“ Sending text messages to your customers? That sounds invasive…”

I was a skeptic at first when the idea was mentioned to me. But when I started to look at SMS marketing, I realized that with the right frequency and messaging, it can be a highly effective method of communication.

SMS open rates are far higher than other types of messaging, and they reach people on a more personal level. And companies are learning how to take advantage of it. SMS marketing in all its forms is making inroads into all different types of companies, including my own. It might seem invasive, but in my experience, you can turn “ invasive” into “ personal” — with the right strategy.

According to one Intis Telecom report, application-to-person (A2P) messaging has an expected growth rate of 6.99% right now. Furthermore, that’s expected to continue through 2023. So it makes sense t his is an area many businesses are trying to optimize.

The same goes for my team. We’re working on integrating message marketing at my company Sourcify, and through that process, I’ve found out some things about this type of marketing that make it a must for just about every business.

Here’s why you should make bulk message marketing part of your strategy.

1) Messages almost always get opened

You’re probably running email marketing — just about everyone is. What’s your best open rate? Maybe 10%? 20%? 30% if you’re doing well? Mailchimp puts the average across all industries at just over 21% .

SMS open rates are as high as 98% . That blows email out of the water.

Be aware though — legally, you have to get permission from the customer to send them text messages. You also have to provide a disclaimer and opt-out.

However, the opt-out is far from being a bad thing for your messaging. It can actually be a great way to build trust with your customers, as it ’ s far more visible than the option on an email and makes them feel more in control of the messages they receive.

An email may get sorted into a folder that doesn’t get touched, particularly with the high number of people that use Gmail with its automatically sorted inbox. Microsoft Outlook now also has some of the same functionality with its “Focused” inbox.

SMS doesn’t.

Text messages are a fantastic addition to other parts of your marketing mix. They’re almost always read, and if you use the right copy they can drive response in a way that other media can only dream of.

2) Messages are (super) easy to automate

You already know that text messages get a high open-rate. But if you combine that with the ease of automation that application-based messaging can bring, you can drive traffic in a big way.

There is a wide range of applications that will help businesses of any size manage their SMS marketing. These applications manage sending, receiving, KPIs, and other important tasks and dashboards.

Choosing the right SMS application depends on the size of the business you’re running, the industry you’re in, and what sort of functionality is most important to you.

There’s no easy one-size-fits-all option. But all the major contenders can help you automate marketing to a full list of phone numbers. SMS marketing applications make it possible to extend your reach far beyond what an individual could do.

3) Messages are ideal for time-sensitive offers

Text messages are opened on average only two minutes after they’ve been received. That makes them a fantastic choice for any offers that have a time element.

You can introduce a level of urgency to your marketing by using SMS messages to send out reminders, special offers, or notifications. One of the best ways to use text messages is to push flash sales and other very short-term special offers.

SMS marketing is a time-sensitive medium by its very nature. Everyone keeps their smartphone nearby if not on them all the time, and a time-sensitive offer (especially for a local business) can be the way to go. The sky-high open rates for SMS, as opposed to an email combined with that two-minute window, make these messages the ideal vehicle for quick promotions.

If you write good copy in that 160-character space, you can see a significant bump in response. That short copy with a link at the end is ideal for grabbing people ’ s attention quickly, and it causes an immediate response .

A time-sensitive offer is best when it can reach people immediately. Any SMS application will let you push out an offer quickly and get people in the door fast.

If you run any business that revolves around a local clientele , it’s a great way to get people to come to visit a location. And for larger companies that might lean on e-commerce, it can get people to log in and spend money on your website.

Final thoughts: With great power comes great responsibility

My own company is using text messages for a variety of purposes, but one of them is keeping people up to date with the latest things that are happening in our business.

We have a text messaging number that’s designed to reply to people when they want updates for our business, and much of it is automated. We also have direct communications from people directly to our customer base.

Message frequency is important; you don ’ t want to annoy your customers.

Oracle ’ s recommendation is one message per week as a general rule, but it depends on your company, your market segment, and your customer base. We try to hit around that mark, but as time goes on we may have to adjust our frequency as SMS marketing gets more saturated

Text messages aren’t just useful for marketing messages. They are a great way to get out immediate updates about the state of the business to your customers. If you have an outage, a new innovation, or any sort of news about your business, SMS messaging can get it out fast to your whole customer base .

