When it comes to starting something new, it’s always a good idea to have a little look around and do some research, when it comes to SMS marketing it’s no different. Take a look at what other businesses are sending, read some case studies, and look out for tips and tricks to make sure you start off on the right foot.
With this in mind, we’ve put together an SMS marketing best practice guide. The best tips and golden bits of knowledge that we have accumulated over the years, to make sure your SMS experience is the best it can be.
Say who you are
Seems an obvious one, but when it comes to text marketing you have no branding or logo to add, so you need to make sure you let your customers know exactly who the message is coming from. So make sure you set your Sender ID to your business name, this means the customer will see straight away that the text message is from you.
Attention grabber
Make sure that your customers keep reading your message, start off on the right note and get straight to the point. Grab their attention, maybe add some humour, or have the first couple of words in capitals. For example, ‘SALE NOW ON!’ ‘New shirt for the weekend?’ ‘Fancy a treat?’
Message length
Don’t try and cram too many points into your message, keep it short, sweet and to the point. This means your customer will not get put off by reams of text when they open the message and will be more likely to read all your message.
Relevancy is key
Make sure you are sending relevant and interesting messages to your customers, a male customer is probably not going to be interested or happy about receiving messages about your new line of women’s dresses. So segment your database into different groups depending on their interests, age, sex or previous purchases.
Clear call to action
Make this part as easy as possible. Don’t make your customers look for details, if you want them to see a specific product, service or website, then include the URL in the message so they can simply just click it. If you want them to ring you, include the telephone number so they can click it. Promoting a sale? Then make it easy to be redeemed, include simple instructions on how they can claim it.
All about the timing
Think about what your customer will be doing at the exact point of your receiving your message. Are they asleep? Are they travelling to or back from work? Also think about the content of your message, even the most pessimistic person will not be looking to buy a coat in August.
Spread the send
If you are sending a big SMS campaign, you might want to spread out your messages into smaller batches to ease the load on your website and phone lines. SMS has such a huge response rate with a 98% open rate and 95% of all messages are read within the first 90 seconds (Source: Gartner). Read our case study here about how SMS was too successful for one of our retailers. Our system can automatically spread your campaign out over your desired time period.
Test and track results
Make sure you track your results from your sent campaigns, numbers of sales, and with our system you can also track URL link clicks. Another important thing is to test different ideas and track the results, try sending on a different day, at a different time, different opening line, or try a percentage offer compared to a money off deal.
Don’t send too often
With the huge success of SMS marketing, there is a big tendency to start sending SMS campaigns all the time, every day! You don’t want to start over sending SMS messages, I know sounds a little crazy coming from an SMS provider, but you don’t want to annoy your customers by sending messages every other day, which will just result in them opting out.
Allow people to opt-out
Which leads us onto always including an opt-out option, which will allow your customers to opt out if they want to. Don’t be discouraged by customers opting out, take note if you get lots of opt outs from a specific message, but customers that opt out are just refining your database to only interested customers, which is actually a good thing.
So refer to this list when you send your next SMS campaign, and track your results to see how you get on. If you have any more questions please do not hesitate to get in touch, but you can sign up for your free SMS marketing account here today.