While SMS marketing may seem old-school, it is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies today. According to a Garner research study, text messages have a 98% open rate. 75% of customers also say they want to receive SMSes with special offers. For this reason, you must invest in an SMS marketing strategy to boost sales, improve brand awareness, and net positive customer reviews. The good thing is that SMS marketing is popular among your target audience and affordable. In this article, we highlight 11 tips for effective SMS marketing to help you engage your customers and increase revenue.
1. Build an SMS Marketing Team
The first step to launching a successful text message campaign is creating an SMS marketing team. You must incorporate various skilled professionals in your SMS marketing strategy to get the most out of your campaign. However, ensure the SMS marketing team coordinates and communicates about strategies, plans, and execution effectively since text messaging is getting more immediate. Here are some professionals you should include in your text message marketing team:
- Social media expert
- Digital creative designer
- SMS marketing program expert
- Promotion specialists
- On-location signage coordinator
- Retail experts
- Budget, ROI, and discount analysts
2. Know Your Customers
Be sure to conduct surveys, leverage social listening tools, read customer reviews and testimonials, and gather feedback from the employees that interact with customers daily to gain more information about your clients. The more you understand your target customers, the higher the chances of launching an SMS marketing campaign that resonates with them.
Take time to know your customer’s interests, needs, geographical location, age, pain points, and behaviors. Next, leverage audience segmentation. Segmentation entails grouping your target customers according to interests and characteristics to enable you to send targeted text messages. Rich Communication Services can help you launch an SMS marketing campaign tailored to your company’s and your customers’ needs.
3. Get Permission
As a marketer, you are bound by law to get consent from your target customers or subscribers to send SMS marketing materials. Sending out text messages without the customer’s explicit permission could make you susceptible to paying hefty fines, among other penalties. Below are strategies to get your target audience to willingly give you their numbers and accept text messages from you:
a. Offer Incentives
Give customers a reason to share their phone numbers by offering something in return. You could offer them discounts, promos, or a free service. For instance, you could offer a free nail color application if you run a salon.
b. Use Social Media
Your social media channels are excellent platforms to invite your target audience to share their contacts. You could include a “phone number” field or an opt-in button on your social media lead generation forms to get clients to consent.
Once you get your client’s permission, you can maintain consent by letting customers know what messages to expect. You should also provide them with a way to opt-out. You could include a “STOP” or “unsubscribe” button or link to allow clients to unsubscribe instantly.
4. Introduce Yourself
An average adult, 45 years and below, sends and receives around 85 text messages daily. Before getting to your point, you must first introduce your brand to capture their attention. Nobody likes receiving texts from unknown senders. If your customers do not immediately know who you are, they will likely not understand your message’s context. Others may unsubscribe from your campaign.
Do not write a long paragraph about who you are, your vision, and what you do. Instead, tell the customer who they are receiving the message from. For instance, you could just mention your brand’s name to alert the clients that you are sending the message.
5. Keep Texts Short and Sweet
90% of text messages are opened and read within three minutes. For this reason, you should keep your messages short and straightforward. SMS messages have a maximum limit of 160 characters, so you must grab your audience’s attention and get to the point without wasting the characters.
If you have to include URLs in your text message, use link shorteners to create short URLs that utilize a few characters. A complete URL can use more than 160 characters by itself. You should also be careful when using emojis. While these characters do not take up much of your screen space, they significantly reduce the available characters in a text.
6. Add Value
Do not send random texts to your customers. Keep in mind that your clients are not your friends, so spamming their inboxes with random texts with nothing to offer is not only annoying. It could also result in losing them from your subscription list.
Ensure your message content is relevant and valuable to the target customers. You could text clients to make them aware of a new product launch, discounts, or sales. Instead of sending random texts, message clients to respond to queries or acknowledge feedback. You can also text clients about the dispatch of their orders, delivery time, or finalization of an order.
7. Personalize Your Texts
Text messaging is an intimate channel to connect with your customers. For this reason, consider adding a personal touch to your messages to get the desired results. You could use the customer’s first name to add a personal touch when addressing your message. Be sure to tailor your texts to a specific gender, age, and geographic location of the target audience. By creating texts according to one particular group, you will likely get more specific results, not to mention building and maintaining an excellent customer relationship.
You could also make your customers feel valued and appreciated by sending them messages on their birthdays, among other special days. Giving a client a gift in the form of a voucher or discount on their special days is a surefire way to show them that you care and value them.
8. Send Texts at the Right Time
Like other marketing strategies, getting your timing right is critical in SMS marketing. For instance, most people may not see a text sent at 4 AM. You will likely appear unprofessional if you wake your customers up in the middle of the night with a promotional text.
Utilize area codes to identify your target customer’s time zones. Next, choose an appropriate text time based on the time zones. You could also conduct some testing to determine what times you get the most responses and the lowest unsubscribe rates.
9. Include Call-to-Action Buttons
Get your customers to engage with you or take the desired action by incorporating clear call-to-action buttons into your text messages. The following are some ideal CTA buttons:
- “Buy now.” This call-to-action button is excellent for a targeted text message. If a particular client frequently purchases a specific product, you could send them promotional messages with a “Buy now” button to help them complete their customer’s journey quickly.
- “Show this text.” Get customers to engage in promotions by requesting them to show a specific text to get a voucher or a discount.
- “Click here.” With a limit of 160 characters, you may not have adequate space to include all the information you need to pass across to your clients. By adding a “Click here” button, you give your target audience a link where they can access all the details they need.
10. Exploit SMS Marketing Software
You need more than a simple messaging app on your smartphone to create a successful SMS marketing campaign. Below are ideal SMS marketing software to help include SMS in your marketing strategy:
a. Omnisend
This software features a pre-built SMS template, shipping and order confirmation, and birthday and cart abandonments workflows. Omisend also offers SMS opt-in software, including landing pages and pop-ups. With the Omnisend software, you can send text messages with images and GIFS.
b. Sparkcentral
Sparkcentral by Hootsuite brings all messaging, including WhatsApp, SMS, social media, and apps, into a single inbox. This unifies your customer care approach since clients can reach out to your brand via multiple platforms. You could also incorporate chatbots into the Sparkcentral software enabling you to handle customer requests automatically without overwhelming your SMS marketing team.
c. EZ Texting
This SMS marketing software lets you broadcast text messaging campaigns to your subscribers. Such campaigns could include promo codes, contests, coupons, and transactional tests such as appointment reminders. The EZ Texting software also provides a built-in web that enables you to convert website visitors and email marketing subscribers to text messaging subscribers.
11. Create a Sense of Urgency
When a client feels like they have a limited time, they will likely make decisions faster, enabling you to achieve the desired results. Be sure to include an expiration date for discounts, among other deals, to create urgency.
Endnote
SMS is of the most underrated yet most effective digital marketing channels. You can send a promotional text even if you have internet issues. Create an SMS marketing team, know your target audience, get permission, introduce yourself, keep messages short and sweet, add a personal touch, and include clear CTA buttons to launch an effective SMS marketing campaign.
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