Promotional Messages: 36 Examples, + Tips for 2024

Tired of cliches?

Well, sorry, but here’s another one—communication is king. This cliche is especially true when it comes to capturing your target audience’s attention… and driving successful marketing campaigns.

That’s why promotional messages exist: to promote your business. (And we all know marketing is importing—the digital marketing industry alone is expected to “reach $786.2 billion by 2026.”)

There are many ways to send promotional messages to your customers: email and social media, to name a couple. SMS marketing is an especially effective way to communicate promotional messages directly to your customers’ mobile phones. Mobile advertising in general saw an astounding spend of $327 billion worldwide in 2022, and SMS have a reported 98% read rate.

So in this comprehensive guide, we’ll step into the world of promotional messages, with a special emphasis on SMS marketing. We’ll talk about tips and best practices, and then give you several concrete examples of promotional messages you can use for your business.

Join us on this journey as we uncover the intricacies of crafting effective promotional messages, particularly through SMS marketing. Discover how you can captivate your audience, boost engagement, and drive tangible results.

Let’s jump in, shall we?

What Are Promotional Messages?

Promotional messages are communications sent for the purpose of promoting a product, service, or brand. These messages aim to capture the attention of potential customers, convey the unique value proposition, and encourage them to take a desired action, such as making a purchase or engaging further with the brand.

Promotional messages can be sent through any variety of communication channels, including SMS, email, and social media, or even more indirectly, such as through streaming service ads or billboards.

This article will focus primarily on promotional messages sent through direct channels.

Tips to Create the Most Effective Promotional Messages

In order to be as effective as possible in your promotional messaging, there are a few tips you can follow.

(A lot of these tips can be attributed to the marketing and copywriting experts at Copyhackers.)

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Promotional messages work best when they are highly relevant.

In order to create highly relevant messages, you’ll need to understand who exactly you’re targeting.

Who is the primary audience you’re trying to reach? What are their pain points? Their desires? Why should they care about what you have to say?

You’ll need to think through these questions if you want to really reach people.

So how can you get to know your target audience better? There are many ways, but here are just a few:

Conduct interviews: interviews with people who are a part of your target audience allow you to do a deeper dive into what people are thinking and feeling; offer an incentive to help compensate people for their time.
Administer surveys: surveys can give you a large number of results more quickly, and can quantify your data for you.
Mine reviews: see what people in your target audience are saying about not only your product but about other similar products.
Analyze internal interactions: pore over and analyze your business’s support and sales interactions with people in your target audience, paying close attention to what they say about things they want, feel, need, or are looking for.
Observe messaging on other sites: check out other successful sites that target the same audience as you (though not necessarily competitors) and see what kinds of messaging they’re using.

Once you have a better understanding of your target audience overall, you’ll be better able to speak to them in a way that really speaks to them.

2. Use Language That Reduces Friction

Your goal at each level of the sales funnel is to simply get your target audience to take the next step—whether that’s signing up for a free trial period, browsing clearance items, registering for a webinar, making a purchase, or whatever other action you want them to take.

You need to use language that guides them into this next step as painlessly as possible.

A few tips:

Make your messaging about them, not you: it’s not actually your job to promote yourself, but rather to show your audience how you can benefit them. Hence, it’s best not to talk about yourself but rather to talk about them.
Emphasize benefits and outcomes, not work: how often have you seen CTAs like “Sign Up” or “Learn More”? They’re all over the place, and yet when you think about, language like this can subtly communicate that more work is waiting for users, which can be a source of friction.
Showcase what they’ll get, not what they’ll pay: no one likes to part with their hard-earned money. Your audience likely already knows they’re going to have to pay, so there’s no need to put it in their face with friction-filled language such as “buy,” “purchase,” and “pay.”

3. Make the Desired Action Clear (and Enticing)

This tip is marketing 101, but it never hurts to be reminded.

CTAs are, with good reason, discussed a lot in marketing.

Your marketing simply won’t be effective if people don’t know the next steps they need to take.

Use clear and compelling CTAs that speak to something your audience actually wants.

In general, it’s best to have just a single CTA per message and to make that CTA as friction-free as possible (see point #2 above).

4. Don’t Sound Like Everybody Else

If your promotional messages are dripping in blasé-sounding “marketing speak,” they won’t stand out.

You know what I’m talking about—we marketers often have certain cliches we fall back on.

Sometimes these cliches work, sometimes they don’t. But they’re not memorable; they won’t stick in your audience’s mind.

