10 Suggestions for Successful SMS Marketing Campaigns:
We shared ten tricks to accomplish your SMS marketing campaign success in this part. If you use all these ten suggestions, you will reach your goal for your business. Let’s begin!
1. Be Sure You Got User Permissions
The first and absolute rule of successful SMS marketing is to get the consent of your target. Otherwise, your messages will turn into spam messages, and you will pay between $500 - $1000 for each user violation. On top of that, you will damage your branding in the long term. So, collecting opt-ins from your target is a must. It will be pretty easy because 91% of customers positively perceive businesses using SMS messages.
2. Expand Your List Over Time
Did you collect enough opt-ins and create your text marketing list? Great! Now, you shouldn’t stop. You should keep collecting opt-ins to expand your list regularly. Over time, some of the numbers may become invalid, or some of your customers may want to opt out. So, you should find and add new ones who may be interested in your business.
3. Choose Correct Keyword
We defined the keyword term for SMS marketing in the last part. When choosing a keyword for your SMS marketing campaign, you need to consider:
Choosing only one word
Using a straightforward word to understand
Not including punctuation or special characters
Using memorable/brand-related keywords
For example, let’s assume you have a “Swan Bridal Boutique.” brand. If you want your customers to subscribe to your text message lists initially, you can use “SWAN” as a keyword.
Here are the bad examples of keywords:
Stop messages
Want to join
Yes!
Begin
Swan Bridal
Wedding Dresses.
How to Opt Back into Receiving Messages
If your customers opt out of an SMS campaign, they can’t receive text messages anymore. In this case, they need to resubscribe them again. This time, you need to decide the keywords such as “START,” “JOIN,” “YES,” or “UNSTOP.” Then your customers can send them to the phone number to resubscribe and start receiving text messages from this number again.
Discover more: How to opt-out from text message campaigns 💬
4. Use Short But Concise Message
Language is everything in SMS marketing. People tend not to read long things. Therefore, you need to give essential information in 2 or 3 short sentences. In your SMS marketing message, you can provide these pieces of information.
What is your offer
The amounts, numbers, and ratios of your offer
How they can use it
When they can use it
5. Make Your Customers Feel Special
You need to speak the same language as your audience and craft your message for your audience. Talk like they talk and use a good sense of humor to humanize your company. We are not telling you that you send jokes to your customers using text marketing. Just make them feel like they are receiving messages from a human, not a robot.
For example, if you send a discount message specific to international women’s day, you can mention the value of women in your message.
Here is a bad example of a generic SMS campaign:
“30% discount on march 8. Show this message to our personnel and get your discount.”.
Instead, you should write something like this:
“Dear valued customer, you deserve a 30% discount for your great efforts. You can show this message to our personnel to benefit from this discount. Happy International Women’s Day!”.
If you want to take one step further, you can use personalized text messages. A personalized SMS message means using the name of your customers in messages. So your message can turn to:
“Dear Sasha, you deserve a 30% discount for your great efforts. You can show this message to our personnel to benefit from this discount. We wish you a happy International Women’s Day!”.
One last thing, sometimes, you can use emojis in your text messages. If you use it correctly, you can gain sympathy from your customers. So the previous version of your message will look like this:
“Dear Sasha, you deserved a 30% discount for your great efforts. You can show this message to our personnel to benefit from this discount. We wish you Happy International Women’s Day!💃🏼”.
6. Use MMS opportunity
Texting regularly to your customers is okay, but sometimes you can surprise your customers using the power of visuals. Of course, we are talking about MMS (multimedia messaging service). You send images or GIFs to your customers on special days like Christmas or Halloween. This action will catch their attention and increase your customer relations and brand awareness.
7. Be Aware of the Time
One essential element of a successful SMS marketing campaign is timing. You need to be aware of the time of texting. For example, at Pony Express HQ, we have a policy not to send text messages from 09:00 PM until 09:00 AM for text marketing purposes. It is nice to be respectful to your target. Also, if you don’t pay attention to time, you can gain antipathy, and your customers can opt-out easily.
8. Use CTA
Call to action (CTA) is a complement to SMS marketing messages. It would be best to tell your target what they should do with this text message. For example, should they come to your store and purchase, go to your website, use any coupon when purchasing, or should they download anything? Don’t let them only read the message and say, “okay, whatever.” Motivate them to do what you need.
9. Analyze Your SMS Marketing Campaigns
You collected opt-ins, expanded your lists, prepared creative text messages, and sent them to your target group. Now, it is time to analyze your success rate in SMS marketing. You can look at the conversion rates, opt-out rates and use surveys to evaluate your success.
- Conversion Rates
Firstly, let’s look at the conversion rates. The conversion rate in SMS marketing means how many subscribers took action after receiving your text messages. So, for example, you sent 100 discount messages for Women’s Day like this:
“Dear customer, you deserve a 30% discount for your great efforts. You can show this message to our personnel to benefit from this discount. We wish you a Happy International Women’s Day!💃🏼”.
If 30 customers showed this message during their shopping on Women’s Day week, your conversion rate is %30.
- Opt-out Rates
If you sent 100 messages for one campaign and two people opted out at the end of this campaign, your opt-out rate is 2%. Check the opt-out ratio for each of your SMS marketing campaigns. You will use this data during the optimization.
- Surveys
One last thing before the optimization is customer surveys. You can ask your customers about their suggestions for your text marketing campaigns. For example, they may like one campaign type more than others. This will help you to understand what you should use or not use. For example, you can ask, “Do you like emojis in our text messages?”. According to the answers, you can decide to increase or decrease the usage of emojis in your bulk messaging campaigns.
10. Optimize Your Campaigns
In the previous part, we explained how to analyze the success rate of SMS marketing campaigns. Now, you need to use these analytics to improve your performance. Firstly look at the campaigns with higher conversion rates and lower opt-out rates. These types of campaigns will be your guide for optimization. Then, compare them with those with low conversion rates and high opt-out rates. What are the differences between them? The differences can be language, emojis, discount rates, discount types, discount times/dates, frequency, timing of messages, etc. Detect the difference and use the ones that performed better. And give up the ones that performed poorly.
In addition to the performance rates, you can examine the survey’s results. Try to understand what your target likes and dislikes. And focus on user preferences. For example, if they said that they don’t like text messages with emojis, don’t use emojis in campaigns for a time. If your campaigns start to perform better, you are on the right track. If nothing changes, then recheck surveys and analyses and try to find the most important preference of your users.
An optimization is a data-driven approach, and it is the best way to know your target and succeed in your SMS marketing campaigns.
SMS marketing guide helps you to generate successful text marketing campaigns. Good luck with your business! 🌈
Discover More: 3 Strong Marketing Strategies for Strong Women in Business
The Pony Express HQ Team
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