How To Run An Effective SMS Marketing Campaign

SMS marketing is one of the most direct ways of communicating with your customers. It’s hard to ignore that buzz in your pocket and people are often on their phone more than they are not these days. So SMS campaigns are bound to get noticed.

People tend to open texts within a few minutes of receiving them. But this fact doesn’t mean that your campaigns are destined for greatness. There’s much more to it than that.

The level of impact depends on how well you put together your campaign before it’s sent out to your customers. Proper data storage, segmentation, and personalisation all play a major part.

Putting in time and effort in the preparation phase will pay off. Effective marketing campaigns don’t come easy, but with the right practices in place they don’t have to be as complicated as they might seem.

Understanding Your Customers

Personalisation is rooted in having an understanding of your customer data. Creating campaigns for customers that you know nothing about won’t bear much fruit. You need to show them you know them.

The days of “Hey customer” are long behind us. When someone receives any sort of message from a company they expect it to be personalised and relevant. Customers won’t interact with messages that aren’t aimed directly at them, especially when it comes to SMS marketing. So in order to get them to engage with you, showing them you understand them is a must.

Using customer data

The influence that your data has on your campaign performance is massive. So you need to make sure that the data you do have is really good quality. Consolidation of your customer data and a deep understanding of them leads to high quality SMS marketing campaigns. This is down to the fact that you understand their behaviours, wants, and needs on a deeper level. Your campaigns will also be far more relevant to the receiver.

There is a variety of different data you can include to build your campaigns. The more customer data you include, the better. Using demographical, behavioural, or transactional data to build your customer profiles for your campaigns makes for a richer experience.

Segment your customers

When it comes to driving campaign results, you should put your customers into groups to receive particular campaigns. You need to make sure what you’re sending is relevant to the customer, and segmentation is important to ensure this.

One campaign does not fit all. Segmentation is where you can identify a particular group to target with a certain message or offer. Sending an irrelevant campaign will have a negative impact on your engagement rates.

It will also just annoy your customer base.

Steps To Create An Effective Campaign

Running an effective SMS marketing campaign isn’t something that just happens. Of course trying out different things can always be helpful. But there are core elements to your texts you should include to get your campaign off the ground.

Establish goals

It’s important that your goals align with the SMS marketing campaigns you send out and who you and them to. Studying your data will make this pretty straightforward.

An abandoned cart campaign has a very defined objective. That is to re-engage a user who had put something in their basket but left your site without making that purchase. Your texts should point them towards carrying out some sort of action or goal that you set out, whatever it may be.

Make the CTA clear

Including a call to action in your texts will lead to an increase in click through rates. Messages with a clear, precise CTA perform much better than ones that don’t include them.

Users consume a large amount of content per day. A lot of the time they’ll need to be prompted to take action and click through your particular piece of content or text. It also gives a specific goal to complete, so customers know where to go to take action.

Some examples of CTAs that perform well are:

• Take me there
• Buy now
• I want a discount 
• Read now
• Download now
• Subscribe
• Claim my free trial

Establish value proposition

Your customers won’t click through your messages or interact with them unless there’s something in it for them too. It’s pointless to send anything in the first place if this isn’t the case.

Send messages that have a bit of substance. Sending vague campaigns won’t yield results. Discounts, sales, event alerts, and other offers where you can create a sense of urgency often make people take action. So you should consider using these in your campaigns to drive results.

Make consent obvious

If you want to send promotional SMS campaigns, then steadily growing your list of subscribers is going to be a priority. What makes this an easier task though is knowing that 91% of your customers are happy to opt-in to receive texts from your brand.

But you need to make sure that you ask and receive that consent before you start sending campaigns to your customers.

As important as it is to make it clear that customers have given consent, you also need to be mindful of the other side of things. You need to ensure you always give your customers the choice to opt-out of receiving your text messages.

Doing this will garner more trust in your brand.

Instil urgency

Your text is bound to disrupt the customer’s day. So try to keep your message short, sweet, and to the point.

Creating a sense of urgency can often nudge people towards making a decision or taking action. The fear of missing out on a deal or promotion is real and can prompt people to follow through.

Including words like “Act Now” or “Hurry” can make a huge impact on their decision to engage.

Make sure that these words stand out and catch the attention of the receiver. 

Be consistent 

Something that businesses struggle with is communicating with their customers consistently. The reasoning being to avoid annoying or spamming customers.

They often go the other direction and don’t send enough messages. Eventually, it will get to the stage where your SMS marketing appears random, and potentially unwelcome.

Inconsistent messaging will also lead to customers forgetting about you. This is the last thing you need when competition is fierce and the pace of communication is so fast.

Setting up your SMS marketing campaigns to include consistent communication means that you will have more impactful interactions with your customers.

Measure, Test, Try Again

Your customers will always provide you with a few surprises along the way. Regardless of how confident you are in your campaign, there’s always performance improvements that can be made.

Always split test your campaigns so you can get a more accurate idea of what works, or what doesn’t work for your customers.

Split testing (also referred to as a/b testing) helps you determine which messaging and products work best. Keep testing throughout your SMS marketing campaigns as buying habits change. Certain messaging may also become less effective over time so testing helps to keep customers engaged.

If you’re not split testing your SMS marketing campaigns, then now’s the time to start.

Introducing the steps above is a great place to begin. It will get your campaigns off the ground and start bringing in results. Once you get them rolling out, don’t be afraid to experiment with different copy, images, or anything else you see fit. You’ll never know if you don’t try.

To learn more about SMS marketing and how it can help grow your business and retain customers, get in touch with us today to book a demo.