This is where competitor research can sometimes backfire. We want to see what our competitors are doing and see what’s effective for them, but if we copy them, we’ll sound just like them.

So experiment with different ways to get your messages across—things that aren’t run-of-the-mill, things that will make an impression on your audience.

5. Choose the Right Marketing Channel for the Job

You could have the most thoughtful, powerful, and well thought-out message in the world.

But if you apply it to the wrong marketing channel, it may fall flat.

What may be gripping in an email may come across as obnoxious in an SMS. What works as a social media post may sound awkward on a site pop-up.

So make sure your message matches the channel(s) you’re using to communicate it.

6. Apply Visuals Effectively

Humans are visual creatures.

By some reports, the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text-only.

We know this intuitively. Images, videos, infographics—graphical elements like these often draw our attention more than just plain text.

Take advantage of this visual appeal to get the attention of your target audience. Incorporate strong visuals that add real value to your promotional message.

Need I say more?

"Creating Effective Promotional Messages" infographic

Types of Promotional Messages

There are many different kinds of promotional messages you can send for your business—whether via SMS or via other marketing channels.

Sales and Discounts

Sales are probably the most common type of promotional message.

Everyone loves a good discount!

You can run sales or discounts to help drive up purchases and convert people, or to win repeated business.

Announcements

When your business undergoes changes or when you have something you want your target audience to know, promotional announcements help you communicate that info.

But beyond simply communicating information, you can use these announcements as an opportunity to move your audience down that sales funnel—maybe by coupling the announcement with some kind of discount or special deal.

Product Launches

A product launch is really a type of extended announcement. But it involves buildup and anticipation.

Product launch promotions can help drive attention to your new product or service—which can not only help drive up sales short-term as the new product is released, but it can also help drive awareness (which will help your business in the long run).

Event Reminders

You can help promote your business’s events using promotional messages. Reminders, particularly via SMS, will help you get more attendance and engagement in your events.

An “event” could be a physical event (if you’re a brick-and-mortar location) or a virtual event like a webinar.

For whatever event you’re hosting, more attendance and engagement means your event will be more successful in accomplishing whatever goals you have for it.

Appointment Reminders

Appointment reminders are more specific than general event reminders, and typically only apply to service-based businesses.

No-shows can be a major problem for businesses that rely on clients keeping their appointments. Appointment reminders can go a long way toward helping to reduce those no-shows so that you can make best use of your time (and your clients’ time).

Follow-Ups

If you have a customer or a lead who’s expressed interest in your business, sales follow-ups can help you give them a gentle nudge in the right direction.

These types of promotional messages don’t need to be long-winded, but they can help remind your lead of their interest and help keep you top of mind.

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How to Send Promotional Text Messages

Let’s dig in a little more in regards to sending promotional text messages specifically.

How do you actually send promotional texts?

First, you need an SMS marketing platform

If you don’t have an SMS platform (like ours at Mobile Text Alerts) already, find one that works for your business so that you can pursue promotional SMS in a way that’s scalable.

Pick a solution that’s easy to use and has robust features that will help you in your business.

Second, you need a plan

As with any marketing effort, you don’t want to jump into SMS marketing blindly. Work up a plan with your marketing team that has clear goals and well thought-out marketing copy for your SMS.

Make sure everyone involved is in the know about what the plan is and what their responsibilities are.

You can even use AI tools like ChatGPT or Jasper.ai to help you work up your SMS copy or to help you plan out your strategy.

Third, you need to schedule out your first campaign

Depending on what strategy (or strategies) you decide you want to implement, you’ll either (1) build out all of your messages in an automated drip campaign, (2) schedule out the messages for specific times, (3) work up automatically triggered messages based on responses people send in, or (4) a combination of all of the above.

Whichever route you choose, you can implement the messages into your SMS platform as desired, so that messages can start going out as soon as possible.

Fourth, you need to get subscribers added in

If all your messages are ready to go, you just need to get contacts loaded in so that there’s someone to receive your messages.

You can let people opt themselves into your texts via one of several opt-in methods. You can also set up integrations with your CRM or other services you use. Or, if you already have an existing list of SMS subscribers, you can import them directly.

Fifth, you need to optimize your campaigns

After your messages have gone out for a while, you’ll be ready to analyze the results so that you can make decisions about how to optimize those promotional efforts.

You can make decisions about elements such as…

What copy you use in your messages
How frequently you send out messages
What times of day you send out messages
What types of audiences you send messages to

"How to send promotional text messages" infographic