It ’ s best understood not as a standalone strategy, but a small part of a larger marketing strategy. Use it for unique promotions, quick updates, and things you want people to take action on immediately.

You can even combine it with your Facebook ads for an easy marketing funnel. My recommendation is for you to start using SMS today as part of your marketing mix and find out why more and more marketers are embracing it.

Meet the photography scaleup helping brands go digital

BOOM Image Studio aims to be the Amazon of commercial photography — by attempting to develop the world’s most efficient digital content logistics and fulfillment system, and delivering global online businesses visual assets on-demand.

Founded in January 2018, the Italian startup currently serves 80 countries through its network of more than 35,000 professional photographers across the globe. “We want to rewrite the future of commercial photography,” Federico Mattia Dolci, BOOM CEO and founder told TNW.

The three co-founders, Federico Mattia Dolci, Giacomo Grattirola, and Jacopo Benedetti — an engineer, an economist, and a philosopher, respectively — started BOOM to meet their own needs as freelance photographers who aspired to work for household brands but had no access to a tech-enabled, digitized platform.

Traditional commercial photography just isn’t cutting it

BOOM recognized a major digital supply-and-demand gap — countless internet-based giants were changing the way people shopped online, and uploading billions of pictures on their websites and platforms every day. But these same brands had no access to a content provider that could keep up with a scaled-up, global, fast-paced environment.

The company recognized that commercial photography has historically been expensive, resource-intensive, and time-consuming for companies and photographers. It’s not only about taking and delivering photos — it involves managing clients and schedules, ensuring photos follow brand guidelines, and maintaining consistency, especially for brands targeting a certain look and feel for their visuals regardless of location, like Airbnb, for example.

“Today, businesses have to digitize overnight with high-quality visuals to stand out from a crowded marketplace,” Dolci says. “We viewed it as an opportunity – it was the right time, and we were in the right position to answer those needs. Whether it’s one photoshoot or a thousand, or whether it is in Chicago, London, or Sydney, we could guarantee speed, efficiency, consistency, and quality. This is the power of our Order System. It’s the beginning of a complete innovation of the creative and photographic industry.”

In response, the company has built a tech-heavy, resilient system that pairs global marketplaces with the right photographers; and manages every element of a shoot seamlessly anytime, anywhere, and without compromising brand identity or consistency across markets.

Turning commercial photography into a seamless process

With the help of its in-house researchers and developers, BOOM creates a seamless process for both photographers and global businesses, by streamlining the entire photoshoot lifecycle, delivering post-produced content compliant with brand guidelines, anywhere in the world. The company doesn’t just facilitate photoshoots; clients can also book videographers, drone pilots, designers, and other creative assets.

The tech is built around a proprietary plug & play platform the ‘Order System’ and reduces effort across the digital ecosystem from booking to delivery. It enables clients to order as many photoshoots as they require in a few steps, and have them delivered in just 24-hours – no advanced technical skills needed.

BOOM leverages AI in post-production, editing thousands of pictures like a professional editor in seconds, ensuring consistency across all images, and in doing so, tackling the hardest problems of Computer Vision: Instance Segmentation, Object Recognition, and Image-to-Image translation.

“Utilizing AI, the photos we post-produce all meet the same high-quality standards, which is vital for the food and real estate industries since they almost always have existing photos that already match some of the requirements,” Dolci says. “We even have an algorithm that removes the background for pictures, which is useful for e-commerce brands that want photos that focus solely on the product.”

Helping brands go digital in the midst of a pandemic

With online businesses becoming an essential lifeline during the pandemic, BOOM focused on doubling down and providing efficient solutions for companies in need of a new digital offer. Businesses that approached BOOM included restaurants looking to offer takeaway and delivery services, real estate vendors, and even players in the fashion industry looking for a way to market their products online.

Dolci says: “We launched into 22 new countries during the lockdown, and our team of 70, which spans 18 languages continues to grow. The pandemic encouraged BOOM to double down and serve businesses moving their core products online overnight. 2020 might well be a catalyst for the sector.”

Innovation is key in a digital world

Looking to its future, BOOM intends to offer its services in 140 countries globally, including a larger presence in Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, when it comes to the future of commercial photography, BOOM envisions technology enabling more automation and connection, making innovation vital for the $80B per annum industry.

