SMS Marketing Best Practices : All You Need Know
What is SMS or Text Marketing?
The number of people having mobile devices is increasing day by day. Most of us own mobile phones these days. This creates new avenues for marketers to share their communications on.
With this, SMS or Short Message Service Marketing came into being. SMS marketing uses text messages to send out marketing communications. It has amazing open rates when compared to other forms of marketing.
While traditional SMS messages only used text, it is now possible to use rich content like images, GIFs, and even videos. Text marketing is beneficial in sharing real-time updates like order confirmations, reminders, and limited period offers that help makes customer interaction with the brand more delightful.
While there are pros and cons associated with all marketing channels, SMS is one channel that organizations do not want to miss out on. In this article, we will be going over the best practices for text or SMS marketing.
How to Be Effective With Sms Marketing
In the digital era of 2022, customers are always on their mobile phones for one reason. Marketing is an art and a science. You must know what your target customers want to hear from you and when they want to listen to it.
The key to being effective with SMS or text marketing lies in taking consent, setting expectations straight, and then delivering on those.
You cannot afford to add a lot of information to text messages. Unlike emails, texts are meant to be brief. Text messaging is often considered more intrusive.
Read about SMS vs Email Marketing: Which One Gets Better Result in 2022
7 SMS Marketing Best Practices
We are here to help you in improving your SMS marketing campaigns. Sharing 7 SMS marketing best practices for you:
Maintain consistency in the number of texts you send
You do not want to spam your users with a lot of content on SMS campaigns. Make sure you set up smart trigger points for SMS and try to automate the process with CRM tools. One of the text marketing best practices is to utilize it for sharing important and time-sensitive information with your customers.
Engage in conversation and give prompt responses
Try to form a relationship with your customers via text marketing. Engage in conversations that revolve around their problem statements and always give prompt responses. Nobody likes to be replied to after 48 business hours.
If you have set up SMS autoresponders, ensure the automated responses are relevant.
Use a special, brand-friendly short code
A shortcode in SMS is a 5 – 6 digit number that the brand uses to run its SMS marketing campaigns. Usually, consumers initiate the opt-in by sending a special keyword to this shortcode. Post that, the brand adds the consumer as a subscriber to the text marketing list. This is one of the text marketing best practices to ensure customer consent is maintained.
You can customize this code per your brand name.
Text during regular hours
It makes you look really bad when you text your users outside of business hours unless the nature of your business requires you to.
If the recipients are sleeping, the open rates might also be impacted. This is where the text marketing best practices come in. Study the best times to trigger your text campaigns and send out future campaigns accordingly.
Read About: text marketing best practices
Associate the right keywords with your business
Customers use keywords when they want to communicate with you via text messaging. The keywords used for communications should be self-explanatory and relevant to your business.
An example of a good keyword: When a customer sends a message with the text “SALE” to a short code like 12345, an automated text gets triggered that shares information about all the sales that the brand offers.
Respect privacy and security concerns
It is not a good marketing practice to procure a text messaging list from somewhere and start spamming the users with communications.
Your SMS marketing list should be built from the information that the users share with you with their consent and you should keep this data secure.
Always have an option for the users to unsubscribe from your text messages and make the process easy. The users should feel in charge of their inboxes.
Focus on bringing value to the table
Don’t you just hate when brands annoy you with unnecessary text messages that pop up as notifications in your inbox sometimes?
Your users get lots of messages daily, make sure your messages are worth their while. Ask them about what type of information they would like to be shared with them, and then create segments that work according to that.
Benefits of SMS marketing
Apart from the most obvious benefit of sharing relevant information in a concise form at the right time with the correct user, SMS or text marketing also has very high engagement rates.
SMS has an open rate of > 95% for most industries. In some cases, it goes even as high as 98% – 100%. The information is efficiently squeezed into 160 characters. The CTR is also significantly better as compared to email and other channels.
ShopAgain uses SMS automation to build and drive your SMS marketing strategy. Start your free trial
Read About: create segments
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does SMS marketing cost?
SMS marketing costs are determined by the number of users you target with your SMS strategy and the frequency of your campaigns. The unit costs depend on the service that you choose to use. ShopAgain offers a free trial that you can use before making a purchase decision.
How often should I use SMS?
The frequency of using SMS messages should be planned and decided in advance. Do not spam users with too many texts that are irrelevant to them. Only share information that is of value to them.
Do I really need a marketing tool for SMS marketing?
If the size of your user base is significant, it is a good idea to employ a marketing tool to reduce your work. Besides, these tools offer important metrics in their reports that can help you make your SMS marketing strategy better.