Successful marketers realize the power of using SMS marketing platforms to produce more clicks, responses, and sales. All businesses can benefit from using SMS messages as long as they know how to maximize their potential. For one, you can broadcast your offers and speak with your target audience using SMS messages, allowing you to reach your marketing goals.
Even in this era of SMS marketing, one unthinking move could frustrate your audience and lead to a failure. If you’re already using SMS marketing, here are some ideas to help further boost your marketing success:
1. Optimize Delivery Times
Once your customers are on your messaging list, be thoughtful about how you handle the deliveries. You must keep in touch with your customers but never do it too often to the point that you annoy them.
Be satisfied with one or two messages per week for the first six months. Place your most important pieces first in your messages, so your readers look forward to seeing more of your content. Increase messaging to 10 messages per month.
Early testing of customer communication strategies and content gives you a chance to determine whether you should use surveys in the customer’s life cycle, for example.
2. Personalize Your Messages
Let your readers see themselves as an essential individual to you, rather than just one more mass contact. An SMS marketing platform allows you to engage with your customers and meet them one-on-one by utilizing personal text. Customers like to get personalized messages and tend to move through the sales process more quickly when they feel more special.
Personalize your list even further to make your marketing messages relevant to your customers. For example, if a customer bought purple-striped shoes, the necessary promos should be sent to this particular customer, like a discount on the next shoe purchase.
3. Create A Sequence
What’s an SMS sequence? It’s a series of texts that marketers send out to your contacts based on trigger-based automation or pre-set time intervals. What’s great about SMS sequences is that they’ll give you or your sales team more time to focus on revenue-generating activities. Not to mention, they allow you to nurture leads and existing customers better.
One can use SMS sequences to create a personalized experience for individual customers by tailoring message content based on a person’s behavior (e.g., has clicked message or not). These sequences are known as automated workflows.
Another way an SMS sequence helps is through drip messages. These texts automatically get sent to people at a specific time after subscribing to the SMS marketing campaign you’ve created.
By applying segment filters, you can make drip messages even smarter. Segment filters allow marketers to send automatic SMS to people for a specific amount of time after joining, but only if they match the criteria you’ve specified.
Auto replies or autoresponders is also one of the most common ways that marketers use SMS sequences. These are automated text messages that are sent back to an individual when they text a unique keyword.
4. Provide Exclusive Offers
SMS campaigns shouldn’t only provide discounts and low-value content. Treat your SMS subscribers as if they were your most important customers. Provide them with sales access to the rest of your products, send them exclusive event invites, and only make events available to them.
Using an opt-in list will decrease unsubscribes and increase subscribers. In addition to being human and real, the content in SMS can help make your brand approachable. Games, quizzes, and one-on-and-one conversations with your customers yield valuable data while also helping you build better relationships.
5. Perform SMS Location-Based Advertising
SMS location-based advertising is now available on most SMS marketing platforms. It allows you to send time-sensitive, promotional messages to prospects or customers to encourage them to take action, such as sign up for a local service, visit a store, and purchase a product.
An example of location-based SMS marketing is when someone wants to purchase a coffee in Lower Manhattan; as the customer approaches the store, they’ll receive a text message from a different coffee shop down the street. The message received contains information regarding an on-going special discount on all products for the day. As a result, the customer buys from the coffee shop that texted them and not from the original store they initially thought of buying a cup of cappuccino from.
Location-based SMS marketing campaigns are made possible by a technology called geofencing.
6. Use A Call To Action (CTA)
Every text marketing effort needs a call to action (CTA). It drives your prospects or customers to react by stirring enough curiosity and getting them to perform the action you want them to take.
Note that unlike email or other messaging platforms, SMS marketing platforms don’t offer action buttons. A button would’ve helped make your call to action stand out. It also masks the link leading to your desired landing page. That being said, your CTA has to stand out in some other ways. So, don’t forget to make it concise and show the value of what you ask from the recipient. Sprinkling some urgency or fear of missing out (FOMO) is also a good idea. Of course, don’t forget to personalize your message so consumers can connect with your brand emotionally.
A link to your website, a text-back request (please text us back), and requesting a call are the best call to action you can use in your mass text marketing campaigns.
7. Be Consistent
When you establish a strategy, implement it, follow it as long as it produces satisfactory results. If not, don’t change it unless it’s revised to serve the customers’ needs better. Avoiding clutter and being overly prevalent in your recipients’ inbox will lead to a more favorable impression of your brand.
Every month, set a content schedule to incorporate the message(s) to be sent and the date/time. In advance, planning ensures you will be providing constant content to your customers. Regular communication does just as well.
8. Look For Feedback
You can improve your SMS campaign continuously by asking for feedback from your customers. If you set up a survey within your drip campaign, you’ll learn who your audience is and what you can provide to them. If you get a positive response to a survey question, you can encourage the user to leave a review on Facebook, Yelp, or your favorite platform. Use their feedback to enhance your products and services.
If your customers see that you listen to their opinions, they will know that you see them as important people for your business. You’ll be able to gain their trust and loyalty to your brand.
Takeaway
SMS marketing is an innovative and effective way to boost your business. With the right strategies, you can reach your target market and gain your customers’ loyalty in the future.
Follow the given tips above to maximize the performance of SMS marketing platforms and make your business grow.
