With the rise of the popularity of smartphones, it’s safe to conclude that there’s no better time to venture into SMS marketing than now.
The Ultimate Guide to Making Your SMS Marketing Work in 2021
As its name implies, this strategy involves marketing your business through text messages. Despite the presence of more advanced forms of marketing, the effectiveness of SMS marketing is undeniable.
As more individuals browse their phones during their idle time, you’re guaranteed to get your brand message across through SMS marketing. Simply put, there’s now a higher likelihood that your target market or your recipients are going to read your texts.
So, if you haven’t already, you need to maximize your SMS marketing strategy this year by making use of the right tactics, coupled with reliable automated call and text software like Drop Cowboy Ringless Voicemail, among others.
Businesses are getting more aggressive with their ads, and you should too. With all the advantages that SMS marketing brings, there’s no reason you should miss out on using SMS marketing as part of your campaigns.
This article will serve as a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know about making your SMS marketing work in 2021.
Personalize Your SMS Campaigns
One way for you to make your SMS marketing more effective in 2021 is to personalize them. By making your clients feel special, personalized messages will help entice your customers to remain loyal and continue patronizing your brand.
If you’re unsure how you can start by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. If you receive a personalized gift, code, or message from a brand, won’t you feel great about the gesture, making you more inclined to be loyal to that brand?
There are many strategies you can apply to effectively personalize your SMS campaigns, which include the following:
Segment Your Text Messages with Fillers
To be effective and efficient with SMS marketing today, you should use a call and text messaging software equipped with automated text functions, a power dialer, text analytics, and other features.
With these tools, you can easily segment your text messages with filters. This practice enables you to send the right messages to the right recipients by grouping people who share similarities.
For instance, you fan filter recipients based on personal details like gender, age, and profession. This type of filter comes in handy when your new collection or campaign is targeted to or more appropriate for a certain age group or gender.
By using filters, you can send an alert about your new collection only to the applicable customers. You won’t make the mistake of sending alerts about men’s suits to women.
Another option is to filter according to geographical location, especially when you have offers that are limited only to select branches of your store.
Be Highly Accurate
There’s no point in trying to personalize your SMS messages if you can’t even get the details accurately. In fact, the more accurate you are with your SMS campaigns, the higher the likelihood that your target customers are going to be responsive.
In today’s highly competitive business arena, getting the small details right, such as an unusual name spelling, will set you apart from competitors.
Be Human
This means adding emotion to your SMS campaigns. At all costs, you must strive to avoid any corporate style of messaging.
While this style is formal, it may put off your recipients, leading them to believe that your messages are spam.
Be conversational and direct, just like how you’d be if you were talking to the customer face-to-face in a physical store.
Grow Your SMS Marketing List
Who are you going to send your text messages to if you don’t have a list of contacts? So, it’s only fitting that as you strive to create effective SMS campaigns, you should also grow your SMS marketing list.
There are various ways for you to effectively grow your SMS marketing list. You can start with these ideas:
Run a Competition
This can be applied in-store, on your online store or website, and even on your social media websites.
The only crucial element to have to make your competition attractive enough for people to actually join is to have a prize that’s enticing enough to convince your SMS recipients to join.
Also, to avoid your SMS marketing efforts from being spammy, be sure to include a disclosure that by joining the competition, that particular SMS user also agrees to be updated with future offers, competitions, and promotions.
Create a VIP Program
A VIP program will involve the VIP list that you’ve developed in your business, reserved only for the subscribers you’ve identified as extremely loyal customers.
You can invite more contacts and subscribers to sign up for your VIP program by offering more exclusive discounts and perks.
Make the Most of Your Website Data Capture
Whenever customers purchase products on your website, make it a part of your practice to also ask for their contact information, particularly their phone numbers, before they can complete the transaction.
To convince more customers to key in their phone numbers and email addresses, make your intentions clear to them. Assurance your customers that all the information will be kept private.
Keep It Simple
Another reason SMS marketing works is that it’s simple and fuss-free. So, you should strive to maintain that same standard with your SMS campaigns.
Otherwise, when your SMS campaigns involve incredibly long and complicated messages that are difficult to follow, your recipients are might be put off.
In fact, many may even opt to unsubscribe from your promotional messages.
One of the innate natures of text messages is that they’re instant. It follows that the messages you send should also be simple and straightforward.
You can ensure this by taking note of these standards:
Include a Strong Call to Action
With a strong call to action, you can get your customers excited and motivated to engage with your brand. A call to action is another way to make your customers understand what your message is and what should be done to benefit from it.
