Text message or SMS marketing is becoming one of the most effective, but often untapped newer channels for marketing your business. In today’s world, most people spend a significant amount of time on their smartphones, and messages are all read, making SMS marketing a great way to enhance customer engagement and retention. Apart from its high conversion rate, the starting cost of SMS marketing is relatively low.
This article will walk you through six effective SMS marketing tactics that can boost the response rate and improve your marketing ROI.
The first and most important step when initiating any marketing campaign is adequate preparation to ensure that everything is in place. For SMS marketing, there are some things to consider during the planning process. These include:
Customers love incentives in the form of gifts, coupons, and other deals. As a marketer, it is vital to appreciate consumers who subscribe to your SMS list. These subscribers, if properly nurtured, can turn out to be your most loyal customers.
In the initial stages of your SMS marketing campaign, start with a small incentive to drive opt-ins. This could be a discounted product or service that saves the customer a few dollars. Incentives may also take a non-monetary form such as VIP access, enhanced privileges, or personalized engagement.
When providing your incentive, create a sense of urgency to ensure your customer responds in a timely manner. Allowing you to achieve the desired results as quickly as possible.
Contextually relevant text messages are more likely to have a better click-through rate, and ultimately higher conversions. Therefore, before executing your SMS marketing campaign, craft high-quality messages ahead of time. The best text messages for marketing are short, sweet, and straight to the point. When creating them, ensure they provide value to the reader, such that they understand its meaning and intention. This way, you can minimize recipients who take no action or those that opt-out.
Most marketing campaigns fail because they lack a strong call-to-action. When sending text messages, marketers should come out clear and let the recipients know what they need to do. Whether it’s texting an sms short code, clicking a link, signing up for something, taking advantage of a discount, or any other action, let the recipient know and make it easy for them to do it. Remember, there’s no point in creating an SMS marketing campaign if the recipients don’t know what they should do with the information.
Timing is key when it comes to SMS marketing. It could be the difference between a message that is received positively and one that is ignored. As a rule of thumb, never send marketing messages before 9 am or after 10 pm. Instead, aim for times when the recipient could be at home and not too busy, like during lunch hours or after work. Also, it’s important to understand the TCPA compliance requirements for your SMS marketing and to put systems and processes in place to ensure that you’re meeting those requirements.
Along with sending texts at the right time, be consistent. Regular text messages can remind the audience of a new product release or upcoming flash sale. While striving for consistency, do not overdo it as this can be spammy. Automated messaging and tracking can help marketers remain consistent.
It is always a great idea to move leads collected from the SMS campaign to other marketing channels. In most cases, promotional messages are not enough to help you close a deal. Use SMS marketing to start building the relationship. However, as you connect with the subscriber encourage them to check your website, YouTube channel, or any other platform. SMS should serve as hooks to social media or any other brand resource that allows further engagement.
Additionally, like any other marketing strategy, it is crucial to keep track of your progress by measuring and analyzing your results. You can track performance metrics like subscriber growth, churn rate, cross-channel engagement, redemption rate, cost per redeeming subscriber, and more. These will help you measure the success of your SMS marketing campaign.
SMS marketing, if used correctly, provides a powerful channel for building relationships with your client base and growing your businesses.
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