if you’re running a renewal campaign for someone with an expiring subscription? You literally can’t afford to land in Promotions. 

Texting your subscribers the renewal offer ensures that they’ll at least see your message and respond. Multiply over thousands of subscribers and that’s a ton of saved revenue — all through one text. 

2. Create high-impact sponsored content 

SMS also gives you another platform to create and promote sponsored content. SMS is most effective when the content’s time-sensitive in some way, but you can also use it to complement promotion on other channels. 

However, texting ads to your audience will backfire if it’s not relevant to their needs. So for best results, promote sponsored content to audiences that you’ve segmented based on their observed behaviors and interests. 

3. Re-engage lapsed audiences 

Picture this: Jalen reads your daily NBA newsletter every other time it hits his main inbox. But maybe you’ve been experiencing deliverability issues or Gmail is just working against you, because only 10% of your sends actually reach his inbox. 

You’ll see that he’s got a 5% open and click rate and at some point, label him “at risk.” First instinct is to add him to a standard 5-email re-engagement campaign and pray he opens one. 

But if you send him five emails, and all five hit the Promotions tab he doesn’t check, you’re forced to delete a subscriber who actively engages when he does receive your content. And your sender score will take a hit, to boot. 

Now imagine you could just text Jalen. You send him a reminder that he hasn’t engaged in a while, encourage him to add you as a contact if he still wants to receive emails. Jalen sees it probably within the day, marks you as a contact, and gets even more of the content he likes. 

And now that you’ve reached him outside the Gmail algorithm, you know for sure that he’s actively engaged and interested in learning more. 

This isn’t to say you should move 100% of your re-engagement messages to text. But adding a text into the flow ensures that you’re reaching audiences that really aren’t seeing the emails. 

4. Remind attendees about webinars and live conferences 

Only 30 to 40% of webinar attendees actually show up for the event, according to research from several webinar hosting platforms. While it’s unrealistic to expect near 100-percent attendance, each no-show is a missed opportunity to interact with your audience, answer their questions and get to know them in real time. 

Text-based reminders keep your event top of mind for registrants and increase the odds that they’ll show up to the session. 

The same goes for live conferences: At a live conference, your audience is immersed in the experience — talking to other guests, listening to sessions, etc. If they’re glued to their phones, you’re doing something wrong. 

So if you need to send updates, you’re better served sending them one text rather than hoping they take the time to check their email, sift through their inbox, and then read your message.

5. Share smart article links 

86% of American adults say they sometimes or often read news on their phone, according to Pew Research Center. Why force them to check their email, sift through newsletters, then click through to your articles when you could text them the article directly? 

Your audience gets the articles they’re most likely to read — in a place where you know they regularly engage. Everyone wins. 

There’s a big caveat here, though: People are protective of their messages — and for good reason. So if you want your SMS strategy to succeed (and not get spam complaints), you need to provide highly curated, personalized content to an audience that’s enthusiastically opted in. 

So before launching SMS, review your content and email engagement data to identify key topics and refine your SMS strategy. Some places to start: 

• Review mobile and desktop email engagement data to identify your best-fit SMS audience. If 90% of your email readers come from desktops, it might not make sense to promote SMS to their audience. Instead, you might use a personalization or on-site form to promote SMS to other parts of your audience. 
• Allow readers to select their topics and send frequency. On your SMS opt-in forms, ask users to opt into receiving content on specific topics or verticals, or select their preferred frequency (daily v. weekly.). 
• Monitor engagement and adjust accordingly. Treat SMS as a test and learn opportunity, especially in the first few weeks. Once you’ve rolled out SMS, use the engagement data to create specific audience segments for this channel, and further personalize your content accordingly. 

6. Share local breaking updates (if applicable)

Depending on your coverage and audience needs, consider sharing immediate news updates via SMS. You don’t have to limit yourself to weather updates and road closures. You could also notify your audience about breaking industry news, then link to your full coverage on your website. 

7. Collect feedback 

Sending surveys through SMS can also help you collect more responses and drive more actionable first-party data, especially if you’re not seeing enough traction from your survey emails.  

When you integrate Omeda and CredSpark, you can administer interactive surveys to your audience, then each person’s responses will flow directly back to their pre-existing profile on Omeda. There, you can use the feedback to create more actionable segments, further personalize your content and create experiences your audience will love. (See how you can engage your audience and drive better first-party data with Omeda and CredSpark here.) 

For best results, administer short surveys about specific parts of your subscriber experience — i.e., survey someone after they’ve completed a call with customer support or after they’ve completed the onboarding process. 

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