No shopper – whether he is buying a car or a new property – can resist the temptation of a bargain. Fortunately for the marketing community, text or SMS marketing lends itself to exploiting this urge of shoppers with text coupons.

Any businesses trying to incorporate bulk SMS into their overall marketing strategy should learn few basic facts about text coupons…

The switch (or rather, evolution) from paper coupons to text coupons is a positive development for consumers, marketers as well as the environment. Amidst a skyrocketing rise in the usage of text coupons, the couponing industry is switching its default mechanisms to redefine how consumers can efficiently leverage on discounts offered.

This change has made printed coupons something of an obsolete way to get discounts, replacing it with mobile or text coupons. This change is currently being exploited by the growth of sms marketing.

Here are three essential strategies that any business can resort to in order to cash in on the growing usage of text coupons.

*Always use short code and keywords — by doing so you will ensure that the keyword can be easily remembered by consumers.

*Use Quick Response (QR) codes whenever possible — these codes promote customer engagement without requiring any additional effort. There are dozens of distinct ways you can use QR codes in your text message marketing — a quick search on Google should lead you to plenty of handy tutorials on the subject.

*While offering freebies through your coupons, make sure that what you are offering is at least related to what your business deals in. The idea, after all, is to encourage your own business, products and/or services through these coupons, isn’t it? The freebie does not have to be an expensive one, it just needs to be something that your target customer base is likely to be interested in.