Top 8 Tips To Ensure SMS Marketing Success

Short message service (SMS) marketing is considered one of the most prominent elements for a successful business. It’s also the most popular type of service component in telephone, internet, and mobile device systems. Due to that, there’s no denying the role of SMS marketing in helping businesses thrive in their respective fields.

If you’re planning to launch an SMS marketing approach, you need to be mindful of certain things. For starters, you can seek help from reliable service providers and utilize several technological advances like Drop Cowboy and other similar automated dialing systems to better manage your business operations and improve your lead generation.

You can also continue reading this article for more ideas.

Things To Know About SMS Marketing 

Many businesses shifted in practicing SMS marketing to build brand awareness over the past decades. Not to mention its role in allowing the easier promotion of products and services, SMS marketing proves to be one of the best practices in ensuring one’s market growth.

As the business industry continues to change along with the emergence of various technological advancements and marketing trends, so do the clients and the business owners. Particularly, many businesses have been using text message marketing to reach out to their clients, disseminate business news, enhance market sales, and provide services to customers.

Apart from that, here are some of the things you need to know about SMS marketing:

• SMS marketing is the practice of utilizing text message marketing to enhance one’s brand awareness and bring it to the next level. Unlike before, other companies need to rely on contacting their prospective customers manually and use numerous types of voicemails. Now, they can attract clients through texts.
• The overwhelming usage of mobile devices and other types of technological systems is one of the most prominent factors that lead to the fast-rising popularity of SMS marketing.
• In SMS marketing, clients can send and receive messages through texts. They can also send messages to a larger group of people with just one click and gain response without much hassle.
• Businesses that practice SMS marketing typically focus on optimizing standardized communication protocols that allow them to provide quality services to their prospective clients.
• One of the many good things about making use of SMS marketing in your business operations is it could allow a faster exchange of information and easier brand creation without having to deal with marketing noise.
• Businesses could also send bulk messages to larger audiences and personalize their services by sending individualized messages. Through this alternative, they can move past the traditional marketing approaches such as using social media ads and email marketing campaigns, as well as direct their messages to the clients’ phones.
• In most cases, SMS marketing proves to be one of the most efficient ways to garner attention and loyalty. This could help businesses boost customer engagement and bolster their key performance indicators (KPIs).
• SMS marketing requires businesses to rely on a database that consists of the clients’ names, phone numbers, and other pertinent information. This database may also contain the customer categories, interests, and geographic region.

Improving SMS Marketing 

If you’re thinking about the proper measures to take to maximize your business’s SMS marketing, then you need to know how to market your services to your clients through text messages. You also have to know the efficient methods to reach out to mobile consumers.

To help you optimize your SMS marketing and ensure a successful campaign, take note of the following:

1) Consider The Timing

One of the most important aspects you need to consider is the right timing for your messages. Note that clients may prefer different times to receive an SMS, especially if they’re from other countries. For starters, you must consider the time differences as well as the potential responses of your clients to the SMS depending on the time it was sent.

Many experienced marketers believe that some of the most ideal periods of the day to send messages include morning to afternoon hours. Particularly, sending SMS between 10:30-11:30 am and 2:30-3:30 pm proves to be the ideal way to garner a response from clients. However, while sending messages during morning hours could help you stay ahead of your competitors, you must not overdo it.

To strike some balance in these times, you can send SMS messages during times like 10:30 am. This could help you avoid less competition with other companies. Regarding the ideal days, you can send SMS on Thursdays or earlier. You may also send event reminders ahead of the actual date to keep your clients updated.

2) Promote Conciseness And Coherence

When composing an SMS message, you need to make it more concise and comprehensible to your clients. To ensure the success of your SMS marketing, you need to consider not just the uniqueness of your messages but also their coherence so your prospective clients can easily understand the message you’re trying to convey.

To help you out, you can take into consideration the following tips:

• Your messages should be short and sweet. The simpler, the better.
• As a rule of thumb, any message that exceeds the standard 160-character format must be broken down into shorter text messages. Not only would this allow you to avoid sending multiple messages simultaneously, but it’d also prevent incurring extra fees.
• As much as possible, you must not use jargons or slang that aren’t easy to understand.
• You must also assess the readability, consistency, and soundness of your messages to make them stand out.
• Additionally, don’t forget to include a call to action (CTA) message to emphasize the actions expected of your clients.

3) Provide Context 

In general, text messages are limited to 160 characters only, so it’s understandable that many businesses find it hard to make their SMS informational. Due to this, you need to know how to ensure providing context in your messages and keep it structured.

