The key to any successful SMS campaign is keeping your messages short and simple to understand.
You also need to fully understand what SMS marketing is about to avoid going off-point with your campaigns.
As an SMS marketing pioneer, TXTImpact has helped influence the reach of businesses and organizations, helping them send billions of messages to consumers across the globe.
In turn, this has given us a clear understanding of what really makes a business SMS marketing campaign successful.
Thus, you can also gain from our many observations and expertise through these text messaging tips and practices for a successful SMS marketing campaign.
The 9 best text messaging tips to help boost your business’s SMS campaigns include the following:
Keep it short and simple
Be clear with your identity as a business
Include an eye-catching Call to Action (CTA)
Paint the perfect picture with MMS
Timing is everything
Segment SMS campaigns
Provide a means for an easy opt-out
Track the performance your SMS marketing campaign
Evolve
The following text messaging tips can be broken down thus:
#1: Keep it Short and Simple
We came to notice with businesses that most businesses tend to go overboard when structuring text messages for their SMS campaign.
The best way to capture users’ attention in an SMS campaign is to actually keep things short and simple!
Just picture yourself as the person reading the message and pick out what you’d want to see in the sent message.
Keep your text messages between 20 and 30 words long for the best possible levels of engagement.
#2: Be Clear with Your Identity as a Business
Consumers will only buy from you if they know you.
Picture this scenario, you get a sudden knock on your door, but you can’t really tell who’s on the other end of the door because the person fails to identify themselves after the knock; would you still open the door?
Well, the same applies to business and marketing.
A business is more like a living entity, and by you being able to show this to consumers, you can definitely get them to convert to your SMS marketing campaign.
Thus, consumers need to first know who is sending them a message before they can even proceed to read the message. Youcan do this by including your business name in your text messages, usually at the beginning of the message.
The best way to do this is to get a little bit personal when communicating with your customers.
For real, though, not only would your contacts love to know who is sending text messages to them, but this same habit has seen an increase in click-through rates of businesses’ SMS marketing campaigns by almost 35%.
#3: Include an Eye-Catching Call to Action (CTA)
If customers don’t know exactly what to do with your text message SMS campaign, they’re basically not going to do anything with it.
But if you give them a reason to engage in it, they are definitely going to do the same.
Thus, to get the most conversions out of your SMS marketing campaigns, you need to give your readers a reason to take action.
A call to action (CTA) is basically an option to take action for users in a business marketing campaign.
CTAs tend to vary depending on the scope of your SMS marketing campaign, but some very common call to action you can include in your text message SMS campaign includes the following:
· Sign Up
· Subscribe
· Shop Now
· Volunteer
· Learn More
IF POSSIBLE, your CTA must be properly visible to readers and placed in a button format.
#4: Paint the Perfect Picture with MMS
We understand that some text messaging SMS campaigns can be difficult to make short and brief. For these kinds of campaigns, it’s always best you find a way to keep your readers engaged while still trying to pass out the right message of your given campaign.
This can be done using videos or images in an MMS format.
#5: Timing is Everything
Time, in general, is a key determining factor in anything we do in life.Thus, it’s good to test out different SMS campaigns to know the right time to send text messages for the best possible conversions.
But still, stats on Consumer Texting Behavior in 2022 shows that most consumers prefer receiving text messages from businesses and organizations on weekdays (Monday to Fridays) from around 9 AM to 5 PM.
#6: Segment SMS Campaigns
Don’t just send out one general SMS campaign to everyone in your contact list; this is called spamming.You have to understand that every customer has varying needs.
When you get to understand this, it’ll become pretty easy for you to them based on age, the type of product or service they tend to order more often, and lots more.
#7: Provide a Means for an Easy Opt-Out
This is very important to implement because most providers will likely have your text message marked as spam if you fail to do this.
Also, it’s important to first get users’ permission before actually sending out SMS marketing campaigns to them.
#8: Track the Performance of Your SMS Marketing Campaign
TXTImpact lets you the ability to track the progress of your SMS marketing campaign. You’ll be able to take note of the following metrics:
· Rate of responses
· Number of buys or orders
· Number of clicks and leads
· The total amount of money spent on the marketing campaign
#9: Evolve
Each report you track of your marketing campaign will help you know the better ways to actually structure your next campaigns to boost conversions.
Thus, even though you weren’t able to achieve the kind of results you wanted on your SMS campaign, you can always try something new until you find something that works and just stick to it.
This can be done by conducting A/B tests on your SMS campaigns.
You simply send out two (2) different text messages to two different categories of consumers and check which SMS format out-performs the latter.