Keep Your Messages Short
The more words there are, the harder it might be for you to get your message across. No person wants to have to go through an incredibly long text message. The more concise and brief you are with your messages, the higher the chance that your recipients will understand your message and respond to it positively.
Create a Sense of Urgency
You can achieve this by making it clear when the special offers or promotions you’re offering expire. This simple but effective way to create a sense of urgency can also provide you with the benefit of collecting information as quickly as possible.
Send Reminders and Confirmations through SMS
Another subtle way to perfect your SMS strategy is by setting reminders and confirmations through SMS. This is especially applicable if your business is service-oriented.
When you leverage the power of SMS marketing to send updates, you can avoid the situation of customers or clients forgetting their appointments and not showing up.
With the widespread use of mobile phones today, it’s become second nature for people to immediately open and check their phones whenever it beeps.
This means there’s a higher chance that the clients you’re reaching out to will notice your reminders for their appointments.
Profit-wise, this is very advantageous to your business since you’ll be certain that the specific paid time slots you’ve reserved for particular clients or customers won’t go to waste.
If the client does cancel, then you’ll also be notified of the cancellation. This will enable you to give the time slot to another prospective client instead.
This way, you won’t be wasting any time and every slot will be taken by a paying customer.
This principle also applies to billing updates. SMS marketing is now commonly used to send text messages to improve customer service.
You can achieve this by making it easy for your customers to pay their dues and remember their payables.
With that level of convenience, you may even gain new customers.
Your existing customers who are pleased and happy with your services will serve as your walking ads, spreading the word of how convenient it is to deal with your business.
Send Your Messages at the Right Time
No matter how enticing your offer is or how well-made your SMS campaigns are, they won’t be well-received by your target customers if you send those messages at the wrong time.
The reason is simple: no one wants to be woken up in the middle of the night with a text message unless it’s an emergency involving one’s family.
If you’ve awoken a customer from their sleep simply because of your promotions, you can be sure that you’re going to lose customers.
Moreover, existing subscribers might have a reason to unsubscribe from your updates because they find your text messages annoying.
So, don’t be that kind of company. You have to show your customers that you care about them and you respect their time and boundaries.
This means limiting your SMS marketing messages only during the daytime, or even only during office hours.
If you’re still not convinced of this point, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you receive text messages in the middle of the night from certain brands, customers, or an unknown number, won’t you feel inclined to delete the message without even reading it?
This can happen to your brand too. You can be sure that all those messages you sent at the crack of dawn won’t have any other destination but the trash.
To ensure a higher chance that your SMS ads will be well-received and responded to, make sure that you and your team only send messages during the day.
Set the Proper Metrics to Measure the Success of Your SMS Campaigns
It’s not enough for you to create an SMS campaign, send messages, and not do anything after. You can’t improve your SMS ads when you don’t even have the means to check whether or not your SMS campaigns are effective.
If you want to consistently secure high ratings with your SMS campaigns, you need to check what has consistently worked in the past, so you can use the same strategies moving forward. For campaigns that didn’t bring favorable results, you can also do the necessary alterations.
2021 can be a better year for your business, specifically in increasing the likelihood of success for your SMS campaigns, as long as you study these metrics:
Conversions
which refer to the number of people who completed and performed the call to action in your text messages;
List Growth Rate
which is the number that shows how fast your list of SMS subscribers grows periodically.
You can set these metrics to report weekly, monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually.
Your choice of how to track your growth will depend on the specific goals of your campaign and the timetable you’ve set;
Return Rate
which refers to the number of return visits booked by customers who received your SMS;
Delivery Rate
which is affected by your list size, the reliability of your SMS marketing software, and factors such as whether your SMS marketing recipients are prepaid or postpaid subscribers;
Click-through rate
refers to the number of users who clicked on the link you included in your SMS.
Conclusion
In the past, SMS or text messages were used solely for sending messages to family and friends. Then, as cellphones evolved, technological advancements also changed how people utilize text messaging.
Today, SMS marketing is no longer used exclusively for personal and private text messages. Many brands have ventured into SMS marketing, which involves making the most of text messages to implement their marketing campaign.
As more individuals continue to spend time in front of their mobile phones, it’s only fitting that brands venture more into creative ways to improve their SMS campaigns.
The guide above should help you discover efficient solutions that ensure you implement SMS marketing campaigns with more confidence and less likelihood of failure.
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