To make your messages clear and organized, you can consider the following:

• Company name: When creating a message to your clients, you must prioritize your company ID or company name at the first part of your SMS.
• Client name: To build rapport with your prospective customers and make your SMS more personal, you should also address them by their name. While this might be a bit challenging, you can always use custom fields in SMS software.
• Offers: You can put here your company’s services and products. You can also include details like marketing schedules, coupons, promos, sales, and the release of new products. You should make your message catchy and convincing to garner the attention of your clients.
• Qualifier: You may include here the conditions that you require from your clients and the requirements of your offer.
• Directives: This part will serve as a guide for customers on how to claim or redeem your company’s offers and promos.
• Expiry: Expiration dates are a crucial part of your services as they help make your offers special. Creating a sense of urgency in your marketing schemes could help encourage your clients to avail of your services.

4) Utilize Other Channels

It’s well-established that SMS marketing could provide incredible click-through rates (CTR) to many businesses. Not just that, but it could also enhance a company’s lead generation, especially if you know the right alternatives to utilize.

As mentioned earlier, SMS marketing could help promote outstanding CTR and boost your company’s revenue, making it one of the most efficient platforms to bolster lead generation processes and garner higher customer satisfaction rates. Apart from that, you can gain many benefits from SMS marketing, including making direct traffic to your website and easier link creation.

You can include links in your text that’ll direct clients to your website. Also, it’d be better to use other channels in your marketing to better cater to the demands of your prospective clients. You can also consider utilizing the following channels:

• Social Media: You can include details like mobile number and opt-in button to your website so the clients can access your SMS campaign.
• Website: Maximize the opt-in buttons on your website.
• Newsletter: Make your company’s opt-in features visible in your newsletters.
• Snail mails: Whenever you’re sending promotional mails, provide printed instructions on them.

5) Optimize Your Scheduling

One of the many good things about utilizing SMS marketing is it allows you to monitor and boost your market promotions without being in an actual workplace. You may also promote your services and products easier than when you’re doing the traditional ways of advertising. Apart from that, several SMS platforms could help you in scheduling your messages.

In most cases, these platforms could be used to schedule your messages in advance. SMS marketing could also be beneficial if you’re working with marketers that have different timetables. If you’re aiming to launch a bulk SMS campaign, you can schedule your messages so there won’t be any problem with the transmission.

While running a bulk SMS campaign might be challenging to handle, your operations could be further improved by sending your messages in smaller batches and avoiding overloading your systems with messages.

6) Keep Your Messages Updated

Aside from utilizing other channels and maximizing your schedule, you can also ensure SMS marketing success by keeping your messages updated. Particularly, you must avoid sending messages twice to the same person. This is to ensure the relevance and consistency of your messages even if you can’t use the usual tactics in marketing.

Also, you must never send similar messages to the same clients as they might be turned off and become uninterested in your campaign. To make your marketing interesting, you should also offer different services and products through messages to all the promotions you’re conducting.

7) Identify Your Target Audience

SMS marketing and other types of marketing approaches won’t be successful if you don’t have anyone to receive your messages. Likewise, any campaign strategy may not be profitable without anyone purchasing your products and services. To prevent such events, it’s best to start by identifying your target audience.

When conducting SMS marketing, you have to send messages to your prospective client to persuade them and turn them into loyal customers. However, you can’t just send text messages to anyone. Instead, you have to send them to people who opted to receive them. You can do this by asking them through subscription processes online or making them text your company number.

As a general rule, you must prioritize doing the following:

• Determine the loyal clients who purchase your products and services consistently, provide positive feedback, and promote your brand to other people.
• Identify the customers who participate in your campaigns and give them promos to maintain customer engagement and gain higher customer retention rates.
• Dedicate extra time and resources to these types of clients.

As they’re the ones who have a deeper understanding of the nature of your services and are loyal customers since day one, you can send them in-depth polling questions to accumulate positive feedback. You also have to treat them well as they can be considered your company’s VIP clients.

8) Personalize The Text

In most cases, clients respond more to messages that sound more personal and familiar to them. Particularly, these people may prefer text messages that address them directly, so you must make sure your messages have the client’s name in them. Although this might be a bit difficult to accomplish, inserting your subscribers’ names in the message could significantly make them feel more valued and appreciated.

Not just that, but you can also better target prospective clients with relevant text messages if you know their preferences. To better ensure the success of your SMS marketing, know that the more time you spend developing your marketing skills, the greater your chances of obtaining your goals. Also, don’t forget to personalize every text message you’ll send to your prospective clients to turn them into loyal ones.

Final Thoughts

Conducting an SMS marketing campaign may not be easy. With many things to consider and risks to be mindful of, it’s easy to feel intimidated by this approach. However, you can efficiently ensure the success of your campaign if you know the appropriate alternatives to use and the right people to work with.

You can seek help from reliable service providers and experienced marketers if you’re having a hard time obtaining your objectives. Also, you can consider the tips above to better achieve your marketing purposes.