The tech firm has experienced 400% growth year-on-year, and its network of photographers has already processed over three million images for global clients including Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Oyo, and GetYourGuide in 80+ countries, averaging one photoshoot a minute.

“ We are on a mission to develop the world’s most efficient system by turning the traditional photographic industry model on its head,” says Dolci, “ We need to keep moving and keep innovating to adapt to the new ways of working, new ways of buying, and the new habits of consumers and their ever-changing needs. The size of the opportunity is exciting, but it’s not about winning. It’s about designing something lasting, where there was nothing before. Our mantra is taking care of the people, the product, and the profits — in that order.”

Your company needs to focus on ethics, respect, and inclusion — even if it’s fighting to survive

At a time when so many companies are struggling to simply keep the lights on and stay afloat and many employees are grateful to still have a paycheck, this may seem like an odd time to be talking about workplace culture.

However, I believe this is actually the perfect time to be having this conversation — and for corporate leaders to be paying even more attention to the foundation of any workplace culture: ethics, respect, and inclusion.

Over the next 12 months, amid numerous rounds of layoffs, we’ll hear many stories where businesses failed to operate with ethics, respect, and inclusion. We’ll hear about financial misreporting to make numbers look better than they really are or conflicts of interest as people get desperate and focus on self-preservation.

We’ll also hear about a failure of respect where business leaders prioritize business needs at the expense of the health and psychological safety of their employees who helped build the business. And, lastly, we’ll have a heyday in stories about exclusion where the “in-group” gets even more powerful and the “out-group” gets more marginalized.

These dynamics are not specific to any one business. It’s just what happens when the going gets tough and an organization lacks strong norms and practices. We just need to look at the doom bomb 20 years ago to see the same pattern of failures in ethics, respect, and inclusion.

Hard times define you

These are early days yet and we already have horror stories; business leaders insisting their employees continue to work at meat packing plants — despite thousands of coronavirus cases — and US state governors denying unemployment benefits to workers who are too fearful to return to work.

Leaders have the choice to provide hazard pay to workers who are willing to incur the risk and they can lobby state governments to pay unemployment to those workers who are too afraid to return to work. It’s a respect and integrity issue.

We also have inclusion issues where the more marginalized, out-group employees are disproportionately affected by layoffs. Leaders can be intentional when selecting who gets laid off and who stays and factor in diversity and inclusion as a component in their downsizing strategy.

It’s the hard times such as the current pandemic, where future corporate cultures are actually defined for years to come. Tomorrow’s winners are those who take the right steps today. This is the time when a company’s leaders either step up to serve in courageous, respectful ways — or not.

Step up or step off

For those leaders who do not step up to lead in a courageous, respectful way, their actions will be scrutinized and second-guessed in real time on social media.

This is the first economic downcycle in history to occur in the era of social media with people who are used to sharing their experiences publicly. It’s the first time in history that corporate leaders will be making these tough decisions under a microscope and facing the court of public opinion.

20 years ago during the dotcom bomb, the biggest worry is that you’d end up on the layoff reporting site, Fuckedcompanom. Today, every misstep can be shouted to the world through Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook in minutes and seen by a global audience and in a forum lacking context or a balanced perspective.

Finally, as thousands of employees are suddenly working remotely, it’s even more important for leaders to intentionally build connections and reinforce corporate norms and practices to strengthen the workplace culture. This is an opportunity to develop our workplace skills of empathy, good communication, and inclusivity to better support a distributed workforce.

Do better

So what are some best practices moving forward to support a healthy workplace culture during this crisis and upheaval?  Here are three that should serve you well:

Imagine a global audience for every management action you take, public scrutiny and Monday morning quarter-backing

Be intentional and disciplined about operationalizing respect, inclusion, and ethics into the culture, even amidst the current crisis

Sponsor monthly programs that address tricky culture issues and that prompt employee feedback so you can measure and benchmark issues that require more focused attention to resolve

Now even though I’ve lined this up neatly, let me make one thing clear: it’s hard. All of this is.

Addressing, and even changing, the culture of a company under normal circumstances is a daunting task. Trying to do it while isolated in your basement or home office makes it all the more difficult. But it’s important, it’s necessary. And taking proactive steps now to support a culture of ethics, respect, and inclusion will make it better for you, your company, and your employees in the long run.