What is SMS marketing?
SMS marketing is a text message from a business to a customer who agreed to receive it. The phone already has a thread for that number. Your message shows up there, next to whatever that person writes back.
That is the whole channel. The work is in who is on the list, what the text says, and what happens to the reply.
Who is on the list
The list is collected. Someone typed their number into a form, checked a box at checkout, or texted you first because a sign asked them to. A list that was bought, scraped, or guessed is a different practice, and it is the one that gets businesses in trouble.
Say, at the point of signup, that they will get texts, who the texts are from, and that they can stop. Message and data rates may apply. That sentence is the consent, not a footnote you add later.
What the text is for
One message, one reason: a repair is due, an order is ready, a shift opened up, a deadline is tomorrow. A discount can be the reason. A discount every week, with no particular person in mind, trains people to reply STOP.
Write it the way it will read after the name and the other fields are filled in. Length matters, because a text past one segment is billed as more than one.
What happens next
A blast that disappears into a report is half of the channel. The useful version keeps the message you sent in the same thread as the answer. That is two-way SMS. On Entrance, those replies wait in one queue until someone on the workspace takes them.
Running a campaign is the order of operations, from the list to the send. Whether it works depends less on the channel than on those three pieces: consent, a specific message, and a place for the reply.