In an incredibly digital age, where technology is abundant in our lifestyles, SMS marketing has emerged as a powerful avenue for businesses to connect with their customers. A staggering amount of people worldwide use mobile devices, making it the ideal channel for brands to engage with their audience and drive better marketing outcomes.
Today, we’re going to dive deep into SMS marketing, providing a set of best practices and tips you can use to master text message marketing and bolster your business.
Table of Contents
- Understanding the Power of SMS Marketing
- Building Your SMS Subscriber List
- Crafting Engaging SMS Campaigns
- Personalization & Segmentation
- Measuring & Analyzing SMS Performance
- Integrating & Automating With SMS
1. Understanding the Power of SMS Marketing
Before we start exploring how to win with SMS marketing, let’s first consider why it’s so effective. The answer is simple: It’s a direct and immediate way to reach your audience. Over 98% of messages are opened within 3 minutes, and they have a response rate of over 40%!
Furthermore, SMS is more effective than other marketing channels because of preference — 91% of consumers actually want to receive promotions via text. This engages customers in a more sustainable way, promoting better conversion rates and higher campaign ROI.
2. Building Your SMS Subscriber List
The first foundational step in mastering SMS marketing is constructing a robust subscriber list. You can start by promoting your SMS campaign across several consumer touchpoints — that means your website, social media channels, and physical stores.
The more touchpoints you utilize, the better, since it expands your SMS campaign’s surface area to include more people who want to get texts. You can even encourage users to opt-in by offering exclusive promos upon sign-up, such as coupons, valuable content, or beta access to new products and features. Our only caveat would be to maintain a transparent opt-in process that complies with privacy regulations.
3. Crafting Engaging SMS Campaigns
This next tip deals with creating actual campaign content — the message that your subscribers will receive. Our best piece of advice would be to prioritize brevity. Working with a strict character limit every word in your message must convey something meaningful. Utilize direct phrasing in your mobile marketing to maximize clarity and boost customer engagement.
You can further amplify your SMS marketing strategy with compelling, action-oriented text. Your goal with this is to immediately capture attention, and strong verbiage can go a long way in doing that. Inject powerful calls-to-action (CTAs) to catch users in your product’s trap.
4. Personalization & Segmentation
While engaging messaging will certainly help your SMS campaign succeed, it won’t be the winning factor. That’s where personalization and segmentation take the crown. These are slices of your target audience, split based on similarities in demographics, preferences, purchase history, and more. By segmenting your audience into groups, you can tailor messages to each one.
These types of SMS messages can make customers feel valued since you’re using their name and unique traits to make an offer they’d love. It further improves your SMS campaign’s ROI since you’re not administering a blanket promo to all your consumers; instead, you’re able to discriminate between them and offer the perfect deal to everyone.
5. Measuring & Analyzing SMS Performance
Our next SMS marketing tip involves data, the lifeblood of good decisions. It’s crucial for brands to investigate the performance of their SMS marketing campaign, even when it appears to be going well. This ensures every aspect of your campaign is operating at peak efficiency — from CTAs to pricing and imagery. We recommend identifying and tracking key metrics that matter to you; some common choices are open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates.
Most SMS marketing platforms offer analytics capabilities, so you can quickly gain insight as to what’s working and what isn’t. On a similar note, start implementing an A/B testing pipeline to optimize your campaign with confidence; split testing each element of your campaign will enable you to purify it to perfection.
6. Integrating & Automating With SMS
Finally, leverage integrations and automation into your overall marketing strategy to enhance coordination between consumer touchpoints. This connects your SMS campaign with your other channels — like email campaigns and social media — creating a universal source of truth to manage your marketing. Further, marketing automation allows you to accomplish more with less, improving the overall efficiency of your marketing efforts.
This offers a plethora of benefits, such as maintaining a consistent contact list and unifying segmentation across channels. It also empowers a stable message to permeate across all your channels, reinforcing your brand’s identity and building a stronger audience connection.
SMS marketing is undoubtedly powerful, driving better results than all outbound strategies. By following these best practices and tips, your brand will be ready to unlock the true potential of SMS marketing. Embrace text message marketing in your business to generate more meaningful outcomes for your business.
