In today’s digital environment, SMS marketing has emerged as a powerful engine for business growth. It reaches your target audience in a convenient place (their mobile devices), driving more conversions and boosting customer engagement. Today, we’re curating actionable strategies you can put to work immediately to maximize the effectiveness of your digital marketing text campaigns.
Table of Contents
- Establishing Your SMS Basics
- Get Creative With Your Copy
- Streamlining Automation and Integration
- Measuring and Optimizing Performance
- Staying Compliant with Best Practices
Establishing Your SMS Basics
Crafting a solid SMS marketing strategy comes with a few basic elements that are crucial for achieving your marketing goals. From setting goals to segmenting users, let’s cover a few of those foundational steps you can take to get your SMS campaign off the ground!
Defining Objectives
Start by clearly outlining your objectives in the text message marketing arena — do you want to increase sales, drive web traffic, or improve customer loyalty? Each of those goals entails a different messaging approach and strategy. That’s why it’s key to flesh out what you want to achieve with SMS marketing.
Building an Ideal Consumer Profile
Next, you should start constructing an ideal consumer profile (ICP) for your target audience. This could be based on demographics, interests, or user behavior to tailor your messages effectively. Make sure to clarify detailed traits of your audience; leave no stone unturned. The more vivid your ICP, the better your SMS marketing will be.
Growing Your Subscriber List
The final step in establishing your SMS basics is to begin growing your contact list! This is a vital piece of the SMS marketing puzzle since you need subscribers to send SMS promos to. Make sure you’re obtaining the explicit consent of each subscriber through a clear SMS opt-in process. You can even offer incentives like exclusive discounts or valuable content to promote registration.
Get Creative With Your Copy
Beyond the basics, another high-value strategy to boost SMS marketing is drafting compelling, creative copy. Copy, or copywriting, refers to any content collateral that is used to market your brand. In this case, SMS copy refers to the actual SMS messages you send. With creative copy that captures your audience’s attention, you can drive meaningful conversions and user engagement.
Clear Call to Action (CTA)
Almost all great copy comes with a clear call to action (CTA) — and yours should too. Make sure your CTA conveys urgency via action-oriented language. For instance, a flight charter company may state: “Text ‘FLY’ to 12345 before tomorrow and claim a free discovery flight!”
Deliver Personalized Offers
The power of SMS is that you’re able to discriminate between different customers and meet each one at their ideal offering. That’s why you should always personalize & tweak your SMS messaging to align with different audience segments.
Send customers discounts on products you know they purchase frequently, or something they’ll need soon. Include their name in every message, and utilize graphics and emojis to add a level of humanity to each SMS. However, make sure these illustrations align with your brand and enhance messaging efficacy.
Streamlining Automation and Integration
When it comes to optimizing your SMS marketing campaigns, automation and integration are both pivotal strategies that multiply your efforts — literally. You’re able to attend to 10x more activities without sacrificing the effectiveness and efficiency of your campaigns.
Let’s explore how you can leverage these two strategies to supercharge your SMS campaigns.
Harnessing the Power of Automation
Automation is a simple yet immeasurably powerful tool. It allows you to exponentially increase your SMS messaging capacity by taking away the need for manual effort. Take advantage of marketing automation so every customer receives a welcome message, new product notifications, and even unique transactional triggers like cart abandonment reminders precisely when they need it. You can even use SMS automation to better target different audience segments without the need for manual intervention throughout this tedious process.
Creating a Cohesive Customer Journey
Integrations further amplify your SMS marketing efforts by embedding it within a network of other marketing channels — such as email and social media. This can significantly improve your customer journey because it unifies their experience; each consumer interfaces with the same brand, regardless of where they interact.
By coordinating your SMS campaign to integrate with multiple platforms, you create a seamless and consistent brand experience. Furthermore, this also enables you to scrape leads from your other channels and bring them into your SMS ecosystem.
Measuring & Optimizing Performance
Once your SMS campaign is up and running, the work doesn’t stop there. You’ve got to continually drive changes to your SMS strategy to reap iterative improvements over time. That’s where data comes in handy, acting as an operational compass for your SMS marketing efforts. By analyzing the numbers, you’ll uncover key insights that turn into data-driven optimizations.
Tracking Key Metrics
In the SMS game, there are a handful of metrics that are proven to reflect the health of your campaign:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Response rate
- Conversion rate
- Unsubscribe rate
To better understand your campaign’s performance, make sure you’re measuring these key metrics and their changes over time. Pay attention to how they shift in response to changes in your SMS campaign. By understanding these relationships in the data, you’ll quickly realize what’s working and can double down.
A/B Testing for Validated Learning
A/B testing is another strong, quantitative technique for driving changes in your SMS marketing campaigns. It’s essentially a digital experiment measuring the impact of a particular change on user engagement, conversion, etc.
For instance, imagine your team has been running one SMS template forever. To test a new one, you would split your audience into two random samples and show each group one template. Based on the results, you would know which was a stronger SMS template to go with!
Try and experiment with various aspects of a text message — offer, hook, graphics, and CTAs. You could even play around with message lengths or timing to uncover what circumstances best resonate with your audience.
Staying Compliant With Best Practices
Compliance is the final roadblock for modern SMS campaigns, as there are strict rules and regulations surrounding how text marketing works in the US. That’s why we’re finishing off this piece with crucial best practices for staying compliant with your SMS campaigns.
Get familiar with the guidelines outlined by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), and always ensure you have proper consent from your SMS list. Also, try to provide a clear opt-out mechanism to respect your audience’s preferences.
With these SMS marketing strategies in hand, you’re ready to harness the full power of text messaging as an outbound channel. Leverage our tips to better engage with your audience, drive more valuable traffic that translates to conversions, and otherwise improve your marketing ou
