At MSG ADVERT we are dedicated to helping you get the most from your SMS marketing activity. We understand the importance of achieving your goals and can advise on the best practices to maximize the potential of your mobile marketing campaigns, in addition to providing a comprehensive marketing toolkit on MSG ADVERT platform.
We help businesses use mobile marketing effectively, whether it is to build prospective customer database, to generate leads with effective campaigns, to convert them with special offers or to retain existing customers through loyalty points and timely feedback process.
The results you achieve are often based on what you learn from previous campaigns and big data. And that’s why we recommend you to conduct campaigns that can be easily tracked and give you granular analytics. It is imperative that you use this data to make key decisions, gain valuable insights into customer behavior and campaign effectiveness and continuously optimize your mobile marketing campaigns to achieve the best results. Take a look below at our top tips to increase the performance of your next mobile marketing campaign…
1. Include a clear call to action
Ensure that the reason for the SMS is made clear. You want the recipient to act on your SMS, so tell them what they need to do to benefit from the information they have been sent.
2. Track your campaigns and optimize
Make sure you measure how effective your SMS marketing campaign has been so you can improve it further next time. How many responses did you get? What was your return on investment? Try texting different offers, at various times of the day, days of the week, or target different groups of customers, to find which works best for you. MSG ADVERT provides granular click through metrics for webpages, files, and coupons attached with your SMS campaigns.
3. Be prepared and know when your customers respond
Pick the right time to send SMS campaigns to your customers. If you want to generate an action or response then make sure you leave your customers enough time during the day to do so. You can also use MSG ADVERT scheduler to draft your messages now and schedule them for delivery at any time you choose.
4. Be concise and keep it short
A single SMS message consists of 160 characters. For the most cost-effective campaign you need to choose your words carefully. Get to the point straight away, the benefit or reward to the recipient should be clear.
5. Find the right frequency
Should you send your SMS campaigns daily, weekly or monthly? If you send messages too frequently, customers might get annoyed and unsubscribe from the service. However if you leave it too long between messages, the customer may lose interest and will have forgotten why they subscribed in the first place.
There’s no fixed amount of messages you should be sending per week or month – the frequency needs to be fine-tuned based on your audience and the purpose of your messages.
6. Create a sense of urgency
Set an expiry date to your discount coupons and vouchers. Limited time validity creates a sense of urgency for your customers and results in higher conversion rates. MSG ADVERT platform provides an easy way for you to create, send and redeem mobile vouchers!
7. Don’t overdo it – less is more
Make sure you manage your contact groups properly and avoid repeatedly sending the same SMS marketing message to recipients. Keep your communication fresh and engaging.
8. Keep your database clean
It can be costly to continue sending messages to old numbers. Be sure to regularly check and delete the numbers that can’t be reached to save time and money. Three strikes and you’re out is a good principle.
9. Use keywords to help grow your data
Use an SMS keyword (e.g. text OFFERS to 786263XXXX to receive discount coupons from your local shopping mall) to grow an opt-in list of customers that choose to receive your SMS alerts. Print this everywhere and you will easily grow an opt-in list of followers. SMS marketing can be intrusive if sent to somebody who hasn’t given their permission. Protect the reputation of your organisation by ensuring all recipients have allowed you to communicate with them.
10. Respect the opt-out mechanism
Include a simple opt-out option regularly in your texts. Always ensure you make it clear to your customers that they can stop receiving messages from you at any time.
11. Know your audience
Make sure that the recipient is going to be interested in what you have to offer. It’s likely that each offer or message will need to be tailored to individual customer groups. Age, gender, location and past purchases should all be taken into account when you send out your messages. For example, you wouldn’t offer free lipstick to men, because it’s likely the response rate would be next to zero and some of your customers may choose to unsubscribe as a result.
Paying attention to a customer’s purchase history and collecting her demographic data will help target effectively.
12. Personalize your texts for a better experience
Use our mail merge feature and insert names, appointment times or other customer-specific details into your messages for that personalized message. You can also brand your text by setting the Sender Name on the SMS message as your company name for maximum impact.
6th strategy works like wonders